Australian Government ministers have agreed to permanently lift the base rate of the jobseeker payment by $50 a fortnight when the coronavirus supplement ends in March – the equivalent of just $3.50 a day. Not even enough for a cup of coffee at a cafe (average cost is $4).

Before the pandemic, the base rate of Job Seeker for a single person was about $40 a day. This week the Federal Government announced it would increase payments by $50 a fortnight, lifting the base rate to $44 a day.

The Uniting Church Assembly has joined UnitingCare Australia in expressing disappointment at this meagre increase in the base rate of the JobSeeker payment.

Those receiving the Job Keeper benefit will get $615.70 a fortnight, which is still a drop from the current rate of $715 a fortnight, when the $150 coronavirus supplement expires at the end of March.

The Australian Unemployed Workers Union described the $50-a-fortnight increase as a “cruel joke”. Perhaps appropriate then that the increase takes effect on April Fools Day, April 1.

The UCA President, Dr Deidre Palmer, said: “One of our key learnings from the pandemic has been that we are only as strong and healthy as the most vulnerable members of our society. The extra support delivered by the Government throughout the pandemic has been a lifeline for many Australians. COVID-19 highlighted in a new way that people who are unemployed need adequate funds in order to live with dignity, remain healthy and participate in society.”

“In 2020, we released our Build Back Better statement which called for a fair and permanent increase to JobSeeker to ensure a safety net for people out of work, but these changes fail to live up to those hopes,” said Dr Palmer.

“We need to do better.”

In recent months, UnitingCare Australia has joined other community sector agencies in calling for a permanent rise to the JobSeeker payment.

This week UnitingCare joined Anglicare Australia in condemning the changes that they say will plunge people into poverty.

UnitingCare Australia National Director Claerwen Little said the announcement was a devastating blow to individuals and families struggling to make ends meet.

“Unemployment payments need to be above the poverty line. Increasing the base rate by a mere $3.60 a day is not enough to lift people out of poverty.

“As one of the largest networks of community service providers nationally, we have seen first-hand the positive impact of the Coronavirus Supplement,” said Ms Little.

“One of our services spoke about a young father who is the sole carer of his three small children. He said the impact of the JobSeeker supplement meant that instead of living life on the edge, he has been enabled to be a better father.”

“No one deserves to live in poverty. We need a permanent, adequate increase to JobSeeker that actually enables people to meet their needs and live with dignity.”

Two weeks ago, UnitingCare and Anglicare called on the Government to raise the rate of JobSeeker after releasing research which showed people on the old rate of JobSeeker, which has been frozen for nearly three decades, had forced people to skip meals because their payments were so low.

Many were left with as little as $7 a day after paying their rent. Others were forced to couch-surf. Read the FULL REPORT.  

Facts and figures
March 2020: JobSeeker – $40 a day
April-September 2020: JobSeeker – $80 a day
October-December: JobSeeker – $60 a day
January-March 2021: JobSeeker – $50 a day
April 1 2021: JobSeeker – $43.50 a day
(Could you live on this?)
Those receiving the new Job Keeper benefit will get $615.70 a fortnight (or about $44 a day), which is a drop from the current rate of $715 a fortnight, when the $150 coronavirus supplement expires at the end of March.
Before the pandemic, the base rate of jobseeker for a single person was $565 a fortnight, or about $40 a day.
During the pandemic, the jobseeker payment was initially doubled with a $550 coronavirus supplement before the top-up payment was reduced in September 2020 and January 2021.
The relative poverty line for a single person – set at 50% of median income – is $914 a fortnight, while another measure, the Henderson poverty line, puts it at about $1,100 a fortnight.
Welfare groups, Labor, the Greens and even the Reserve Bank of Australia urging the Coalition not to allow the payment to fall back to the pre-pandemic rate.
Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) had called for a permanent increase to jobseeker of at least $25 per day ($350 a fortnight). The Australian Unemployed Workers Union, backed by the Greens, wanted it raised to $80 a day, which is closer to the rate paid at the height of the pandemic.

A new report from Anglicare Victoria found the coronavirus supplements had alleviated financial stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anglicare Victoria chief executive, Paul McDonald, said: “The COVID-19 stimulus measures gave people without work a better quality of life, helping them meet their debts and restore their dignity. They gave people more ability to pay off outstanding debt and the research recommends that they should be permanent.”

Sourced from The Guardian, a statement by the Uniting Church in Australia, and ACOSS.

Diana Butler-Bass, writing on her website The Cottage, offered these reflections for Ash Wednesday, in her own context in the USA. Many here in Australia will resonate with her thoughts. She writes:

Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent in the second Lent of the Great Pandemic of the early 21st century. 

On Ash Wednesday, Christians go to church, pray a solemn liturgy, are marked on the forehead with the sign of a cross made from ashes as “a sign of our mortality and penitence.” As the ashes are imposed, those who receive it are told: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
(At Pilgrim we use the words ‘Remember that God formed you from the dust of the earth and in God’s hands you shall remain. May this time deepen your faith and love in God‘).

But, I confess: the whole thing is wearying. How is Ash Wednesday really all that different from any other day in this interminable pandemic? 

The entire year has felt like Lent, so today is just another ashy day.

I know that some will protest – saying that Lent is a specifically Christian season to prepare for Easter some forty days hence, that it is necessary for us to consider our death in order to understand the work of God in salvation. 

When I say this entire year has felt like Lent, I’m not just saying that I’m tired of being introspective or don’t want to think about death. The point is that for more than a year now, that’s pretty much all I’ve done – reflect, pray, and read, mostly alone, all while worried that I might die, someone I love might die, or I’d unwittingly contribute (by my own carelessness) to someone else dying. Every time I put on a mask, I think of death and dying. In a year of a half-million deaths of other Americans and millions of people around the world, the Lenten discipline of contemplating mortality seems like one more painful day. 

Add to that all the climate-related crises of fire, ice, water, and wind that have killed far too many people this year, and we don’t need ashes to remind us that the world is heavy with sorrow, and that much that we love is being lost and is ending. Every single day is an exercise in mortality, as we see our dusty illusions of existence coming at us like a haboob (dust storm) in the desert. 

Frankly, I don’t need the church to remind me that I’m surrounded by death this year. I know that. Everyone I know knows that. We are covered in dust.

Dust. Ashes. I know these things. I grew up in Arizona. I know what it’s like to see the dust coming at sixty miles an hour with nowhere to go, to turn away from the dust to keep it out of your eyes, to feel your back blasted with stinging sand. I’ve lived in California. I know what it is like to see a hillside on fire, to know when to run so one isn’t incinerated, to walk in ashy landscapes of death. Dust and ash aren’t merely reminders of death – dust and ash are death. (We know this all too well in bushfire season in Australia and dust storms robbing farmers of their precious topsoil).

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

The church has always emphasized this verse (taken from Genesis 3:19) as penitence in anticipation of death. You came from nothing, you return to nothing. The starkest of all reminders of fleeting existence, the ever-present reminder of death. But the verse also points another direction — not toward death but toward creation. In Genesis 3:6-7 (a poetic account of the beginning), a spring wells up on the dusty earth. From the resulting clay, God fashioned a man, breathed on him, and thus created humankind: The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.

Dust may be our ending, but it was also our beginning. Dust and ash are the stuff of creation.

Deserts do bloom. Charred landscapes birth new forests. From dust and ash come flowers and trees and fruitful fields. Dust is not nothing; ash is not nothing. Dust and ash are necessary for life. Repentance isn’t the point. Recognizing the circle of creation, the connectedness of all existence — that is the point.

Somehow, in this miserable pandemic, this endless season of death, even this dust and ash will become the humus of new life, a recreation of who we are, what we do, and how we love.

This Lent, I await the spring rising from the parched ground, and I wonder how we are being fashioned into a new people. I’m looking for water in this dry land. I’ve had quite enough of death. I’m longing for life.

‘I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth’ (Isaiah 43.19)

Day 1 of the SA Synod meeting (11-13th February) began with ‘..about’

Neryl McCallum read these words:

‘About…’, God says.
‘I’m about to do a new thing’.
And my mind floods with ‘about’ moments…
Coming in the kitchen and seeing the ingredients for chocolate cake lined up on the bench.
A tree in bud.
A violinist raising a bow as a dancer tiptoes on their toes.
A footy tam running onto the field.
The intense gaze of a basketball player standing on the three point line.
The nervous stance of a groom awaiting a bride.
The chortling of a chook ready to lay an egg.
The frozen bow of a cat stalking a mouse.
The unfolding of an eagle’s wings as the wind ruffles its feathers.
The first rays of gold emerging from the east.
Ants marching underground as rain clouds roll in,
A shower of glowing red sparks in a blackened sky as a fire advances.
The first pangs of labour.
The teetering raised foot of a toddler on the brink of walking.
The intake of breath before blowing out birthday candles.
A coffin held over the ground –

Our days are full of ‘abouts’.
Singular moments
that exist as specks in the expansive breadth of time.
They are loaded with a multitude of emotions.
From excited expectation to menacing fear.
And no matter how solid they seem
we cannot settle into them,
for they are by nature transitory and ephemeral.

But a moment can change everything.
‘About’, God says. ‘I’m about to do a new thing’.

February 2nd. Groundhog Day in the U.S.A.

I love the Bill Murray/Andie McDowell comedic movie Groundhog Day and have watched it many times. It’s profound and philosophical. 

I was interested to read this recent reflection by Neil Carter:

“Groundhog Day is an audiovisual dissertation on philosophy disguised as cinematic entertainment.  Every year when Februrary 2nd rolls around, I have to pull this movie back out and watch it again because there are so many things about it that I love.  For example, who wouldn’t want a chance to get do-overs for all of their mistakes?  And how many times have I wished that I had all the time I need to read whatever I want to read, have all the conversations I want to have, learn to play an instrument, or learn a foreign language?  It has quite a few of my favorite movie lines as well.  But on a deeper level, Groundhog Day asks a question: What If There Were No Tomorrow?

What if there is no afterlife?  How should we then live? What will order our priorities and guide our choices if “tomorrow” (i.e. life in the hereafter) were removed from the equation?

After spending a long miserable day in his least favorite place in the world, Phil Conners (superbly played by Bill Murray) wakes up the next morning only to discover that he has to relive the same day again in the exact same miserable place.  Then the next day it happens again.  And the next day, again.  And again, and again, and again. 

The movie explores the many stages a person might go through upon learning that they can do practically anything they wanted.  If you were to let a someone have whatever they wanted as many times as they wanted it, how might it change what they want? Upon realizing that he can do whatever he likes, and that there are no lasting consequences for his actions, Phil first embarks on a hedonistic thrill-seeking adventure.  He robs banks, evades cops, crashes cars, seduces women, and gorges himself on every unhealthy dish the local diner has to offer.  Since there’s no meaningful punishment, there’s nothing to stop him from doing as he pleases.  But this only satisfies him for so long.  Eventually the novelty of it all wears off and he decides to set his sights a little higher.  The most interesting and attractive person in town is his producer, Rita (played by the beautiful Andie MacDowell), but she proves much more difficult to acquire.  Intelligent, sensitive, and beautiful, she needs someone much more altruistic and self-actualized than Phil to swoop her off her feet.  He tries but fails to win her affections and soon descends into a period of nihilistic despair.  He tries to take his own life a number of different ways, but he always wakes up again the next morning unscathed.  No matter how bleak the days get, life goes on.

This pushes Phil to re-evaluate what would truly make him happy.  The sensual pleasures were fun for a while but people are complex and therefore want more complicated things.  Phil starts to read interesting books, learns to play jazz piano, learns to ice sculpt, and teaches himself French.  His morning broadcast becomes more and more poetic as he begins to contemplate the deeper questions of human existence.  Before long, this self-absorbed weather diva learns to appreciate the company of people he previously thought were too far beneath him for his time and attention.  In time he learns that the enjoyment you receive from helping others satisfies something deeper than food, money, or sex could ever satisfy by themselves.  He learns the value of contributing to the lives of people around him, not because he would be rewarded the next day for his good behavior, but just because it’s the most enjoyable way he could envision spending this eternally recurring day.

Phil’s impressive knowledge of the intimate details of every person in town revealed that he had spent countless hours sitting and listening to people telling their stories, which is perhaps the most powerful education anyone could ever have. In the meantime, he also learned more about himself and about what really makes a person happy – what makes life worth living. He discovered that investing time and care into the lives of others made for a more fulfilling life.  He had all the time in the world to try out every other way of living and that’s the one he chose in the end.  He would never land that dream job working for the big network, but he would find a way to make his ‘day’ as meaningful as it could possibly be under the circumstances in which he found himself. This is what humans do if allowed the time and freedom to discover for themselves what truly makes us happy.

What Groundhog Day suggests is true of human nature:  We are equally capable of both great selfishness and noble altruism, but the enjoyment of the latter ultimately eclipses the thrill of the former if only you’ll give people the time and opportunity to figure that out.

In the end, Phil grew into his full potential as a human being.  He learned to sympathize with others and to identify with them in their life situations.  He learned compassion, cooperation, and humility.  He also grew in his ability to love and to appreciate beauty.  All the external motivators were removed, and he became a better man for it, the kind of man which Rita wanted to be with in the first place.  In the end he got the girl after all (who doesn’t want the story to end that way?).  He broke the curse by becoming more than the man he was when he entered this purgatorial time loop.  The next day finally came, and a new man greeted the morning, ready to find out what new things could be learned and explored.

Grace Tame, who took on the law over rape silencing, has been named Australian of the Year for 2021. She is the first Tasmanian to be named Australian of the Year. After a sexual assault at the age of 15, she was unable to speak about her experience due to Tasmania’s sexual assault victim gag laws. Ms Tame ultimately applied to the Supreme Court for the right to publicly self-identify as a rape survivor and won. Her case is one of those that has prompted the Tasmanian government to reconsider the gag law, for which it is now taking community submissions. Ms Tame has continued to use her media profile to advocate for other vulnerable groups in the community. In her acceptance speech she said she was focused on empowering survivors and using education to prevent child sex abuse.
(1800 RESPECT is the national sexual assault and domestic and family violence counselling service on 1800 737 732)

Dr Miriam-Rose Ungumerr Baumann (AM) of Daly River in the Northern Territory was named Senior Australian of the Year.

Dr Baumann, 73, is an Aboriginal activist, educator and artist who in 1975 became the NT’s first fully qualified Aboriginal teacher. She campaigned for years for visual art to become part of every child’s education, and has served on the National Indigenous Council. In 2013, she established the Miriam Rose Foundation, which drives grassroots reconciliation. to bridge the divide between Aboriginal culture and the rest of Australia.
Dr Baumann said, “We have lived in this great country for many thousands of years and 200 years ago we began to interact with whitefellas. And now, Australia has become multicultural. Since then we have adapted to a new way of living. We learnt to speak your English fluently. For years, we have walked on a one-way street to learn the white people’s way. I’ve learnt to walk in two worlds and live in towns and cities, and even worked in them. Now is the time for you to come closer to understand us and how – and to understand how we live, and listen to what needs are in our communities. When you come to visit or work in our communities and leave your comfort zones, I ask that you bring your knowledge and wisdom, but we ask you also to learn and understand how we live and function in our communities, and listen to what our needs are.”

The Young Australian of the Year was tonight revealed to be 22-year-old social entrepreneur Isobel Marshall.

Isobel is a full-time student at the University of Adelaide, where she is studying medicine and surgery. She was just 18 when she co-founded women’s organisation TABOO with school friend Eloise Hall. The pair crowdfunded $56,000 to launch their range of hygiene products in August 2019, selling organic cotton pads and tampons to Australian buyers, with all profits going to One Girls, a charity that provides education programs for girls and women in Sierra Leone and Uganda.
Ms Hall said, “Menstrual products should be accessible, affordable, not a luxury or a choice. But the reality is one in every 10 girls around the world can’t afford menstrual products and culture stigma forces women and girls to isolate the days they bleed.”

She called on all Australians to join the cause. “Firstly, let’s change the conversation around menstruation. Those on your period, expect respect in place of shame and be proud of what your body can do. Families and teachers, invest in creating an environment that understands the importance and the strength of the menstrual cycle, and don’t shy away from the conversation. And, of course, let’s all commit to fighting period poverty around the world.” TABOO also provides free hygiene products to Vinnies Women’s Crisis Centre, for women in need of emergency accommodation in South Australia.

Migrant and refugee advocate Rosemary Kariuki was named Australia’s Local Hero. The 60-year-old – the subject of 2020 documentary Rosemary’s Way.

She arrived in Australia from Kenya in 1999, fleeing family abuse and tribal clashes. Her early lonely years in Australia made her realise how isolated migrant and refugee women could be – with many unused to going out alone, having no transport, and struggling to speak English. “It took me a while to feel like this country is home”.
Ms Kariuki encourages women to become involved with the community, creating with the African Women’s Group the annual African Women’s Dinner Dance, which attracts a crowd of hundreds. She also ran the African Village Market, which helped migrants and refugees start their own business. Currently she is the multicultural community liaison officer for the Parramatta Local Area Command, specialising in helping migrants who are facing domestic violence, language barriers and financial distress.
She urged people to embrace Australia’s multiculturalism.
“Together we can make this wonderful country that I call home even greater. So let us share what we know and give each a helping hand. Let us embrace our multicultural nation, more building on it and looking for the opportunities and positives. I would like to encourage every one of you to meet someone new from a different background this coming week and see what doors open to you.”

National Australia Day Council chairperson Danielle Roche (OAM) congratulated the recipients. “Grace, Miriam-Rose, Isobel and Rosemary are all committed to changing attitudes in our society and changing lives. They are strong, determined women who are dedicated to breaking down barriers and advocating for people’s rights – particularly the rights of women and children.”

Inspiring women! Inspiration for us all!!

(Text sourced from Channel 9 news report, 25 January 2021)

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God bless. Peace be with you [Editor]

(A sermon by Rev Sandy Boyce, 24th January 2021).

If we can think beyond boats, storms and whales from Sunday School lessons about Jonah, we might find ways that the story is surprisingly relevant.

God called Jonah the prophet to deliver a hard message to the city of Ninevah. God had seen their wickedness and Jonah was to call them to repentance. Jonah was reluctant to go. More about that later. Instead, Jonah fled in the other direction. Sunday School lessons have given a negative spin on Jonah. Shouldn’t he have been like those fisherman in today’s Gospel reading who just dropped what they were doing and followed Jesus, no questions asked. Shouldn’t Jonah have just eagerly shared God’s message to the people in Ninevah?

Let me tell you about Ninevah, the largest city of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, on the outskirts of Mosul in what is modern-day northern Iraq. Nineveh was a city great in power, culture, and size. The citizens of Nineveh felt secure behind its massive walls – some 30 metres high and broad enough for three chariots to be driven abreast on the roadway running along their top. The Assyrian Empire was powerful, and sought to conquer the world. Enter Jonah, a Jewish man, who God asked to leave his own country of Israel, and go into the heartland of an enemy people, to declare the coming wrath of God.

Now, the Assyrian empire considered the Jewish God inferior to their own, especially since their own gods had prevailed. Ninevah as a city was thriving, defeating enemies, gaining power and wealth. Nobody would have felt they were evil and needed to repent – they just relished the success they had achieved.

To maintain its power, the Empire had a way of dealing harshly with anyone who challenged the status quo. Jonah knew he risked imprisonment at the very least for the message he would bring. Ninevah was infamous for mutilating and torturing its prisoners. He faced the prospect that he might even be killed as soon as he opened his mouth. The prophet Nahum had called Ninevah ‘the city of blood’.

Jonah declared, “40 days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” He had the audacity and courage to speak truth to power, right there in the centre of the city that served as the capital of the Empire. Just 8 words (5 in Hebrew). And God wasn’t even mentioned. Nor was there any mention of what the people should do in response.

But, surprisingly, the city listened, took it seriously, and acted. A fast was proclaimed; everyone wore sackcloth. Even the King put on sackcloth and sat in the ashes. I’d like to see a few current day leaders repent, don the sackcloth and repent! The King declared everyone should turn from their evil ways and from the violence that was in their hands, so that God’s mind would be changed and the people would not perish. Indeed, that’s what happened. The threatened calamity was averted. I could round this off by saying this passage from Jonah reminds us that people can, in fact, turn from their unfaithful ways, and that the voice of a prophet can be extremely powerful!

But we need to read on – the punchline is that Jonah was angry with God when the Ninevah actually put on a show of repentance. He was angry because God’s mind could be changed so easily, just because the oppressor had a temporary change of heart and put on a bit of a show. In fact, the Assyrian Empire would quickly return to its ways. History reveals Assyria conquered Israel in waves in the late 8th century deporting most of its citizens. A remnant remained in the north, but the nation of Israel was under Assyrian rule. Tens of thousands were deported and put to work as servants in Assyria. And then, the Assyrians began to populate Israel with people from other nations they had defeated (2 Kings 17:24).

This was a practice called geographical migration, or transmigration, where they would invade an area and uproot the heart of their society, forcing them to move to another region of the Empire. It’s a strategy still used in our world. The resulting confusion and terror ensured that the people can never rise against their oppressors. Scholar Christy Randazzo cites three factors: ignorance – since the people had no knowledge about the new place in which they were forced to live and work; starvation (“uprooting” was meant literally: they lost their carefully tended fields, which often took generations to cultivate); cultural trauma because so many cultural practices had been linked to the physical landscape, the land itself. Many turned to the gods of the Empire for comfort.

Empire would cut the heart out of a people, in effect killing their entire sense of “peoplehood.” This form of cultural genocide was, and is, irrefutably “evil”. It’s part of our Australian story and the dispossession and dislocation of First Peoples. It’s why the conversation about January 26th matters.

The Assyrian Empire was clearly the oppressor in this story. Violence. Nations and patriots. Power, privilege and entitlement was on their side. Oppressive systems and structures.

Jonah was a lone voice calling for change, for justice, for repentance. Jonah’s call for change, had it led to transformative change, would have enabled the nation of Israel to safely live in peace, to be unafraid. His call for change is replicated in those voices from the margins over the centuries calling for transformative change, for the sake of the poor and marginalised. Repeatedly, the biblical witness tells us that God’s priority is for the welfare of the poor, the marginalised and the oppressed. The groundswell of such voices led to the Black Lives Matter movement. To the Civil Rights movement. To recognising Aboriginal people in the 1967 Referendum.

How does the Church speak to the Empires of our day? How do we listen to the voices of the prophets in our midst calling for justice, mercy and repentance? To turn from evil and towards good. Modern day prophets, like Jonah before them, will be angry when repentance is lip service only and does not lead to changed lives, nor substantive systemic change that disrupts power and privilege. Injustices need to be named, and structures that created and sustained injustice completely reimagined. Anything else is cheap repentance, the cause of Jonah’s anger.

What is needed is a change of heart.

The Book of Jonah may have been written in the context of Jewish people encountering cultural genocide by the Assyrian invaders, to explain what was happening to them. They would have resonated with Jonah’s rage. How could Ninevah, the centre of the Assyrian Empire, the one that would destroy God’s own people, be reconciled to God? Jonah lamented, “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you’re a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing”.

God: gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love. God’s love is for all, even enemies like the Assyrian Empire – when there is repentance. The prophet Isaiah (Ch19) says, “Behold the days are coming when God’s promises are all fulfilled. Behold the days are coming, when I will bless Assyria, my people Egypt to my chosen, and Israel, my inheritance”. There is the possibility of many blessed, beloved chosen peoples.

God never gives up hope on anyone, even the least likely.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

A sermon by Rev Sandy Boyce, 10th January 2021

The Day of Epiphany, in the Western church, is celebrated on January 6, completing the 12 days of Christmas. Traditionally Epiphany marks the visit of the Magi, the wise men – Gentiles from another culture – who recognized Jesus’ kingship and bowed before him in worship. It begins the season of Epiphany in the church calendar when Christians celebrate how the light of Christ spreads to all people and all ethnic groups. The true identity of Jesus as the revelation of God is revealed afresh to us.

Usually, the Day of Epiphany gets a liturgical nod and not much more. It’s when Christmas trees and decorations are often taken down, and the nativity set packed away. 

This year Epiphany began in a quite different and shocking way. We had good reason to contemplate the actions of an anxious leader with a manic claim to power.

I’m speaking, of course, of King Herod.

History remembers him as a leader who had no hesitation using violence in a bid to ensure no-one would be able to challenge his authority and absolute power. His power depended on his capacity to convince people that his power alone was legitimate, that he alone had the capacity to protect the interests of the citizens in his part of the world. 

King Herod was enraged when he learned from the Magi, the wise men, that there was an infant born in Bethlehem who they were seeking to worship. He smooth talked his way with the wise men, using them as pawns in his quest to protect his own power. He asked them to inform him about where he could find Jesus, promising he too was a devout religious man, that he would like to worship the infant king too (Matt. 2:8). Epiphany this year is a sobering reminder that religious language and symbols can be co-opted as a weapon of earthly political power. Herod was also happy to use his own religious advisers as pawns to retain power. 

The arrival of the Magi was a catalyst for Herod to unleash violence. Matthew’s Gospel (Ch 2) highlights that there was “fear,” “terror,” and “lies” when the Magi come calling on Herod. Herod was anxious, and the people under him were cautious and apprehensive. The Magi discerned something was wrong.

The Magi, we are told, did find Jesus and pay homage to him, and then instead of returning to Herod, went home by a different route. 

This year, the story has particular poignancy, with the power plays of Herod and the feigning of religious belief and appropriation of religious symbols.

Like the Magi, we too may need to find a different route to travel on from this point.

We speak about Epiphany as a time of light and illumination, a time of revelation, to see more cleraly the revelation of Jesus. Epiphany this year was also a wake-up call – that we need a new direction to head as a global community. 

We are tired. Tired of the pandemic. Tired of political life that exploits and delivers partial truth. Tired of economic and political movements that promote nationalism, isolation, and versions of xenophobia. Tired of wealth that is hoarded by a few people while others struggle to simply survive. Tired of the way policy is guided by insecurity, fear, prejudice, and racism. Tired of the overwhelming reality of global climate change and so little we can do when those with power refuse to confront the issues for the sake of future generations. The earth is groaning. 

We need a prophetic vision, focused on the light of Christ. A vision that invests in human flourishing and well-being. The story of the Magi is a story to enliven our own faith. They had seen something hopeful that propelled them to undertake a long journey. It was this hope that sustained them. Such a hope in the God revealed in Jesus is one to sustain our actions, our prayers, our relationships as we share in God’s redeeming work in the world. 

The Genesis reading we heard today begins, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. . Scholars believe it actually says, ‘In beginning…’. An action, rather than a time. And that action continues. 

Mark’s Gospel states its intention with the words: ‘the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God’. It suggests the beginning of a new order, a new world that is to come. And it happens through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. 

Mark’s Gospel begins in the wilderness on the far side of the Jordan, on the Jordanian side of the river. UNESCO has declared Bethany Beyond the Jordan a World Heritage site, identifying present-day Jordan as the location where Jesus’ baptism is believed to have taken place. The Vatican and Orthodox Christian patriarchs have given their blessings to the site. This location was also closely associated with the foundational identity of the Jewish peope. It was where the miraculous crossing of the Jordan into the promised land took place, under the leadership of Joshua. 

The location is significant. It meant that a large number of Israelites symbolically left their land, and then re-entered the land. A fresh start. And immersion in the Jordan’s waters. Dying to the old ways of living, and rising to the new ways of living, to God’s way. 

What happened this week as Epiphany began was shocking but it also provokes an opportunity for us to examine our own lives, about what’s important. Like those who John baptised, who symbolically left their land and then re-entered it fresh from baptism, we need to ask what we need to leave behind and how we re-orient our lives to the way of Jesus. To pause and ask ourselves what it means to be a follower of Jesus. To ask, who are we? What are our values? How do we love our neighbours as ourselves, those we agree with and those we don’t? How do we follow the Jesus way?

Jesus invites us to the way of truth-telling, of mercy and justice, of love, of forgiveness, of repentance, of reconciliation. We reorient our lives to this calling. The prophetic work of the church is to take up the slow work of repair, of re-forming our churches around the deep, unchanging truths of the light of Christ. To reconstruct communities where we can know and speak truth, serve the needy and the poor, love our neighbours, learn to be poor in spirit, and witness to the light of Christ amid darkness. To bring wholeness, and healing. To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with God, as the prophet Micah said. 

The Jesus Way invites us find a different route than the one that has led us to this point, because there will always be another Herod whose fear and hold on power leads to violence and death. Let us journey through this season of Epiphany, seeking the revelation of Jesus in our midst. 

And this blessing for the journey: 

May God strengthen you for adversity and companion you in joy. 
May God give you the courage of your conviction 
and the wisdom to know when to speak and act. 
May you know peace. 
May you be gifted with deep, true friendship and love. 
May you have laughter to fortify you against the disappointments. 
May you be brave. 

© Valerie Bridgeman, December 18, 2013

A reflection by Mary Lou Kownacki:

“Do not be afraid; for behold, I proclaim to you good news
of great joy that will be for all the people.” (Lk 2:10)

The promise can no longer be contained. Every day this week a messenger arrived “bearing glad tidings”.

Gabriel walked into the Holy of Holies and announced good news to Zechariah and Elizabeth: “Joy and gladness will be yours … in these days God is acting on your behalf.” An angel entered the dream of Joseph and whispered, “Do not fear … you shall call him Emmanuel … God is with us.” And Mary is greeted with words that praise and comfort: “Rejoice O highly favored daughter! Blessed are you among women.” Immediately and in haste she carried the message into the countryside inviting the entire universe to a festive procession.

One has an image of an angelic choir on its feet rushing toward earth leading the way to Bethlehem, then the poor shepherds, dressed in rough sheepskin clothes, still drowsy, still dazzled by the light, still bewildered by the music, the voices, that announced “Peace on earth.” Next the Magi, arrayed in splendid robes, faces aglow, bearing humble gifts; and behind the seekers come travelers of every nation, advancing on horseback or on foot, followed by their camels, dogs and oxen.

If you can imagine this procession of creation, you can also hear the song that envelops the earth as these pilgrims make their way toward Bethlehem. “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who bring glad tidings, announcing peace, bearing good news, announcing salvation, and saying to Zion, ‘Your God is King’.”

Do you hear that song as you journey towards the stable? Do you believe it?

People on their feet, walking toward a promise, is revolutionary. People on their feet, walking toward a promise, can topple empires. People on their feet, walking toward a promise, can create a vision of the Promised Land. Processions are like that.

Remember Gandhi’s Salt March, the small cadre that swelled into a national nonviolent army marching for freedom. How beautiful are the feet of those who bring God’s peace. Remember the euphoria of Solidarity in Poland, Lech Walesa carried on the shoulders of the working poor, the throngs singing in the city streets. How beautiful are the feet of those who bring God’s peace. Recall the day of victory when the Berlin Wall toppled. Hear the church bells ringing, see the people embracing and dancing in the streets. How beautiful are the feet of those who bring God’s peace.

Stay in touch with the Christmas story, a wonderful mystery marking 2000 years of beautiful feet walking the Judean hillsides, walking toward the Star of Bethlehem, the promise of peace.

But, you may argue, Herod soon begins the slaughter of the innocent and the shadow of a cross looms in the distance. Or in time the “little people” are crushed again. Or despite millions of people for peace nothing changes. It only worsens.

Yes. Yet for one second in time everyone has a taste of new beginnings, new possibilities, new life. Christmas. For a moment, the Kingdom is come.

And who knows – in the 60’s Mama Cass belted out the promise, “There’s a new world coming and it’s just around the bend.” We believers in the Christmas message would have to agree around the bend is always a surprise; around the bend could be a child wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger, whose name is PRINCE OF PEACE. And there’s only one way to find out – keep following the Star of Bethlehem.

It is this promise, this hope we call Christmas that will feed the flame within us and lighten the path for the next generation.

“Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire,” says the Lord Almighty. “Not a root or a branch will be left to them. But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays. And you will go out and frolic like well-fed calves. Then you will trample on the wicked; they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day when I act,” says the Lord Almighty.
“Remember the law of my servant Moses, the decrees and laws I gave him at Horeb for all Israel.
“See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.” Malachi 4:1-6

Joy Connor evokes the deep grief and anger of Malachi as she reflects on the injustice that still surrounds us, as part of the ‘For the Weary’ Advent series…

Malachi is a cranky man, full of grief and anger. As God’s messenger in a culture where revenge and retribution were the answer to wrong-doing, his message brings a whole lot of Malachi with it.

After a year when three horsemen of the apocalypse: fire, flood and pestilence, have rampaged through the land, I wish I had his energy and that I wasn’t just so weary.

Malachi is incensed at hypocrisy, at the loss of reverence for the creator God. He burns with anger at the human hubris which sets the world out of kilter, ignoring the proper balance of the human presence in the light of the eternal, revealed through the ancient law and stories of his people. Hypocrisy which brings sick, useless and worthless offerings to contribute to the care of the temple. These days it is like pretending that the mining of coal seam gas will look after our fragile planet as it destroys the deep ground water. It’s like ignoring the deep wisdom of the Statement from the Heart and just fiddling around the edges, believing that this will fix the racial oppression suffered by our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Malachi hates the arrogant sense of entitlement which is deaf to another’s pain. Like inferring that people seeking asylum are illegal potential sex offenders, criminals and terrorists who deserve to lose their youth in off-shore and onshore detention. Decision making which means that people seeking asylum live with no unemployment assistance through a pandemic in order to stop the “pull factor” which causes the deaths at sea of other desperate people.

The thought of putting a bit of heat under the suits who perpetuate the lies is quite attractive after I have listened to people who have been abandoned in detention for 7 years or more. I mentioned this to my dear communist inspired friend. She was horrified. ”That’s just not OK Joy” she said, “You are a Christian, you shouldn’t even be thinking like that.”

And she is right. The “Elijah” that Malachi is longing for who “Comes with healing in his wings” doesn’t come as a vengeful militarist God but as a tiny baby born in poverty, living in the midst of the injustice and oppression of an occupied country, sharing the pain of racism and weariness. ”God with us,” as Paul says ”the hope of glory.”

Advent means that the Creator loves us and became one with us in love. The message of compassion and justice doesn’t change but following the one who has shared this pain shifts how we deal with the wrongs whose effects just don’t go away.

I try and start each day sitting or lying down when I am very tired. I shut my eyes and let the sun of God’s love soak in. Letting God love me is sometimes hard. The worries, the things to be done, the hurts of others and my own brokenness constantly interfere. But our God is just crazy about us. “We are all God’s darlings” as Lady Julian of Norwich wrote in 1492.

Joy Connor is a long term social justice activist. She is currently Chairperson of the Blue Mountains Refugee Support Group and regularly visits refugees in detention.

For the Weary is a daily email devotional series that has been crafted by a diverse group of contributors, and reflects on the lament of the Advent story and the hope that we share. Encourage your friends, family and faith community to sign up here. It’s not too late to sign up!
Promote this series in your church or faith community this weekend with PowerPoint slides and social media assets available here. 

(prompted by an article by Laura Jean Truman, Advent: When Waiting Is the Work)

I’ve just spent a week with a family with young children. It was joyous. The four year old would proclaim, in the intervals between activity, ‘I’m bored’. It’s an expression she’s probably picked up from kindergarten, or Bluey, or any number of places. One time she stretched out full length on the couch to rest, assuring us she was bored again. I wondered what bored must feel like, as I adore the moments in between activity and things to do, when there is a time of gentle quiet. So the four year old philosopher and I chatted about how those moments in between activity and the way it lets the brain and body rest.

Perhaps the experience of lockdown in this strange and difficult year has meant the experience of ‘being bored’ has woven its way through many adult lives where ‘inactivity’ too easily equates with boredom. The ‘in-between activity’ moments have been difficult to manage when ‘being busy’ is often worn as a badge of honour, or at least can be an expectation.

My ‘smart watch’ tells me when to take time to breathe deeply for one minute. It pops up when you least expect it, and sometimes at inconvenient times (like in the middle of a meeting!). Making the time for deep breathing has great benefit for body health – a simple and natural tool to reduce stress and anxiety, pain, and high blood pressure. When you become stressed or anxious, the brain releases cortisol, the “stress hormone.” By taking deep breaths, your heart rate slows, more oxygen enters our blood stream and ultimately communicates with the brain to relax. Deep breathing also ups your endorphins, the “feel good” chemical. Breathing is in charge of 70% of cleansing the body of toxins (the other 30% is through bladder and bowels.) If you do not breathe fully, your body must work overtime to release these toxins.

Similarly, meditation improves mood, decreases stress, increases attention span, even increases creativity. Contemplative practices have been a staple of Christian spirituality for thousands of years, as a way to encounter God and our deep self.

Laura Jean Truman reflects: And yet it can be hard to make the time for these practices, to make space for stillness. There is always just so much to be done. Injustice is everywhere and the work is never-ending. When we look at the suffering of the world, being still feels like a sin. How can we justify stopping, resting, breathing, waiting?

Into this anxiety and restless busyness, the liturgical year invites us into the holy waiting of Advent. Into a culture that prioritizes productivity over presence, Advent invites us to believe that we have value even when we are still. Into a culture that tells us if we don’t do it, it won’t get done, Advent asks us to stop working for a season. God is going to do a new thing, and all we have to do is wait.

There is a time for everything, Ecclesiastes reminds us, and the liturgical year leads us through this sacred time that runs alongside secular time — through a time to feast, a time to fast, a time to repent, a time to be forgiven. Yes, there is time to work alongside God bringing in the redemption of the world. And there is also a time to stop working, to sit and be still. It’s tempting to say that the “sitting still” is just a preparation for the work, but it would make just as much sense to say that the work is preparation for sitting still. Neither the steady work of ‘Ordinary Time’ in the church calendar, or the patient waiting of Advent, is more important.

During Advent, the waiting is the work. 

When the earth rests in the winter, it’s not non-productive. In stillness, the earth is replenishing. In waiting, the earth works. In COVID lockdown, the earth had a chance to breathe again, to do some healing in the interval when humans were doing less driving, less travelling, less consuming.

In Advent, we acknowledge that there are forces at work beyond our own heady dreams of fixing the world. We admit that even when we stop, God still works. We put down our tools and put down our pride, and wait for the morning that God always brings in.

Waiting is hard because our culture has worked tirelessly to disciple us into the myth that life’s meaning is tied to our productivity. The world has taught us to be unsatisfied and to always strive for more – to be more, have more, get more, do more, fix more. Unlearning that is hard work, and it takes practice. 

No one has taught us that the work goes on, even when we are still. No one has ever taught us that God can break into the world even when we have stopped working.

Advent teaches us how to wait and be still. The rhythms of the church year echo the rhythms of the seasons and the rhythms of night and day. Winter always moves to spring. Night always shifts to day. The loneliness of Advent always gives way to the God with us, Immanuel, of Christmas.

****
Laura Jean Truman, Advent: When Waiting Is the Work (published on Church Anew blog)

Richard Rohr reflects on Jesus and the Reign of God. The last Sunday of the Church year (Nov 22) has a focus on the Reign of God (Reign of Christ), before we move into Advent.

Jesus announced, lived, and inaugurated for history a new social order. He called it the Reign (or Kingdom) of God and it became the guiding image of his entire ministry. The Reign of God is the subject of Jesus’ inaugural address (see Mark 1:15, Matthew 4:17, and Luke 4:14–30), his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7), and the majority of his parables. Once this guiding vision of God’s will became clear to Jesus, which seems to have happened when he was about thirty and alone in the desert, everything else came into perspective. In fact, Matthew’s Gospel says, “From then onwards” (4:17), Jesus began to preach.

In order to explain this concept, it may be helpful to first say what it is not: the “Kingdom” is not synonymous with heaven. Many Christians have mistakenly thought that the Reign of God is “eternal life,” or where we go after we die. That idea is disproven by Jesus’ own prayer: “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).

“Thy Kingdom come” means very clearly that God’s realm is something that enters into this world, or, as Jesus puts it, “is close at hand” (Matthew 10:7). We shouldn’t project it into another world. What we discover in the New Testament, especially in Matthew’s Gospel, is that the Kingdom of God is a new world order, a new age, a promised hope begun in the teaching and ministry of Jesus – and continued in us.

I think of the Kingdom of God as the Really Real (with two capital Rs). That experience of the Really Real – the “Kingdom” experience – is the heart of Jesus’ teaching. It’s Reality with a capital R, the very bottom line, the pattern-that-connects. It’s the goal of all true religion, the experience of the Absolute, the Eternal, what is.

God gives us just enough tastes of God’s realm to believe in it and to want it more than anything. In the parables, Jesus never says the Kingdom is totally now or totally later. It’s always now-and-not-yet. When we live inside the Really Real, we live in a “threshold space” between this world and the next. We learn how to live between heaven and earth, one foot in both worlds, holding them precious together.

We only have the first fruits of the Kingdom in this world, but we experience enough to know that it’s the only thing that will ever satisfy us. Once we have had the truth, half-truths do not satisfy us anymore. In its light, everything else is relative, even our own life.

(Adapted from Richard Rohr with John Bookser Feister,  Jesus’ Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media: 1996), 3–4, 29, 109–110, 111)

Our Values Matter

A sermon from The Most Rev. Michael Curry is the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church.

And now in the name of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God, father, son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

“When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak and taught them….” Matthew 5:1-2
 

I

The Beatitudes, just read in a variety of voices from around our country, are part of a compendium of some of the teachings of Jesus that tradition has called “The Sermon on the Mount.”  They are so named because the setting for these teachings of Jesus is on a mountaintop. That is not an incidental detail.

In 1939 the late Zora Neale Hurston published a novel that retold the biblical story of Moses and the Hebrew freedom movement recorded in the book of Exodus. She told it in the idiom of African slaves in America, but she wrote it as an ingenious critique of lynching and the immorality of Jim Crow segregation here at home, and a critique of the rising tide of fascism, authoritarianism, hatred, and bigotry around the world that would lead to the Second World War. She titled the book, Moses, Man of the Mountain.

“When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain and taught them.”

The mountain is not an incidental background detail. When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain and began to teach them. Matthew was deliberately and intentionally invoking the memory of Moses around what Jesus was doing in the sermon on the Mount.

It was on a mountain called Sinai that God confronted Moses and challenged him to live beyond mere self-interest and to give his life in the service of God’s cause of human freedom. “Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land, and tell ole Pharaoh, let my people go.”

Years later when the Israelites had won freedom, it was on that same mountain that Moses received the Ten Commandments; God’s law and principles for living with freedom.

And at the end of his life, it was on another mountain, Mt. Nebo, that God allowed Moses to, as the slaves use to say, look over yonder to behold a promised land.

Centuries after Moses, in Memphis, Tennessee, a follower of Jesus named Martin, on the night before he was martyred for freedom’s cause, spoke of hope in the biblical language of the mountain. “I’ve been to the mountaintop, and I’ve seen the promised land.” No, the mountain is not an incidental detail.

The mountaintop: That is where prophets and poets look over yonder, to behold not what is but what ought to be. To behold the promised land of God; a new heaven, a new earth, the kingdom of God, the reign of God’s love breaking in, the beckoning of the beloved community, a reconfiguration of the landscape of reality from the nightmare it often is into the promised land of God’s dream for the human family and all creation.

“When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain and taught them.”

What did he reveal from that mountaintop? He told them about the way to the promised land.

Blessed are you when you’re poor and broken-hearted. Here’s the way.
Blessed are you when you’re compassionate and merciful. This is the way.
Blessed are you when you’re humble and meek. This is the way.
Blessed are you peacemakers who will not cease from striving until human beings learn to lay down their swords and shields down by the riverside to study war no more.
This is the way to the promised land.

Blessed are you when you hunger and thirst that God’s righteous justice might prevail in every society, in every age, for all time.
This is the way.

Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.
Love God, your neighbor, yourself.
Love when they spit, shout and call you everything but a child of God.
Love!
This is the way. the way to the promised land.
When you live something like this, when you look something like this,
when we love like this, then we are on our way to the promised land.

You may be thinking, this sounds wonderful in church, but will it work in the world? Can such lofty ideals about hope, beloved community, and the reign of God be translated into human reality and society? Some years ago I was in the public library working on a sermon. I took a break and walked around the stacks looking at books. In the religion section I came upon a little book with an old black binding, published by St. Martin’s Press titled, The Great Sayings of Jesus.

The forward to the book was written by Richard Holloway, who once served as the Primus or presiding bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church. He said that in Gospels generally and, “In the Sermon on the Mount, in particular, we get from Jesus something of God’s dream for a transformed creation. But the epilogue [the rest of the Gospel story] reminds us that the dream is costly, that dreams are cruelly disposed of by the world as we know it. Yet the dream lives on, nothing can kill it for long; and Jesus goes on breaking out of the tombs into which we have consigned him.”

“The dream lives on.” Do not underestimate the power of a dream, a moral principle, eternal verities, virtues and values that lift us up and move us forward. For true and noble ideals and the dream of a promised land have their source in the God who the Bible says is love. And God, as my grandmother’s generation used to say, God is still on the throne!

Our ideals, values, principles and dreams of beloved community matter. They matter because they drive us beyond service of self alone, to commitment to the greater good of us all. They matter because they give us an actual picture of God’s reign of love, and a reason to struggle and make it real. They matter to our lives as people of faith. They matter to our life in civil society. They matter to our life as a nation and as a world. Our values matter!

II

They matter in some simple and yet significant ways. A number of years ago Robert Fulghum wrote a wonderful book titled, All I really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.
Here is a list of the things – the values – he learned: 

• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Don’t hit people.
• Clean up your own mess.
• Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
• Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
• Wash your hands before you eat.
• Flush.
• When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.

Imagine a world in which these basic values don’t matter.

Share everything? Imagine a world in which the value of sharing is replaced by greed and selfishness.
Play fair? No, cheat, lie, steal. That would make for an interesting World Series, NBA Championship, Super Bowl, election, democracy.
Wash your hands before you eat. No, let’s spread the germs.
Flush. I rest my case.
“When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.”
No, it’s everyone for themselves.

Our values matter! A world, a society, a life devoid of values and ideals that ennoble, that lift up and liberate, is a world descending into the abyss, a world that is a dystopian vision of hell on earth.

Mahatma Gandhi knew something about the power of ideals, dreams, and values. He said it this way.

Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.

Our values matter!

III

The values and dreams we hold as a nation, our shared American values, they matter even more. We hold this prayer service in the midst of a national election, in the context of profound divisions that left unhealed could prove injurious to the fabric of democracy itself. The right to vote and to participate in the democratic process is a value of the highest order.

To be sure, no form of governance attains perfection. The preamble to the Constitution wisely reminds us that each generation must continue the evolving work of forming “a more perfect union.” No, our democracy is not perfect, but it offers the best hope yet devised for government that fosters human freedom, equal justice under the law, the dignity and the equality of every human being made, as the Bible says, in the image of God.

Reinhold Niebuhr said it well, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

Despite our flaws and failings, we have some shared values. One of them is the preservation and perfection of representative democracy itself, “that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

We don’t think of it this way very often but love for each other is a value on which our democracy depends.  On the Great Seal of the United States, above the bald eagle are banners on which the Latin words, e pluribus unum are written. Those words, e pluribus unum, literally mean, “one out of many.” One nation from many diverse people.

But do you know where those words come from? They come from the writings of Cicero who lived during the time of the Roman Republic. Cicero said, “When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of many.” Cicero who gave us those words said that love for each other is the way to make e pluribus unum real. Jesus of Nazareth taught us that. Moses taught us that. America listen to Cicero, Jesus, Moses. Love is the way to make e pluribus unum real. Love is the way to be America for real.

We have some shared values.

Thomas Jefferson gave voice to these shared values in the Declaration of Independence.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

We have shared national values. Abraham Lincoln gave voice to them when he said in the Gettysburg Address:

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

We have shared national values. Every one of us was taught these words as a child in school.

I pledge allegiance to the flag
of the United States of America
And to the republic for which it stands
One nation, Under God, Indivisible
With liberty, And justice, For all

 We sing our shared values.
 

America. America.
God shed his grace on thee.
And crown thy good with brotherhood.
From sea to shining sea.

At a church picnic, many years ago when I was a parish priest, I happened to be sitting at a picnic table with parishioners, several of whom were veterans of World War II and Korea. One of the men sitting there, then well into his 80s, was one of the Tuskegee Airman, the first black air unit to fight.

He started talking about Eleanor Roosevelt, and he spoke of her with great reverence and respect. He went on to explain why. In the beginning the Tuskegee airmen were being trained to fly, yet they were prohibited from flying and fighting for their country because of the color of their skin.

At the time there was a great debate in Congress and the country as to whether or not a black person had the lung capacity to handle altitude. And, if they had the brain capacity to handle the intellectual rigors of flying. Scientists were brought in to argue the case on both sides. Nothing changed. The Tuskegee Airmen kept training.

The tide turned when Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States, went to Tuskegee and brought the press with her. While the cameras flashed, she got in a plane piloted by a Tuskegee airman and flew for 45 minutes over the Alabama countryside. The picture of her in the plane with the black airmen went viral. And it changed the debate.

What led Eleanor Roosevelt to stand with them? In a spiritual biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ivan Smith said she “wanted her critics to join her in working toward a new America that lived out the Declaration of Independence and the Beatitudes of Jesus.” She was holding on to deep American ideals, the values of this country. And lifting up the values of God.

What led the Tuskegee Airmen to fly, fight, and even die for their country? Between 1943 and 1945 those airmen flew over 15,000 sorties. Recognitions included 96 Distinguished Flying Crosses, a Silver Star, 14 Bronze Stars, 744 Air Medals, and 8 Purple Hearts. In 2007 President George W. Bush awarded 300 Tuskegee Airmen the Congressional Gold Medal.

I was raised by folk like those guys sitting at that picnic table. In her living room, my grandma proudly displayed the pictures of her two sons who fought in World War II, serving in segregated units within the Army Air Corps. My wife has her grandfather’s discharge papers; he fought in a black unit in World War I. This I know: They loved America even when America didn’t love us. They believed in America because – even when America falls short – the values and ideals of America, the dream of America, stands tall and true and will one day see us through.

So whatever your politics, however you have or will cast your vote, however this election unfolds, wherever the course of racial reckoning and pandemic take us, whether we are in the valley or the mountaintop, hold on to the hope of America. Hold on to hope grounded in our shared values and ideals. Hold on to God’s dream. Hold on and struggle and walk and pray for our nation, in the words of James Weldon Johnson…

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.

This sermon has been shared with Church Anew with permission by the Office of the Right Reverend Michael B. Curry, The Episcopal Church, in its entirety. The Most Rev. Michael Curry is the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church and the author of the book “Love Is the Way: Holding On to Hope in Troubling Times”.

NAIDOC Week 2020 acknowledges and celebrates that Australia’s story didn’t begin with documented European contact. The very first footprints on this continent were those belonging to First Nations peoples.
NAIDOC 2020 invites all Australians to embrace the true history of this country – a history which dates back thousands of generations.
It’s about seeing, hearing and learning the First Nations’ 65,000+ year history of this country – which is Australian history. We want all Australians to celebrate that we have the oldest continuing cultures on the planet and to recognise that our sovereignty was never ceded.

Always was
Always will be
The Lands I walk on
And the Lands that walk within me

To know the history of First Peoples
Is to know the importance of place,
To know what being on country is,
Is to know and feel the connection

To want to hear the stories and feel the stories is our call to all,
To want to know and hear the Lands
as a gift, to our being and knowing,
To know and hear from First Peoples, is how we as First and
Second Peoples are called to the growing

To know the significance and compass that abounds us,
as First Peoples through place,
is to know our links to the Land surpasses all time and space

But in knowing that connection
Is to know and reflect on, dispossession and its true realisation,
To hear the Land relation, is a call to know
and reflect on the impacts of invasion and colonisation

What is country, what is milaythina ningee (Mother Earth) in the
now and in the forever time for First Peoples?

Stolen lands,
At the colonisers hands,
Stolen connection,
By forced removals,
Under the myth of protection.

The Land is us,
And we are the Land
Imagine and reflect on what happens when that is taken away?
May our Churches and agencies discern,
For it is in Nature’s classroom that we truly learn
Learn the struggle and the survival of a people and place in realisation,
Hear the cries of our people at the hands of colonisation

Reflect on Always was Always will be,
Not in words, but in action too
And embrace the message to unlearn and be free,
Not just in words but in hearts, souls and spirits too
And reflect on the privilege of the Land walked on and with:

Know its stories
Feel its stories
Feel its call
And feel its heart

The Land is my compass
It connects me
It connects me to place past present and future too
It’s who I am
It’s who we are as First Peoples
And in the discerning of justice for Land return,
It’s the knowing of the importance of Place,
The healing of Place is the place to Learn.

It’s in knowing this connection to Land, through this lens of
discernment the true lessons are learned
Honour the land and the stories
sitting within Country wherever you may be,
And be in the knowing and the growing of:

Always Was
Always Will Be
As you gather

Can you hear the stories of place?
And as you walk and gather and stand?

Can you hear the connection in the forever time
of First Peoples’ Connection to Land?

Walk it
Feel it
Know it
Hear it
Honour it
Sit and be

With what it means to truly honour,
The words “Always was, Always will be”

Alison Overeem, UAICC Tasmania
Leprena
November 2020, NAIDOC week

Alison also included specific reference to Lutrawita (Tasmania):
In Lutrawita, the 9 Nations of our ancestors
lived in harmony with the Land,
The Land is us,
And we are the Land
Imagine and reflect on what happens when that is taken away?
Declaration of “The Black War” here in Tasmanian must be told and must be heard,
The impacts of broken Treaties must be learned.

The world watches on as the U.S. waits for the outcome. So, this week, the following reflections may give some scaffolding to our hopes and prayers. (Not just for this election, but for the way we want to live in our global community).

     Choose this day whom you will serve...
          but as for me and my household, 
          we will serve the Holy One.
                                          —Joshua 34.15

Choose, this day.
As for me, I will follow the Beloved.
I will spurn violence and all claim to dominion.
I will stand for justice:
that all may be included in the blessings of life.
With the Crucified One,
I will cast my lot, and my vote,
with the poor in spirit, and those who mourn,
with the gentle, and those who hunger for justice.
I will stand with the peacemakers
and those who are persecuted.
I will follow the one
who fed all who were hungry,
who healed all who wanted to be healed,
and welcomed all who were pushed to the margins.
I will speak only the truth, and only lovingly.
I will examine, confess and resist
my own complicity in systems that harm,
and surrender what I can
so my living may be a blessing for the poor.
I will accept the power God gives me
to resist evil, injustice, and oppression
in whatever forms they present themselves.
I will live with hope and gratitude,
with courage and generosity and kindness.
Choose this day whom you will serve,
but as for me, I will serve the God of love.
[Friends, pray for America…]
(Source: Steve Garnaas-Holmes, Unfolding Light)

Rev Steven Koski, First Presbyterian Church Bend Oregon, writes:
I want to publicly announce who I believe will lead us out of the mess we’re in: YOU. Whoever wins or loses, what is at stake in this election and it’s aftermath is the kind of people we choose to be and become. No election can decide whether we will become bitter or better. No election can decide if we will shrink in fear or step up and in with courage. Only we can make that decision. Regardless of the outcomes of Election Day, the world we wake up to tomorrow will be on edge, fear will threaten to overwhelm and hate and violence will continue to be a threat. The way we choose to love is more important now than ever.
Whether today results in the outcome we fear the most or the outcome we most desire, the holy work of love that is ours to do remains the same:
To bring love where there is hate; to resist hate without becoming hateful ourselves; to shine light in the darkest corners; to offer hope where there is despair; to overcome evil with goodness; to be the presence of mercy where there is cruelty; to offer healing where there are wounds; to work for reconciliation where there are divisions and restoration where there is brokenness; and to extend generosity where there is need.
We don’t simply cast votes on Election Day. We cast votes every single day with our hearts, voices, hands and feet. Our best hope is not in who wins the election. Our best hope is in you, in us, together.
Turn aside for a few minutes today from the anxiety of election results. Find a way to practice kindness reminding yourself of the power of goodness that resides within you, a goodness stronger than evil. Take deep breaths today breathing in “Love wins!” and breathing out “Love always wins!” reminding yourself that if love isn’t winning, it just means the story isn’t over yet.
What is the holy work of love that is ours to do? That work is now more important than ever.
(Source: Steven Koski’s Facebook page, 3rd November 2020)

God of Justice and Peace, as the world rotates today, may your calm filter each corner of our communities. As many of us wonder “what happens next” in this very unusual year, we seek spaces free from anxiety.
God, my soul aches for humanity. I hurt when I don’t see my neighbors remembering that, they too, are connected with everyone else. The choices we make today impact not only ourselves but our neighbors across this planet.
As we walk this surreal landscape, we pray that we can choose to love our neighbors across this world. Turn the feet and the minds of those who bully, those who hate. May the dawn of your hope fill our souls with new possibilities, knowing that tomorrow may bring the light for which we’ve been searching. Amen.
(Source: Rev. Michelle L. Torigian, posted on revgalblogpals)

God, you are creating a world where everyone can live an abundant life. We confess that we often work against your creative spirit, instead creating systems that privilege a few and leave behind the rest. We confess that we benefit from injustice, and we often do not want to give up our spot at the top. We confess that sometimes the words we say and sing in the sanctuary do not match our actions in other parts of the building, let alone other spaces in our lives. We confess that we prefer to offer you what is easy and hope that is good enough to get us through the week. Forgive our inconsistent faith, our hypocrisy, our hard-heartedness. Open us to your way, and give us courage to walk your path of healing, reconciliation, justice, and peace. Amen.
(Source: Teri Petersen)

For those of us who want to see democracy survive and thrive – and we are legion – the heart is where everything begins: that grounded place in each of us where we can overcome fear, rediscover that we are members of one another, and embrace the conflicts that threaten democracy as openings to new life for us and for our nation. . . .
Of all the tensions we must hold in personal and political life, perhaps the most fundamental and most challenging is standing and acting with hope in the “tragic gap.” On one side of that gap, we see the hard realities of the world, realities that can crush our spirits and defeat our hopes. On the other side of that gap, we see real-world possibilities, life as we know it could be because we have seen it that way. . . .
If we are to stand and act with hope in the tragic gap and do it for the long haul, we cannot settle for mere “effectiveness” as the ultimate measure of our failure or success. Yes, we want to be effective in pursuit of important goals. . . . [But] we must judge ourselves by a higher standard than effectiveness, the standard called faithfulness. Are we faithful to the community on which we depend, to doing what we can in response to its pressing needs? Are we faithful to the better angels of our nature and to what they call forth from us? Are we faithful to the eternal conversation of the human race, to speaking and listening in a way that takes us closer to truth? Are we faithful to the call of courage that summons us to witness to the common good, even against great odds? When faithfulness is our standard, we are more likely to sustain our engagement with tasks that will never end: doing justice, loving mercy, and calling the beloved community into being.
Richard Rohr writes: Parker Palmer’s understanding of the “tragic gap” recognizes that no matter what we do, we can never completely solve the problem. In all our actions, there is always a space left incomplete, imperfect, which God alone can fill. The search for “the perfect” often keeps us from “the good.” The demand for one single issue about which we can be totally right actually keeps us from reading the whole picture – often this is true in regard to voting. 
Reference: Parker J. Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit (Jossey-Bass: 2011), 10, 17–18, 191, 192–193.

As Melbourne comes slowly out of lockdown this week, we all breathe a collective sigh of relief across Australia. (Well done, Victoria! It’s been hard but you’re on the way now).

In this time we can tentatively begin to describe as ‘post-lockdown’ (post-COVID is a long way off yet), it will be tempting to simply pick up life and begin the return to ‘normal life’. What will the ‘new normal’ look like? We’ve had months to contemplate what is possible, that we never considered possible before or even thought possible.

The following is an edited excerpt from a conversation between Common Grace CEO Brooke Prentis and Christian ecological ethicist Dr Byron Smith, facilitated by Common Grace’s Creative and Communications Director, Brigitta Ryan. It is titled 2020, the Year of Disruption: COVID-19, Black Lives Matter and the Climate Crisis. Listen to the full conversation here.

DR BYRON SMITH: So, one of the things the pandemic has done is reveal that the window of possibility [for climate action] is wider than perhaps we thought. And that, I think, is one of the key lessons. Change is possible. Another world is possible. And, you know, that cuts both ways. Things can actually get worse, faster than we think as well. Things can get better, faster than we dare to dream. The question is, will we allow ourselves to be defined by the stories of the past and the stories that have shaped and governed our lives, stories of capitalism and technologism and individualism and stories in which the profits of the few, are placed ahead of the health of the many and the health of the planet, or how are we going to live out new life-giving stories grounded in ancient wisdom from First Peoples and in the Scriptures but creatively applied to our new context? And that really is the challenge of today.

BRIGITTA RYAN: We’re talking about the resources for change and how we could go about creating change to care more deeply for God’s Earth. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, who’s been described as one of the world’s leading marine biologists, said in Time magazine that “we can’t solve the climate crisis without people of colour but we could probably solve it without racists.” That’s really a frank way of putting what you’re saying there Byron, that the interests of a few are really being placed ahead of the interests of many.

DR BYRON SMITH: If I could jump in there, it’s not just the interests of the few being ahead of the interests of the many. It’s the interests of the few and the preferences and whims of the few put ahead of the needs of the many. What the rich have to lose is their opulent riches, unnecessary riches, and their immense, unaccountable power. What the poor have to lose and are currently losing are their lives.

BROOKE PRENTIS: I realise my lived experience of injustice is as an Aboriginal person in these lands now called Australia. We are exhausting ourselves, trying to make the possible possible, but we actually need the rest of the Australian population to come on board to change the systems and the structure, the systemic racism, the systemic injustice in so many of the structures built in these lands now called Australia. And so it’s not just about fixing them. We actually have to ‘dismantle’ these systems. And then we’ve got to build something new.

Richard Rohr talks about the movement from Order to Disorder to Reorder. This year we have seen the sudden movement from ‘order’ to ‘disorder’ with the global pandemic. He wrote recently: Disorder is already upon us by reason of our planet, our history, our politics, our economy, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the widespread increase in mental and emotional unhealth. Our job is to make “Good Trouble”* – and probably even “Necessary Trouble”* – so that humanity can spiritually and politically mature. It is about falling – but, as always, falling upward.

What does this liminal time in history call us to do and to be? What will the ‘new normal’ look like that will bring health and healing and wholeness to all, and not just a few. What systems and structures need to change? What might ‘good trouble’ and even ‘necessary trouble’ look like?

(*US Senator John Lewis, who died of pancreatic cancer this year, said,
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”)

1 Thess. 1:1-10
Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, To the Christian community in Thessolonica, in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you, and peace. We give thanks to God always for all of you, constantly mentioning you in our prayers, remembering before our God and Father your work of faith – your faithful service, and labour of love, and perseverence and steadfastness of hope and in our Lord Jesus Christ. For we know, brothers and sisters beloved by God, that God has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction and assurance. You know what kind of men we proved to be among you for your sake. And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you received the word in much affliction, with the joy of the Holy Spirit, so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia. For not only has the word of the Lord sounded forth from you in Macedonia and Achaia, but your faith in God has gone forth everywhere, so that we need not say anything. For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.

The Lectionary begins a journey through the earliest letter of Paul, written to the Christian converts and fledgling church in Thessaloniki.
Thessaloniki was (and still is) an important seaport about 300 km north of Athens. In Paul’s day, the northern region of Greece was known as Macedonia. The city had supported Emperor Augustus, so the Romans made Thessaloniki a free city in 43 B.C. We’re told that Paul, Silas and Timothy went to Thessaloniki, and attended the Jewish synagogue 3 times to present their case for Jesus as the Messiah. As a result, there were converts, primarily among devout Greeks (Acts 17:4) – Gentiles who were sympathetic to Judaism, but had not yet converted to the Jewish faith.
So there were those in Thessaloniki who continued with worship of idols, those who were part of the Jewish faith, and those who became followers of Jesus. The different faith traditions continue today. In Greece, religious affiliation is aligned with ethnicity – to be Greek is to be Orthodox. It is the state religion. Non-Orthodox churches can face legal restrictions and discriminatory governmental obstacles. They have to have a permit from the Ministry of Education and Religion to operate legally as a ‘House of Prayer’. The Pastors of Protestant Churches can be taken to court for proselytizing.
Paul and his team were preaching and proselytizing, and faced determined opposition. The Jewish leaders at the time were enraged and caused a riot, which was enough to run Paul out of town. Paul headed south to Berea and began to preach again, but the Jewish leaders followed him there and again caused a stir. So Paul headed south again, this time to Athens, and then to Corinth. We are told he was by that time he was in weakness, in fear and in much trembling (1 Cor 2:3). He was very discouraged. And yet, his attention was focussed on the churches he had founded. He didn’t want to leave them with only a distant memory of his teaching. You see, there was no church building or church ecclesial structure as we know it. Just a group of new believers who had responded to the teaching about Jesus and chose to follow the Jesus way. Then Silas and Timothy came to Paul from Thessaloniki with great news: the church there was going strong. The local organization was basic, but sufficient enough to carry on the business of the church, even when Paul was no longer present to guide them. Paul became so excited that he dashed off this letter to the Thessalonians. It’s what we’re reading today, and understood to be the first letter penned by Paul. He wanted to help focus their attention on being a community of mutual interest, care and fellowship.
The Thessalonian Christians had experienced the integrity of Paul and his colleagues – their unselfishness – their agape love. They were confident that Paul and his colleagues were truthful and that they were serving God rather than promoting some sort of private agenda. Having decided Paul and his team were people to be trusted, the new Christians in Thessaloniki responded by imitating them. Then, in turn, they became examples to others in their community. Everybody asked, ‘What has happened to these Thessalonians? These people have broken their idols: they worship the one God; they trust in Jesus. They are no longer drunken, dishonest, impure, contentious.’ The new believers became witnesses to others by the way they lived. People noticed the difference in their lives.
The new believers simply shared with their neighbours and friends what God had done in their lives. They explained the new joy and peace that had come into their hearts. Then, when their friends began to ask questions about what had happened, they shared their faith with them.
Now, being a busy seaport, the word about the new believers in Thessaloniki spread all over the country, silently, and without fanfare. People far and wide were stirred by what was happening in the lives of the new believers. Faith is not merely belief; it is something that changes you. Faith makes you turn from what is wrong to what is right, from dark and hurtful things to right and true and healthy things.
Paul writes to them, that they are beloved of God. Now, the Jewish people reserved this descriptor for supremely great men like Moses and Solomon, and to the nation of Israel itself. Now, this accolade is being extended to the humblest of the Gentiles. You are the beloved of God.
Henri Nouwen wrote: “Personally, as my struggle reveals, I don’t often “feel” like a beloved child of God. But I know that that is my most primal identity and I know that I must choose it above and beyond my hesitations. Strong emotions, self-rejection, and even self-hatred justifiably toss you about, but you are free to respond as you will. You are not what others, or even you, think about yourself. You are not what you do. You are not what you have. You are a full member of the human family, having been known before you were conceived and moulded in your mother’s womb. In times when you feel bad about yourself, try to choose to remain true to the truth of who you really are. Look in the mirror each day and claim your true identity. Act ahead of your feelings and trust that one day your feelings will match your convictions. Choose now and continue to choose this incredible truth. As a spiritual practice claim and reclaim your primal identity as beloved daughter or son of a personal Creator”.
In this letter, Paul writes the famous triad for the first time: faith, hope and love. But Paul’s stress is not on these virtues as an end in themselves, but rather upon what they produce. Their faith produced work – as is the nature of true faith. Their love produced labour. The ancient Greek word used for work implies toil that is strenuous and sweat-producing. Their hope produced patience, which is the long-suffering endurance needed to not only survive hard times, but to triumph through them. Paul writes in this way so that we may see these as the great motives of the Christian life.
Jesus said that he came “not to be served, but to serve” (Mt 20:28, Mark 10:45). The verb douleuo (to serve) was apparently never used in a religious sense in pagan literature. No Greek or Roman could take in the idea of ‘serving’ a God… There was no room for it in their religion. If life was to be a moral service rendered to God, it must be to a God quite different from the ancestral worship.
In reflecting upon this passage this week, I remembered my friend Verena, a German woman who has been living in Thessaloniki for about 3 years, supporting the refugees. She attends the International Protestant Church in Thessaloniki, where about 8-10 people take turns preparing the services. Small, just the way the early church began. She wrote to me this week, reflecting on the passage from 1 Thessalonians. “I remember the first time in Thessalonica when we were reading passages from Thessalonians. Three years later, I still get excited reading this passage.The Bible has become even more personal since I moved to Thessalonica and this passage (1 Thess. 1:1-10) has become precious to me. It has been encouraging in times of my personal difficulties when moving to a foreign country, learning a language, figuring out daily life.
This passage has been encouraging in the work with refugees. In the camp where I have been going I play with and teach the children. It has been encouraging in the work on the streets where we distribute food, clothes, and sleeping bags, and in the organisations where I am working.
It’s been encouraging when on every Tuesday and Saturday we distribute groceries, vegetables and clothes. Families, many with children, don’t have any support from the government. So they are coming because they have literally nothing to eat anymore. When I start to think about the coming winter, I know there will be hundreds of people in the city of Thessalonica who will hide themselves in the street in order not to be found by the police who are doing illegal pushbacks – to Turkey. I think about past winters and the snow we had one year ago and the flimsy tents that broke down under it.
(1 Thess 1:6) “For you received the word in much affliction…” Verena says, I see the refugees in Thessaloniki who were able to leave the island of Lesvos in Turkey, and the Moria camp which has now burnt down, and who say “we want to go back to the hell of Moria, because here it’s worse.”
(I think you may have heard the same sentiment from those living in the hell of indefinite detention in Australia and offshore in immigration detention).
In Thessaloniki, the refugees live in an overcrowded camp or on the streets. The traumatized children cannot stop screaming or are frozen or simply don’t speak anymore. The shoes of the people are inadequate, too small, too big, too cold. A desperate situation that is getting worse and worse.
She says, Then I am thankful to know, to see, to live what I can read (1. Thess:1.5): “because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.” This power is so necessary in this work, where is no end in sight. Where people after years still don’t speak English or Greek. Where there is no infrastructure and the camps are not made for integration. Where things are not getting better but worse because the European Union is happy with the Dublin II-law that determines that refugees have to apply for asylum in the country in which they arrived – which of course are the few countries on the edge, one of them being Greece.
“…to serve the living and true God” (1 Thess 1:5) Thessaloniki has so many people in need. How could I do this only by myself? I can’t. Knowing that God put me here to serve makes it possible. When people ask me what they can do for us here, I ask them what Paul did for the church of the Thessalonians then: “constantly mentioning [us] in [your] prayers” (1 Thess 1:2).
So, please hold Verena in your prayers – and the people she supports.
Her experience has many parallels with life for refugees and those seeking asylum in Australia. Refugee advocates report that over 60 asylum seekers – including women, children and infants – who are in community detention in Adelaide have been given just 3 weeks to find work and a new place to live (now extended to six weeks). The youngest is just 8 months old. They are being transitioned to “Final Departure Visas”, which means they will receive no income support. Some individuals are already without an income. If they cannot find work, authorities have advised they “will need to return to a regional processing country or any country where they have a right of residence.” A third of these people are stateless. This would be a huge challenge for anyone at any time, but the fallout from the COVID19 pandemic takes this desperate situation to a whole new level. Community groups are assisting with food, bus tickets, mobile phone vouchers, medicine, utility bills and emergency accommodation. (If you would like to donate a few dollars in support, head to COFA Circle 110).
Last week I did the ‘drop off’ of food packages to families as part of the program to support refugees and those seeking asylum who have no work due to COVID. You know Libby Hogarth had been involved in this program, coordinated with Catherine Russell. I’d love to hear from you if you’re interested in being available to help in any way with packing or delivery.
And on a really positive note, an Afghan family Libby has been working with were able to board their flights to Australia yesterday. The sponsor (husband and father) is already in Adelaide and has been struggling with the weight of all the stress. He looks forward to welcoming his family including his teenage daughter who is seriously ill and needs medical attention. Pray for this family, on this long flight, and for the joyous reunion that awaits them.
Let us continue to be the kind of community that is known by faithful service, labour of love, and perseverence and steadfastness of hope in Jesus Christ. Amen.

(A sermon at Pilgrim UC by Rev Sandy Boyce, Sunday 18th October 2020)

The President of the Uniting Church in Australia Dr Deidre Palmer has welcomed the Federal Government’s investment in job creation and recovery measures but says the 2020 budget is a missed opportunity to bring about a more equitable and fairer Australia.

Dr Palmer commended the Government’s focus on getting people back into work, particularly young people, but says the budget as a whole neglects those who need the most support to recover from the pandemic.

“As we noted in our Build Back Better statement, COVID-19 has highlighted the stark inequality and disparity in our Australian society,” said Dr Palmer. “Going forward we need a plan that will build resilient communities and a sustainable future, but this budget fails to live up to those hopes.”

The Budget announced last night failed to raise the base rate of JobSeeker, a move which would have provided much needed security to those who are out of work and who do not qualify for the tax cuts at the centre of the Budget.

Unless further changes are announced, those on JobSeeker will return to the pre-COVID-19 rate on 31 December 2020.  

Last week Uniting Church women leaders called on the Government to prioritise measures to support women, but the budget has little support for women struggling right now.

The Government has prioritised incentives for construction and infrastructure, over social care services, sectors which employ high numbers of women and which would generate far more overall economic benefits.

Other missed opportunities include no investment in more affordable housing and no significant funding for renewable energy or climate action. Rather the Government has invested more than $60million in gas projects and infrastructure.

Also, disappointingly, the refugee humanitarian intake has been cut and financial support has dropped for asylum seekers living in Australia.

In a media release issued last night, UnitingCare Australia National Director Claerwen Little warned that despite record spending and investment, millions of Australians are still at risk of deepening disadvantage.

“We are disappointed that the Government has not taken this moment to raise the base rate of JobSeeker and provide confidence and hope for millions of Australians facing poverty and a very bleak Christmas” said Ms Little.

“This budget is also a missed opportunity to invest in social housing and ensure that everyone has shelter in the storm of this recession.” Watch the video of Ms Little address media in Canberra this morning. 

Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress Interim Chairperson Pastor Mark Kickett said despite some measures to support Closing the Gap and specific health measures, overall our First Peoples have been neglected.

UnitingWorld National Director Sureka Goringe welcomed the $4billion for Overseas Development Aid including additional money to assist with COVID-19 recovery in the Pacific but was concerned it fell short of addressing the growing need in the global context of the pandemic.

Frontier Services National Director Jannine Jackson welcomed increased funding for mental health care but warned this may prove insufficient for the combined impacts of COVID-19, bushfires and drought and failed to address the gap in health services for people living in rural and remote areas.

Dr Palmer added: “As we chart a path to recovery at this critical time in our nation’s history, we strongly encourage the Government to prioritise measures that support the well-being of all Australians.”

In responding to the COVID19 pandemic, governments all around the world did things that previously they had resisted doing. Support for people who were no longer in paid employment was doubled. Homeless people were provided hotel accommodation, to protect them and the broader community from the spread of the virus. Child care services were provided without charging families a fee for them.

The COVID-19 crisis still has a while to run yet. Many developing countries will be very vulnerable to the impact of COVID-19 due to their more limited health care systems.

The question we face as a community is, do we need to return to the way things were before the COVID-19 crisis, or can we build back to something better?

On May 15th, the World Council of Churches, the World Communion of Reformed Churches, the Lutheran World Federation and the Council of World Mission issued a joint statement about the world we seek to build as we move to recover from the COVID-19 crisis. They stated:
‘Even as capitalism supplants the impulses to love, care, and share with the urge to compete, the crisis has seen communities all over the world mobilizing deep reserves of compassion, kindness, and generosity, particularly where markets have failed. This underscores the potential of an economy based on care of the most vulnerable, each other and the earth‘.

The church bodies called on all of us to be nurturing communities:
‘Loving, caring, and connectedness are key elements for resilience in the face of Covid-19. Physical distancing has needed to be counterbalanced by familial and social solidarity. As we nurture community, it is possible that new models and values for our economies could flourish rooted not in competition but in care for each other and the earth; that new conceptions of family beyond the restrictions of patriarchy and kinship relations and led by the visions of the most vulnerable would form the foundation of our communities; that borders would fall, racism be dismantled and xenophobia be replaced by radical hospitality’.

They called on churches and church members to play a prophetic role at this time, seeking to transform systems:
‘Covid-19 is overshadowing many with fear, overturning their security and even undermining their faith. In this moment of crisis, we need a liberative theology coupled with a redemptive economy. The human causes and systemic roots of this pandemic point to the exigency of systemic change if we are to be converted by the revelation Covid-19 is offering us, even as, like some latter day Shepherd David, it brings some of those giant systems to their knees. We must build back better, to ensure an Economy of Life that is founded on justice and dignity for all.
This is a prophetic moment. As churches we can see here a path towards the new creation. This struggle could bear the fruit of the earth’s redemption from wanton exploitation. This is eschatological hope rooted not in the end of days, but in the fall of sinful systems. All shall be changed (1 Corinthians 15:51) if the truth is told, the old idolatries of empire and economy cast down, and the care of the Creator reflected in a creation not exploited endlessly but blessed deeply’.

This is a bold and loving vision. We may be sidetracked by the bleak path that screams at us from the media. We may be immobilised by our anger and disbelief at greed and corruption. This gloomy future would involve governments slashing services and reducing taxes, with voices in the media owned and controlled by billionaires already making such calls. Like excluding environmental groups from the Australian budget lock up, where is is expected that details of the Coalition’s plan for job creation will be revealed, including an expansion of gas extraction and fast-tracking of project approvals. Like reducing the top-up payment by $300 to welfare recipients in September, which will leave 2 in 5 people living on less than $14 a day after paying their rent (Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) report). Four in five people living on pandemic-boosted welfare payments will be forced to skip meals if the coronavirus supplement is reduced. Almost half of recipients will also have to ration their medicines. Meanwhile many Executives have pocketed millions from JobKeeper payments. Unbelievable corruption and waste while so many people are in dire situations.

We must resist the bleak vision and put forward the prophetic vision that reflects God’s love for all humanity and for the planet. Let us all play our part.

Richard Rohr offering some simple but urgent guidance. It’s written in the context of the U.S. in the lead up to the November election and the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. It also insight and wisdom more generally for the global community.
(from a post on Center for Action and Contemplation, 19 September 2020)

He writes:
I awoke on Saturday, September 19, with three sources in my mind for guidance: Etty Hillesum (1914 – 1943), the young Jewish woman who suffered much more injustice in the concentration camp than we are suffering now; Psalm 62, which must have been written in a time of a major oppression of the Jewish people; and the Irish Poet, W.B.Yeats (1965 – 1939), who wrote his “Second Coming” during the horrors of the World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic.

These three sources form the core of my invitation. Read each one slowly as your first practice. Let us begin with Etty:

There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too … And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.
—Etty Hillesum, Westerbork transit camp

Note her second-person usage, talking to “You, God” quite directly and personally. There is a Presence with her, even as she is surrounded by so much suffering.

Then, the perennial classic wisdom of the Psalms:

In God alone is my soul at rest.
God is the source of my hope.
In God I find shelter, my rock, and my safety.
Men are but a puff of wind,
Men who think themselves important are a delusion.
Put them on a scale,
They are gone in a puff of wind.
—Psalm 62:5–9

What could it mean to find rest like this in a world such as ours? Every day more and more people are facing the catastrophe of extreme weather. The neurotic news cycle is increasingly driven by a single narcissistic leader whose words and deeds incite hatred, sow discord, and amplify the daily chaos. The pandemic that seems to be returning in waves continues to wreak suffering and disorder with no end in sight, and there is no guarantee of the future in an economy designed to protect the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and those subsisting at the margins of society.

It’s no wonder the mental and emotional health among a large portion of the (U.S.) population is in tangible decline! We have wholesale abandoned any sense of truth, objectivity, science or religion in civil conversation; we now recognize we are living with the catastrophic results of several centuries of what philosophers call nihilism or post-modernism (nothing means anything, there are no universal patterns).

We are without doubt in an apocalyptic time (the Latin word apocalypsis refers to an urgent unveiling of an ultimate state of affairs). Yeats’ oft-quoted poem “The Second Coming” then feels like a direct prophecy. See if you do not agree:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Somehow our occupation and vocation as believers in this sad time must be to first restore the Divine Centre by holding it and fully occupying it ourselves. If contemplation means anything, it means that we can “safeguard that little piece of You, God,” as Etty Hillesum describes it. What other power do we have now? All else is tearing us apart, inside and out (no matter who wins the US election or who is on the Supreme Court). We cannot abide in such a place for any length of time or it will become our prison.

God cannot abide with us in a place of fear.
God cannot abide with us in a place of ill will or hatred.
God cannot abide with us inside a nonstop volley of claim and counterclaim.
God cannot abide with us in an endless flow of online punditry and analysis.
God cannot speak inside of so much angry noise and conscious deceit.
God cannot be found when all sides are so far from “the Falconer.”
God cannot be born except in a womb of Love.
So offer God that womb.

Stand as a sentry at the door of your senses for these coming months, so “the blood-dimmed tide” cannot make its way into your soul.

If you allow it for too long, it will become who you are, and you will no longer have natural access to the “really deep well” that Etty Hillesum returned to so often and that held so much vitality and freedom for her.
If you will allow, I recommend for your spiritual practice that you impose a moratorium on exactly how much news you are subject to for a while – hopefully not more than an hour a day of television, social media, internet news, magazine and newspaper commentary, and/or political discussions. It will only tear you apart and pull you into the dualistic world of opinion and counter-opinion, not Divine Truth, which is always found in a bigger place.

Instead, I suggest that you use this time for some form of public service, volunteerism, mystical reading from the masters, prayer – or, preferably, all of the above.

You have much to gain now and nothing to lose. Nothing at all.
And the world – with you as a stable centre – has nothing to lose.
And everything to gain.

A post by Kate Kennington Steer, originally published on Godspacelight.

I have long been fascinated by and inspired by Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), not least because despite her struggles with persistent ill health, she was a writer, a composer, a scientist, a preacher, a prophetic visionary, and an Abbess of two Benedictine convents; and because, for me, she personifies what I called back in 2016 ‘expressive strength in creative weakness’. Here’s my concluding passage from that post:

It seems to me that it takes a very particular type of strong personality to be able to continue to live a creative, fruitful, flourishing life in the service of God and others; and that such a life-force is only found in those whose strength is based on a recognition of their absolute vulnerability and powerlessness. For Hildegard this life-force came from what she idiosyncratically identified as ‘viriditas’, a ‘greening’ of the spirit that forms the innate connection between God’s goodness in the heart and God’s goodness in the earth; a connection Hildegard personifies as Grace. ‘Greening’ is the epitome of God’s blessing to those God loves… As I struggle to find ways in which I might join every day with the Creator in creating and healing, Hildegard’s expressive, exuberant celebration of the ways in which we may all still be greened continues to echo down the centuries to encourage me this day.

Hildegard’s earthly ambitions were tempered by persistent ill health, and yet, her trusting perception of viriditas beyond the surface of all things, is what helps me, hundreds of years later, see the ‘greening power of God suffusing all life and creation’.

Christine Valters Paintner describes viriditas as the force sustaining life each moment, bringing newness to birth. It is a marvellous image of the divine power continuously at work in the world, juicy and fecund … The prophet Isaiah writes that “the wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing” (Is 35.1-2) This abundant blossoming is the provenance of viriditas. We are called to wander through the desert tending to the abundant gifts of viriditas, the creative life-force of everything alive. Hildegard’s wisdom is for living a life that is fruitful and green and overflowing with verdancy. She calls us to look for fecundity in barren places …(Christine Valters Paintner, Illuminating the Way, 161-2, 164, 170)

In one of her books of visions, the Liber Vitae Meritorum, Hildegard receives a dialogue between two characters: Heavenly Joy and Worldly Sadness. In the opinion of Heavenly Joy, Worldly Sadness is sad because she does not ‘observe the sun and moon and stars and all the decoration of the greenness [viriditas] of the earth and consider how much prosperity God gives man(sic) with these things’. By contrast, of herself Heavenly Joy says: “I possess heaven, since all that God created, and which you call noxious, I observe in its true light. I gently collect the blossoms of roses and lilies and all greenness [viriditas] in my lap since I praise all the works of God, while you attract sorrows to you because you are dolorous in all your works.

Hildegard’s viriditas reminds me to notice the gifts I am given in the ordinary details of my life around me. Viriditas reminds me that the Spirit always waits in readiness to ‘green’ my soul’s barren places and our planet’s damaged earth. There is always hope within viriditas. In the action of the Spirit’s ‘greening’ I am becoming who God longs for me to be. In the light that is itself a gift, I am called to notice and collect together the incidents of greening around about me, like where ‘moss trails over flocked rocks/ inviting me to clamber into depths of evergreen’. The Spirit’s ‘greening’ invites me to open my eyes, to see where the Spirit ‘sets me down’ to find even more green, and though at first I may appear surrounded by ‘lostness’, the ongoing ‘greening’ of my soul promises always to lead me into the heart of God’s calling for me.

Viriditas symbolises the continual flow of emergence and re-emergence of gratefulness in me, which inexorably leads me to pause to praise my Maker the Great Artist, with thanksgiving in my heart, before I move on, powered by viriditas, into the day God lays before me, welcoming whatever it may bring. Today, using Hildegard’s words of praise of the Holy Spirit, I ask that viriditas will bless us this day, and all the days to come.

An extended version of this post can be found at Kate’s blog here.

September is the time to celebrate the Season of Creation, and the 9.30am service is focussing on water, wind, earth and fire. Sunday 13th was ‘wind and breath’ and the Bible reading was 1 Kings 19:11-12.

The narrative takes place at Mt Horeb, ‘the mountain of God’, a place closely associated with the presence of God. It was to this place that the prophet Elijah had retreated, to hide in a cave – tired, depressed, despondent, overwhelmed, alone, uncertain, discouraged. That was then, this is now. We may identify with many of those feelings in 2020, where the dominant dominant narrative is the ongoing pandemic, and the associated experience of scarcity, fear, greed, and violence. In response, many of us will have experienced the emotions of tiredness, depression, despondency, uncertainty, loneliness, and discouragement. When we see the reality of our collective life (the virus, the economic meltdown, the crisis of climate, the loss of confidence in democratic institutions), we no doubt feel overwhelmed and helpless, because the issues are so big, and there is low confidence in the capacity of leaders to address them.

Elijah’s outlook from high up, in the cave, was breathtaking. He could look out over the vast desert, the rough and stony plain devoid of plants, the great mountain walls of red granite, the peaks reaching up into the blue sky, the magnificence of the night sky. The cave to which Elijah retreated was surrounded and protected by granite cliffs. And there was silence. Sheer silence. You may have been in such a place of silence and experienced awe.

The Hebrew Scriptures say that God told Elijah to stand on the mountain, for God was about to pass by. How would Elijah recognise God? Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks, but God was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but God was not in the fire.

God was not in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire. God is Spirit, known in the eye of the storm, where there is silence – even while the storm rages on the outer. God is to be found in the still small voice, in the sound of gentle stillness, in the whisper to Elijah’s soul. God spoke to him, to tell him to go home for there was more God wanted him to do. That is what you do after a tragedy or challenging times. You survive it and go on living, and you look for ways to put your life together again.

How do we recognise the presence of God? How do we make space and time to do so? Many people recognise the presence of God in the beauty of nature. Indeed, during COVID-19, getting out for walks in the parks, at the beach or even smelling the roses on a walk around the block has been life giving, promoting resilience and positivity. Everybody needs beauty, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul. Nature inspires awe, and the measurable impact of awe in nature is resilience, the capacity to face and deal skillfully with the difficulties of life.

Elijah was to learn that God would be revealed not in the extraordinary, but in the ordinary. God is in the quiet, in the gentle influences which are ever around us, without any visible or audible signs of God’s presence. So much in nature that is life-giving happens in silence. And so we seek the gentleness and silence as a means to be present with God. It is the practice of sacramental living.

Ironically, time and silence are two things that many people have had during this COVID19 time of trial and yet the gift of time and silence has for many people been held captive by fear, anxiety and loneliness.

The psalmist says, “For God alone my soul waits in silence.” (Psalm 61:1)  “Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?” (Lawrence Durrell). Where some find only silence, absence and emptiness, others sense the presence of God. Love is found in the eye of the storm.

These lines from Paul are words to remember when storms rage: For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation (fires, storms, earthquakes) will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8.38).

May it be so. Amen.

(adapted from a sermon by Rev Sandy Boyce, 13th September 2020)

A prayer for all those who work in child safety and protection
Christ Jesus,
You welcomed children and brought healing and hope to their lives.
We pray that as your Church, we will create places of welcome, care and safety for all children, reflecting your love and compassion.
God of love and comfort,
We pray for children who have been neglected or abused.
We pray that people will come into their lives who love and nurture them in healing and life-giving ways.
We pray for child safety workers and all those working in child protection. We thank you for their dedication and the gifts they bring to their vocation to protect and improve the lives of children.
We pray that you will sustain their vision, and uphold them in love and grace.
Christ Jesus, as your church, you call us to be a faithful embodiment of your care and love.
We lament when we have failed to be communities of safety and care.
Challenge and correct us in our failure, and reform our life.
We commit ourselves as your Church to being places of safety, free of abuse and exploitation.
We commit ourselves as your Church to be communities, where people can flourish in ways of trust and love.
We pray that your Spirit will empower us to be advocates for a society in which all children can flourish.
Through Christ, Our Light and Life, we pray, Amen.
(Source: 2017, Dr Deidre Palmer, current President, Uniting Church in Australia)

From the SA Synod website:
The gospel for the 6th September is Matthew 18:15-20, beginning with ‘if your brother or sister sins against you’ speak to them when you are alone, and then describes the process if they fail to listen. It ends with promises regarding answered prayer (19) and the promise of the continuing presence of the risen Jesus (20). The passage is part of the five major discourses that are a feature of Matthew’s gospel and this one focuses on the nature of community.
At the beginning of the chapter there is a clear statement about the inclusion of children in the Christian community, which would have been counter-cultural in Jesus’ day. Then in verse six there are the robust warnings about not putting stumbling blocks in the way of these little ones. The parable of the shepherd follows, and in this context it strengthens the importance of pastoral care, especially not causing little ones to be lost.
When we talk about processes for protecting children in our communities, such as screenings, increasing the number of adults in any Sunday School class, increasing the oversight of Church Council over activities and the like, some people murmur about government regulation and compliance. Matthew 18 reminds us that Jesus, from the very beginning of the Church’s life, placed a high priority on protecting the vulnerable in our communities. It is not only about compliance or the fear of being sued, it is a basic gospel value. People thrive when they feel safe. It is even more difficult to become the person God intends you to be when you first need to be healed from abuse and neglect. National Child Protection Week is an opportunity to pause and commit afresh to being communities where vulnerable people feel safe, are protected and are encouraged to become fully alive in response to the generous grace revealed in Jesus.

Music: O God, when trust is shattered
(Tune: PASSION CHORALE 7.6.7.6.D, “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded”)
This 2018 hymn responded to news of abuse by clergy; it was written with input from survivors and counsellors. “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26). Permission is given for its free use with acknowledgement of the author (see below).

O God, when trust is shattered
by wolves among your sheep,
when youth and children suffer,
when those remembering weep,
when victims tell their stories,
when leaders hide abuse,
bring healing, love and mercy!
Bring justice, God of truth!

When leaders side with evil,
when people do their worst,
may we reach out to victims
and put their healing first.
If any member suffers,
we all will suffer, too.
Bring healing, love and mercy!
Bring justice, God of truth!

We pray that the abusers
will learn sin’s awful cost,
and – making no excuses –
will know that they are lost.
Then may they find redemption –
as we all need it, too.
Bring healing, love and mercy!
Bring justice, God of truth!

May all who serve in churches
be careful, watchful, wise.
May we prevent abuses
and hear your children’s cries.
We pray that institutions
will seek your way anew.
Bring healing, love and mercy!
Bring justice, God of truth!

Tune: Hans Leo Hassler, 1601; harmony by Johann Sebastian Bach, 1729
Text: Copyright (c) 2018 by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette. All rights reserved.
Email: bcgillette@comcast.net New Hymns: www.carolynshymns.com

(A sermon presented by Rev Sandy Boyce on 30th August, 2020 at the 11am service at Pilgrim Uniting Church)

Moses was introduced to the reader as a baby, born to Hebrew slaves. According to the biblical account, Moses’ parents were from the tribe of Levi, one of the groups in Egypt called Hebrews. Originally the term Hebrew had nothing to do with race or ethnic origin. It derived from Habiru, and described a class of people who made their living by hiring themselves out for various services. It made sense in the context of the Israelites living in Egypt and needing to secure work. The biblical Hebrews had been in Egypt for many generations, and had become a threat because they were so numerous, so the Pharaoh enslaved them. Then, Pharoah ordered that every male Hebrew child be drowned. Moses’ Hebrew mother placed him in a little makeshift basket in the reeds, where he was found by a royal princess and adopted as her own child. We are told his mother was enlisted by the princess to nurse the infant, so she continued to be in his life. Moses enjoyed all the privileges of growing up in the royal household. So far so good.

But then, when he was 20, he saw a Hebrew slave being beaten by an Egyptian overlord. In anger, he killed the Egyptian official. Fearing retribution from the Pharaoh, Moses fled to Midian, in what today we call Saudi Arabia. He was in exile for the next 50 or so years.

By chance, he encountered some shepherdesses being harrassed by shepherds and rescued them. Their father Jethro invited Moses to stay in Midian with them. No doubt he could recognise the qualities of the well educated man from Egypt. Jethro was a Midianite priest. The Midianites were descendants of Midian, a son of Abraham through his concubine Keturah (Genesis 25:1-21). So, the Midianites weren’t in the chosen line, but they would have had knowledge of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It seems likely that the Midianites worshipped a multitude of gods. Moses ended up staying, and married one of Jethro’s daughters, Zipporah, and settled down for the next 50 years or so to raise a family – in exile, in Midian.

I’m intrigued about the religious influences in his life – his Hebrew mother, the royal Egyptian court where the Pharoah himself was considered a god, as well as the complex system of polytheistic beliefs and rituals framed around the many deities believed to be present in, and in control of, the world. And finally the religious traditions of the Midianites.

Which makes Moses’ encounter with Yahweh in the burning bush remarkable.

In our reading today, Moses should have been ready for retirement, surely. He’s reported to be 80 years old. He’s had a good working life. And that’s where the story might end. Put your feet up and relax. Possibly a round of golf? Well, you know the story of Moses is really just begining at this point. The burning bush, a divine calling, and a long journey. Mischief, murder and mayhem along the way. More of that in the weeks ahead. I encourage you to read the story as it unfolds in Exodus in the Old Testament.

Retirement as we know it today is a new concept. In the past, people kept working, paid or unpaid, until they ran out of puff. Work until you die – or until you can’t work anymore. That was how it worked until the late 19th century when German Chancellor Bismarck introduced modern pensions. He wasn’t really motivated by compassion for the plight of the working class but wanted to pre-empt a growing socialist movement in Germany before it grew any more powerful. Now, retirement seems normal in many countries. Even so, many modern retirees are as busy as they were in earlier life. Some will enjoy 20 or 30 years of life after retirement in which to enjoy good health. But perhaps not all retirees have a sense of meaning that animates their life and gives them a sense of purpose. In his book, From Age-ing to Sage-ing, Rabbi Zalman Schachter- Shalomi suggests that retirement is a time for “harvesting life,” taking time to reflect on ways that God has worked in our lives, celebrating the contributions we have made and acknowledging the wisdom we have gained through life‘s difficulties and losses. It is also a time for the rest of us all to recognize the unique and often undervalued gifts and wisdom our elders are able to offer. As people of faith, perhaps these retirement years might be a time for spiritual growth and renewal?

Deep questions may arise on the journey of ageing: “What is the meaning in this ageing process?” What is of eternal value? How might we discern a fresh way to see who God is and what God is doing? How do we reflect upon the words of Jesus in our Gospel today: set your minds on divine things, not on human things; if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me; those who lose their life for my sake will find it. When we hold these words up like a mirror to our own lives, what do we learn about ourselves, our values, our priorities, our concerns?

Some of you may have heard about the ancient practice of writing ‘ethical wills’. We are all familiar with legal wills by which we make clear our wishes in relation to financial and material matters. In contrast, the ethical will, which can be written at any point in our life, is an opportunity to record the values and beliefs, experiences and life lessons by which we want to be remembered. It is a kind of spiritual legacy to family and friends, and church communities. What is important to you? What do you want to be remembered by? What of your life counts, and has eternal value? Perhaps you might put aside some time to begin this reflection process?

Back to Moses. In his senior years. A man with family responsibilities. Still tending sheep. And then, this encounter with God in the burning bush in the desert – burning but not consumed. “Take off your shoes, Moses; this is holy ground”. Given his diverse religious influences and practices he is right to wonder who has called his name. Who wanted his attention in the middle of desert country?

The speaker is identified as the God of Moses’ father, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This is immediately followed by a call to a very costly call to help the Hebrew people in Egypt – Moses’ own oppressed people, whom, up until that point, he had probably not given a second thought to in all those long years in Midian. The enslaved Hebrew population had to work very long hours daily for minimum wages in order to meet the economic objectives of the Pharaoh. God said, “I have heard the groaning of my people in Egypt. You, Moses, are to go confront Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go” (Exodus 3:9-10). This call from God asks Moses to leave his comfortable and predictable life, and go back to Egypt, to confront the cruel and demanding Pharoah – leader of Egypt, and to demand he let the Israelites go free from slavery. No wonder Moses came up with so many convincing excuses not to go!

Why this man – why not one of the Hebrew people living in Egypt? Because human life was cheap and disposable. Anyone who raised their heads on behalf of the people, for basic human rights, was quickly seen as a threat to be eliminated. Only a few days ago (17th August 2020), a Filipino human rights activist, Zara Alvarez aged 39, was murdered, one of many extra-judicial killings, outside the law but condoned by Government. She was a legal worker and human rights champion with the ecumenical group Church People-Workers Solidarity, working on behalf of landless farmers in the Philippines. Bishop Gerardo Alminaza said, “I bleed of this never-ending injustice and violence, when someone closest in my work with the oppressed is murdered. I just cannot believe this continuing madness of senseless killings! These systemic killings of human rights defenders and activists must be condemned and must stop. I thank the Lord for knowing you, Zara, my dear little child of struggle. I promise to ever continue our work in the service of God’s poor. You inspired me in many ways to be a pastor of the anawim [the poor] of God’s kingdom. Your active involvement in the Church People-Workers Solidarity is worthy of emulation – always reminding us to be prophetic in our work of evangelization and social justice.”

This week, the world remembered the anniversary of the ‘March on Washington’ 1963 and Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech on 28th August 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial. Listen to how it resonates with the experience of poverty and slavery of the ancient Israelities.

I quote: ‘Five score years today, Abraham Lincoln, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition’.

These words resonate still in the #blacklivesmatter movement.

Moses may have been slow to respond to God’s call, but once he does he holds fast to it with conviction until his death. His particular call had social, economic, historical, and political dimensions. The Israelites were oppressed, enslaved. God entered the human arena as the compassionate liberator. Moses was to be the means by which this liberation would be achieved. Moses needed to know for himself the anguish, hardship and suffering of the Hebrew people, and then to play his part in their liberation. Over and over again,the biblical God is revealed to be on the side of the oppressed, not the powerful.

Indeed, the Exodus story continues to inspire and sustain political struggles for liberation all over the world. Oppressed and marginalized people see themselves in the story. They are moved by the compassion of God who hears the agonizing cries of people crushed under the weight of oppression, the God who sees their plight and takes their side, and acts to liberate them from a life of subjugation, dehumanization, and bondage. This is the God who particularizes divine universal love by preferentially opting for the poor and the oppressed. This is the God who stands with the marginalized against the Pharaohs of this world and their life-negating powers.

The pioneer African American theologian James H. Cone maintained that “the liberation of the oppressed is a part of the innermost nature of God. Liberation is …the essence of divine activity” (Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 67).

May we all, young and not so young, find our part to play in God’s reign of justice and liberation – the essence of divine activity. Amen.

Rev Nadia Bolz-Weber is a Lutheran pastor in the U.S. She was recently asked to give a talk on ‘Unprecedented Hope’, and what follows below is a mini-sermon from that talk (originally published here on July 27, 2020) in the context of her personal life journey and the events unfolding in the U.S now. Scroll to the end for the video of Nadia presenting this reflection.

First, a reading from Romans: We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. -Romans 8

1.   Labor Pains. As a woman who herself has groaned in labor pains, I love – like, I adore this passage from Romans. I was in labor for 44 hours with my first child; a relentless freight train of pain that just got progressively more intense.  I’m not sure “groaning” is a primal enough word for the sounds I made. To be honest, I was scared and overwhelmed …but the one thing that kept me from completely going over the edge was to think about, despite how weird it all felt, how abjectly normal birth actually is. I kept repeating to myself “Every woman. Every woman.” If every woman throughout history who has birthed a child has ridden this freight train then I can too. Somehow I had to reach back to my fore-sisters and grasp on to their fortitude, their strength, their resiliency. Had I been the only one to ever experience childbirth I would have given up, sure I couldn’t possible survive it. 

2.   Ordination. I was 39 years old when I knelt in front of the bishop in the stone chancel of a beautiful old church as I made some promises. Images of the saints, made from tiny pieces of stained glass, looked down as I vowed to pray and study the scriptures, to bear the burdens and keep the confidences of those I served. And eventually I was asked to make my favorite ordination vow: I promised to not offer “illusory hope”.
Then the bishop and the other clergy gathered around and laid their hands on me, as clergy had laid hands on them at their ordinations by they who had had the same done to them at their ordinations and so on. Merging us all with those saints robbed in colored light, into something strong enough to allow me to answer “I will, and I ask God to help and guide me”
I think illusory hope in that moment of my ordination would have been to cheerfully claim, based on my own feelings or my own history or my own virtues  that yes, I could keep these promises myself. But realhope came from the strength of all the women who had fought for that moment but never saw one of their own, real hope came from the martyrs and the suffragettes and the really old prayers spoken by generations of the faithful.
Somehow I had to reach back and grasp on to the succession of the apostles who came before me. Had I been the only one to ever experience ordination I would have given up, sure I couldn’t possible fulfil it.

3.    Pregnancy. Ingrid Rassmusen is the pastor at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in South Minneapolis – the church that happens to be directly across the street from the police precinct that was burned down in protest of George Floyd’s murder. The day after it burned Ingrid posted a video (see below) showing us the scene around her church – police in riot gear, smoke rising, helicopters overhead. A few minutes into the video you realize Pastor Ingrid is moving a little slowly because she is 8 months pregnant. Before the video ends she’s in tears, both about her community burnt down around her, but more so about the generational pain and injustice that caused the upheaval – and in a halting voice she reminded us of Harlem the Langston Hughes poem …that what happens to a dream deferred is that it explodes. Her congregation, by the way has been transformed into a massive food bank and community organizing center and is feeding and providing services to their community in profound and needed ways as they rebuild. I think I saw the real thing in that video – like, actual hope. It was a hope of the Christian variety because it was the kind of hope that still stands after being drudged through good Friday first. I’ve thought about her so much recently. Her baby nearly ready to be born as helicopters circled above Minneapolis, Minnesota.

4.   Death. Over 130,000 Americans have died from COVID in the last few months. Maybe one or more of them were people you yourself loved. One of those who passed was Michael Van Myers. Mike served as a minister at my parent’s church of Christ for 47 years including in the mid-eighties when, God bless him, I was in his youth group. That day in the Winter of 2008, when I knelt and promised not to offer people illusory hope, I was ordained as a Lutheran Pastor…. but the church I was raised in doesn’t allow for such things. Women are still not permitted to preach in most of those church, although many have been called. Mike and I still saw each other a few times a year and we shared a deep love and affection for each other. And he would tell me that he was proud of me and my work.  When it was clear that Mike was not going to make it, and was near to death, hundreds of his friends and parishioners gathered in the parking lot circling the hospital, socially distanced and in masks and they sang hymns while he passed from this life to the next. The human eye could not see it, but my friend Mike was already pulled way too deeply into the arms of his loving savior to bother with hope in the form of wishful thinking. When he passed, surrounded by the hymns of his church, Mike reached forward to the great cloud of witnesses in which he now resides.

5.    Unprecedented Hope. So… all of that is to say, I realized this week that my struggle with knowing what to say about unprecedented hope was not about the hope part after all – it was about the unprecedented part. Because for it to be a hope on which I can truly rely, it has to be a hope for which there is indeed a precedent. It has to be a hope that has been worn smooth by the tears and prayers and struggle of our ancestors in faith, through Sarah’s laughter, and Hagar’s steps and Mary’s labor. For it to be a hope in which I can trust, it can’t be unprecedented. It must be already established in those who came before me. By Martin Luther and Fannie Lou Hamer and Marsha P Johnson. Those who have come before us have already lived through pandemics and social upheaval and loss and grief and death and labor pains. Which means we are never alone in our struggles. That has never mattered more to me than it does now. 

By the way, a few days ago Pastor Ingrid Rasmussen had her baby. Due to COVID, she had to do it without her husband present, but she said that she felt surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses. They named him Lars. He was born on the 50th anniversary of women’s ordination in the Lutheran church (U.S.). 

So, I guess I just want to say that no matter what our lives look like in this moment, that something stronger, deeper and more beautiful is moving around us, sweeping us and all those who came before us, and all who will follow, up into God’s really big story. 

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. From our first breath to our last and beyond. Amen.

(Nadia has podcasts under the name of Confessionals. She is the author of three New York Times bestsellers – Shameless, Accidental Saints: Finding God in all the wrong people, and Pastrix).

Our pandemic slowdown has been good for the planet

What if we kept it going?

by O’neil Van Horn

As COVID-19 sweeps disastrously through the United States and elsewhere, some communities have taken action in a way that just a few months ago might have seemed unimaginable: slowing down, doing less. In order to flatten the curve, people with the privilege to do so have stayed home from work, school, and events. They have slowed down, compelled to find new rhythms and different patterns for life.

This has all happened at the very same time that our planetary home is, in Greta Thunberg’s words, on fire.

Anthropogenic—or human-caused—climate change is the result of an economic model that suggests that limitless growth is possible despite the very real ecological limits our planet presents. This perspective encourages accelerating, streamlining, and generally increasing production—all for the sake of profit, and with little concern for the earth.

A globalized economic system means that the ground beneath my feet no longer needs to provide for my needs. I don’t need to grow my food, assuming I even have the space to do so, because that’s already being done elsewhere. It matters not if this ground has been contaminated or rendered infertile by lead poisoning, coal ash pollution, or nuclear radiation, because elsewhere the land is still productive and the environment is pure.

There is a double fallacy here: the delusion that the land here need not be cared for because land will be cared for elsewhere and the misconception that the environment is somehow separate from the human, rather than that with which we are suffused and intimately entangled.

Global capitalism can only function through exploitation, leaving no room for nurture, for care. This is because this system is undergirded by a shared logic, rendering both people and the planet into commodities to be consumed in the forms of labor and natural resources.

Some have suggested that humans themselves are the problem. In fact elitism and exploitation constitute the cause. The wealthiest few are the most responsible. Neither climate change nor the current pandemic happened by chance. Both are the result of denial, of a refusal to believe scientists, of a prioritization of wealth for a few as opposed to wellness for many. And in both cases, the people least responsible—poor folks, communities of color, the unhoused, the incarcerated—bear the brunt of the burden.

This doesn’t mean that you and I are off the hook. It means that we’re tasked with using whatever agency we possess to imagine and cocreate communal structures of radical equity, relentless compassion, and just accountability. If we want the planet to thrive as it once did, different rhythms and patterns are necessary. Some of these rhythms and patterns will need to be both remembered and created. These ways of life will likely need to be slower than the ones we are used to living—at least for those of us in the industrialized Global North.

This pandemic is not a blessing in disguise; it’s a tragedy. Still, I wonder what this moment, which has disturbed our habits and undermined our routines, might have to teach us. What might we learn from this slowing down?

In my work as an educator seeking to combat climate injustice, I’ve encountered all sorts of obstacles. One of the major ones is this: sustainable modes of living, for those with the privilege and resources to enact them, are often not pleasurable.

This raises two important questions: Who has access to these resources? And, for those who do have access, why isn’t sustainable living, in its most common forms, pleasurable? As queer ecologist Catriona Sandilands puts it, “it is not only that abundant pleasure is virtually absent in (most) ecological discourse, but that it is often understood as downright opposed to ecological principles.”

“The problem with this sort of ethical appeal,” adds feminist philosopher Stacy Alaimo, “is that it is hardly appealing.”

Making these changes is hardly appealing because it demands much time and effort—and because it requires us not only to rid ourselves of old pleasures but also to labor to find new ones. For those with access to resources, the quickness of a flight to some alluring destination is, on the surface, far more pleasurable than the slowness of staying close to home. But with this quickness comes great harm: vast emissions, sickening waste, clamorous noise. Slowing down helps us see the injustice that had yet remained unseen.

Many of our ordinary ways of finding pleasure in life have not been available lately. Parks have been closed, concerts canceled, theaters shuttered, friends quarantined. And none of these losses of pleasure even begins to convey the grief and trauma that accompany illness and death. To maintain social distance forces different cadences of life and novel opportunities to endeavor to find pleasure. Indeed, this moment affords—if not imposes—a contemplative pause to re­consider the networks of capitalistic consumption in which we find ourselves and from which we have derived pleasure.

It may yet be the case, paradoxically, that seeking justice in and for this world can be realized as we do less, as we slow down—as we not only refrain from but reject the cycles of consumption so often tied to our quick and ever-quickening lives. Indeed, this crisis may carve space for critical reflection on what had yet gone unnoticed in our lives. Slowing down presents new opportunities to seek pleasure in smaller, simpler ways: mending, baking, writing, storytelling, creating, listening.

Slowing down augments our ca­pacity to notice new ways of living, new connections yet to be made, yet to be regenerated. To notice is to be curious, to abide, to become attentive to, to demonstrate compassion toward. Cultural theorist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing offers the phrase “arts of noticing” to describe this careful process of tending to the precarious, of cultivating life amid the rubble of an uncertain world. Finding new pleasures is predicated on a capacity to notice—the quiet, the slow, the still, the unheard, the silenced. As Tsing writes, “only an appreciation of current precarity as an earthwide condition allows us to notice this—the situation of our world.”

To attend to the precarious, to the vulnerable, carries with it a spiritual depth that resonates deeply with the Christian tradition. What good would the Israelites’ cries have been had the Divine not heard, not noticed? What if Elijah had not listened for that voice that met him at the entrance of the cave? Could the good Samaritan have been good without first noticing a man in anguish alongside the road? Could the faithful woman who reached out for Jesus’ cloak have been healed had he not noticed her touch?

To notice is the first step toward embodying compassion, toward enacting justice. One cannot care for what one has yet to notice; to love is not to trample over but to notice and to tend.

We may yet emerge from our social distance, however soon or late, with reshaped perspectives on meaningful modes of living, on models for justice-seeking community. What might we learn from the strange ways in which slowness may be a resolution to the fast-moving nature of both COVID-19 and the climate crisis? The fullness of these lessons is still unknown, still to come.

But we might begin by noticing: noticing the ways in which our lives intersect with and participate in systems of injustice, noticing the ways in which our communities are caught up in structures that disempower and harm, noticing opportunities to divest from and dismantle these structures. It is our responsibility to craft communal structures that better notice and account for those who’ve slipped through the cracks, who’ve been forced to the margins. And it is our responsibility to do so not as saviors but as coconspirators with those who have been cast aside, those whose cries of “I can’t breathe” echo in the streets.

And to notice requires that we slow down whenever possible. Perhaps this slowing down might just be what’s needed in this moment to create a bit of shalom in our midst.

O’neil Van Horn is a PhD candidate in theological and philosophical studies in religion at Drew University. 

This article was posted on 5 august 2020 at — https://www.christiancentury.org/article/opinion/our-pandemic-slowdown-has-been-good-planet

A version of this article appears in the print edition of ‘The Christian Century’ under the title “Global slowdown.”

First published on Richard Rohr’s daily reflections on 26 July 2020

Before you speak of peace, you must first have it in your heart. (Francis of Assisi)

Generations of Christians seem to have forgotten Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence. We’ve relegated visions of a peaceful kingdom to a far distant heaven. We hardly believed Jesus could have meant for us to turn the other cheek here and now. It took Gandhi, a Hindu, to help us apply Jesus’ peace-making in very practical ways. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), drawing from Gandhi’s writings and example, brought nonviolence to the forefront of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

The nonviolence of Gandhi, like that of the civil rights activists, affirmed a unity of peaceful ends and means. Thomas Merton, reflecting on Gandhi’s nonviolence, wrote:
Non-violence was not simply a political tactic which was supremely useful and efficacious in liberating his people from foreign rule . . . the spirit of non-violence sprang from an inner realization of spiritual unity in himself. The whole Gandhian concept of non-violent action . . . is incomprehensible if it is thought to be a means of achieving unity rather than as the fruit of inner unity already achieved. [1]

Training in nonviolence helps us admit that our secret inner attitudes are often cruel, attacking, judgmental, and harsh. The ego seems to find its energy precisely by having something to oppose, fix, or change. When the mind can judge something to be inferior, we feel superior. We must recognize our constant tendency toward negating reality, resisting it, opposing it, and attacking it on the level of our mind. This is the universal addiction.

Authentic spirituality is always first about you – about allowing your own heart and mind to be changed. It’s about getting your own who right. Who is it that is doing the perceiving? Is it your illusory, separate, false self; or is it your True Self, who you are in God?

If you can settle your body, you are more likely to be calm, alert, and fully present, no matter what is going on around you. . . .  A calm, settled body is the foundation for health, for healing, for helping others, and for changing the world. (Resmaa Menakem)

As Thomas Keating said:
We’re all like localized vibrations of the infinite goodness of God’s presence. So love is our very nature. Love is our first, middle, and last name. Love is all; not [love as] sentimentality, but love that is self-forgetful and free of self-interest.

This is also marvellously exemplified in Gandhi’s life and work. He never tried to win anything. He just tried to show love; that’s what ahimsa [the Hindu principle of nonviolence out of respect for all living things] really means. It’s not just a negative. Nonviolence doesn’t capture its meaning. It means to show love tirelessly, no matter what happens. That’s the meaning of turning the other cheek [Matthew 5:39]. Once in a while you have to defend somebody, but it means you’re always willing to suffer first for the cause—that is to say, for communion with your enemies. If you overcome your enemies [through force and violence], you’ve failed. If you make your enemies your partners, God has succeeded. [2]

References:
[1] Thomas Merton, “Gandhi and the One-Eyed Giant,” introduction to Gandhi on Non-violence: Selected Texts from Mohandas K. Gandhi’s Non-violence in Peace and War (New Directions: ©1964, 1965), 6.
[2] Thomas Keating, Healing Our Violence through the Journey of Centering Prayer, disc 5 (Franciscan Media: 2002), CD.
Adapted from Richard Rohr: Essential Teachings on Love, ed. Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Orbis Books: 2018), 125-126.
Epigraph: Paraphrase of Francis’ words to the first friars, “The Legend of the Three Companions,” chapter 14. See Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 2 (New City Press: 2000), 102.

On Tuesday 4th of August 2020 an explosion shook Beirut and all of Lebanon. The tremor of the explosion was felt in Cyprus, some 240Km away. Everything within a 10 Km radius was damaged, houses, buildings, shops, cars, etc. The explosion was a chemical one and what followed was a toxic pollution of the air. Churches, mosques, schools, hospitals in addition to homes and shops in the area were all destroyed. The affected area is home to almost 1 million people, in one of the denser population areas in Lebanon. Over 135 people have been killed and over 5,000 people injured. This is not counting the people who have not yet been found.
Up to one in four people living in Lebanon are refugees; people from Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Sudan and many other places. In the hours after the massive explosion, Palestinian and Syrian refugees living in and on the outskirts of Beirut leapt into action, offering their homes and their blood to those in need.

Beirut tragedy August 2020
Holy One of mercy and peace,
as you walked across the stormy sea
so long ago, walk in the rubble
of your great city Beirut.
Hold tenderly all who mourn today
loved ones who have died
and those who are waiting
for identifications,
and for those who are missing
to be found.
Be among those who care
for the wounded,
and those who try to cope
with this catastrophe
in the midst of the struggle
ongoing with covid-19.
In the chaos of broken buildings
and the aftermath
of the terrible rain of glass,
give moments of hope,
the welcome kindness of neighbors
and the generosity of the world.
To the re-construction
of the city itself, bring courage
and to the equally long
reconstruction
of the confidence of people
so de-stabilized, bring peace,
for we pray,
in all your holy names. Amen.
(Source: Maren Tirabassi, Gifts in Open Hands)

Prayer for Beirut

God of darkness and light,
Beirut waits in darkness longing for your light.
In the centre of darkness, rekindle hope.
As we pray for families to be reunited,
Let your Spirit be with us.
As we pray for the injured to be healed,
Let your Spirit be with us.
As we pray for those who have lost loved ones,
Let your Spirit be with us.
As we pray for homes to be rebuilt,
Let your Spirit be with us.
God of creation,
You create the Cedars of Lebanon and give them their majesty to withstand all tribulations for your own pleasure. You exalt them to represent eternity, strength, and endurance. Yet we have cut them down and destroyed them for our own personal pleasures. As we remember the Cedars of Lebanon, we also remember the people of Lebanon in their diversity of cultures and faith.
We pray for your healing where there is injury,
We pray for your comfort where there is death,
We pray for your hope where there is despair,
We pray for your light where there is darkness,
We pray for your joy where there is sadness and
We pray for your love where this hatred.
God of Love,
Welcome into your arms the victims of the explosion in Beirut:
Those who have lost their homes, those who have been injured and those who have lost loved ones.
Comfort their families and all who grieve for them.
God of explosions and pollution,
Out of the depths we call to you; in the face of incomprehensible anguish and sorrow, we lift the cries of our distress and implore you to show mercy upon those who are suffering from the destruction of the explosion in Beirut and the ensuing chemical pollution. Give protection and wisdom to emergency service personnel, doctors, nurses, hospitals, and all those who assist in elevating the pain and suffering of those affected. Encourage our generosity to those who suffer loss. In your mercy restore your creation and heal our land.
We pray for those who have been injured in body, mind or spirit and ask you to heal them;
We pray
for those who are left homeless and wandering,
for those who breath the toxic air,
for those who are devastated,
and for families torn asunder and ask you to shelter them,
Strengthen the hands and hearts of those who assist in relief efforts
Grant us all firm resolve to stand with our neighbours who are in need, to love them and to offer our generous support of them in this their time of trouble.
So, guide and bless your people,
that we may enjoy the fruits of the earth
and give you thanks with grateful hearts,
Father, we pray that you will bless us
with the gift of strength when endurance is needed,
for imagination and initiative when action is called for,
for wisdom in times of confusion,
for compassion for those who suffer,
for faith in Christ’s saving action,
for hope when the situation seems desperate
and for charity in all things. Amen.
(Source: Levon Kardashian, Theoblogy)

Lord, you are always with us,
Our shelter in the midst of every tragedy.
In the quiet and the storm you surround us,
Your love stays closer than a friend.
In this time of devastations and disaster be with all who are vulnerable.
Hold them close as they grieve for loved ones lost and fear for those still buried.
Place your arms around each family in their shock and grief.
Guide those that respond and keep them safe.
Be with rescuers and firemen and emergency crews,
Be with medical workers,
Be with all who reach out to neighbours with your love and compassion.
Comfort and protect them in the midst of danger and of strife.
Provide food, and shelter and care for all who have been displaced.
God of all life, you are always close to the brokenhearted,
May all find comfort in the embrace of your wings.
(Source: Christine Sine, GodspaceLight)

A prayer for Beirut 
Merciful and compassionate God,
our hearts break and our prayers rise up
for the people of Beirut and all of Lebanon.
Give comfort, peace, strength, and hope
to all who mourn the dead
and draw near to all those suffering injuries
with healing and hope, skilled care and comforting presence.
Give guidance to public officials,
perseverance to first responders and healthcare personnel,
and compassionate community support among neighbors.
Raise up help and support from global partners
to meet the needs now and in the months to come.
Keep safe all who work in the ruins and destruction.
Uphold reporters and all who tell the stories
in the days and weeks to come
with the patience and care they need for listening,
the curiosity and empathy for perceiving,
and the knowledge and wisdom to ask questions
that reveal the truth that needs to be told.
Hold this place and all its people
in your great and abundant compassion and mercy.
Open our eyes and the eyes of the world
to see your hidden presence revealed
in the rubble of buildings and lives shattered by destruction and death. Hear the cries of the suffering and the laments of the distraught.
Hear us as we pray, Lord in your mercy.
(Source: Robert Franek)

Prayer for the people of Beirut
Light of new hope, God of refuge,
hear our prayer
as we hold the people of Beirut
in our hearts at this time.
Fill us with compassion
and move us to reach out in love.
In your mercy,
bring comfort to those who mourn,
healing to those who are injured,
shelter to those who are homeless
sustenance to those who hunger.
Give strength to those who are working
to rebuild shattered lives,
and protect those who are vulnerable
especially in a time of coronavirus.
Lead us in your ways
so that together we may bring
the light of new hope
wherever there is destruction and despair.
We ask this through Christ our Lord, Amen.
(Source: Regional Council of Churches, Atlanta)

Geoff Boyce, Pilgrim’s Chaplain at Large, is our guest contributor to Messages of Hope. I wonder what you think Pilgrim is known for, what its reputation is among other churches, and within the wider community? And what is the word or phrase that first comes to mind if I were to say the words, ‘Pilgrim Uniting Church’, to you?

During my time as Chaplain at Flinders University I quickly found out about attitudes to the chaplain, and to the Churches, and religion in general. The vast majority were politely disinterested or suspicious. A few were antagonistic – ‘there is no place for religion in a secular university – we didn’t invite you – we don’t need you’.

Of course, the Christian turf wars, the cultural battle for students’ hearts and minds, did not help – particularly between religious conservatives and the more open, and theologically progressive. But the other 99% of the university couldn’t have cared less! Histories of complicity of the churches in colonial violence and genocides, rumours, then current, of corruption and sexual abuse perpetrated by trusted church leaders, and the unexamined hubris and sense of entitlement by some church leaders, made the pastoral role of the chaplain within the university well-nigh impossible.

All that began to change as the university began to internationalise in the late 90’s. Money from overseas students gave the university a financial source to prop up its research sector as successive governments slashed university funding. A senior manager commented to me, ‘Meeting the needs of local students is easy – beer and sports. But overseas students bring their faith with them’. Suddenly we were needed!

I discovered that without embracing the outsider – whatever religion, creed, colour or race – we slowly die. We die in comfort, yes, but not in joy. We are trapped in our own bubble.

This pandemic period of radical disruption from routine gives us an opportunity to re-assess along with the rest of the community. For us – what does Pilgrim stand for? And how free do we feel to say to anyone in the public sphere – ‘I’m a member of Pilgrim Church’ and expect a warm response? And if a barrier, how far out do we go to build the trust needed for the outsider to see that their barrier from potential abuse is not needed?

‘The World Service’ may not be your cup of tea. Equally, other Pilgrim services may not be theirs! It is an attempt to reach out to the on-line majority to provide spiritual support and encouragement, to expose the Jesus values that lead to wellness and life, and to give witness to expressions of God’s activity in the world – without the cues that enliven the barriers I have mentioned, particularly religious forms, language and dogma. Rather, creating a hospitable space, ‘empty signifiers’ that prompt the viewer to make their own meaning and create their own life-giving rituals. And then for me to be regularly available for conversation by Zoom to make more personal connections.

It may turn out to be yet another Pilgrim service with its own congregation.

Check out an episode at geoffboyce.com and let me know what you think.

Geoff Boyce
Pilgrim Chaplain at Large

How Love Shows Us the Way During Difficult Times

Bishop Michael Curry asks “what would love do” in a world upended by racial protests and the coronavirus.

Today, like Peter and the disciples, we must discern a new normal. The continued rise in cases of COVID-19 and the raising of voices in the streets following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery have left us disoriented, uncertain, and confused, afraid of what we know and anxious about what we do not know. Our old normal has been upended, and we hunger for its return.

I do not say this from a lofty perch. I get it. There is a big part of me that wants to go back to January 2020 when I had never heard of COVID-19, and when I only thought of “Contagion” as a movie. Looking back through what I know are glasses darkened by loss, I find myself remembering January 2020 as a “golden age.”

But of course, January 2020 wasn’t perfect, not even close. And anyway, I can’t go back. None of us can go back. We must move forward. But we don’t know for sure what the new normal will be. Fortunately, God’s rubric of love shows us the way.

We’ve all been trying, making mistakes, learning, regrouping, trying anew. I’ve seen it. I’ve quietly read Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Compline online with you. I’ve seen soup kitchens, pantries, and other feeding ministries carefully doing their work in safe and healthy ways. There are Zoom coffee hours, Bible studies, and small discipleship groups. I’ve seen people of many faiths stand for the moral primacy of love. I’ve seen it, even when public health concerns supersede all other considerations, including in-person worship. That is moral courage. Who knows, but that love may demand more of us. But fear not, just remember what the old slaves used to say, walk together, children, and don’t you get weary, because there is a great camp meeting in the Promised Land. Oh, I’ve seen us do what we never thought we would or could do, because we dared to do what Jesus tells us all to do.

As our seasons of life in the COVID-19 world continue to turn, we are called to continue to be creative, to risk, to love. We are called to ask, What would unselfish, sacrificial love do?

What would love do? Love is the community praying together, in ways old and new. Love finds a path in this new normal to build church communities around being in relationship with God. Love supports Christians in spiritual practices. Prayer, meditation, study. Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, Rest.

What would love do? Love calls us to care for our neighbors, for our enemies. Love calls us to attend to those in prison, to those who are homeless, to those in poverty, to children, to immigrants and refugees. Love calls us to be in relationship with those with whom we disagree.

What would love do? Love calls us to be gentle with ourselves, to forgive our own mistakes, to take seriously the Sabbath. Love calls us to be in love with God, to cultivate a loving relationship with God, to spend time with God, to be still and know that God is God.

A few weeks ago when so many things were happening, both in our country and in our wider world, I was on a Zoom call with a member of our staff working on videos and interviews and it was so much and so chaotic, I remember just saying, “Let’s just stop, and pray.”

And the prayer I prayed was a prayer from The Book of Common Prayer. It’s toward the end of the prayer book on page 832 called “For Quiet Confidence.” This prayer is based on a time in the life of the prophet Isaiah, when the people of Judah and Jerusalem were living in a time when their country was in turmoil and things were uncertain and chaos seemed to be ruling.

The prophet Isaiah said, “You must remember that it is in returning and rest, that you will be saved; in quietness and confidence, you will find your strength.”

And this is the prayer we prayed and I offer it for all of us. Let us pray:

Oh, God of peace, who has taught us that in returning and in rest, we shall be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength. By the might of thy Spirit, lift us, we pray thee to thy presence, where we may be still and know that thou art God, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

God love you and keep the faith.

The Most Rev. Michael B. Curry is Presiding Bishop and Primate of The Episcopal Church. He is the Chief Pastor and serves as President and Chief Executive Officer, and as Chair of the Executive Council of The Episcopal Church.

This online column has been shared with Church Anew with permission by the Office of the Right Reverend Michael B. Curry, The Episcopal Church, in its entirety as it appeared on Today.com July 15, 2020.

1985-2020: Celebrating 35 Years of Cultural Diversity
The Uniting Church rejoices in diversity of races, cultures and languages as God’s gracious gift to the human family. In 1985, the Uniting Church Assembly made the declaration “We are a multicultural church.” We continue on our journey to fully realise what it means to be a multicultural church, living faith and life cross-culturally.
We do this by:
* building relationships that are based on mutual respect, collaboration and recognition of the gifts and calling of peoples of diverse cultural and language backgrounds
* assisting the Church to fully utilise the gifts and calling of members from culturally diverse backgrounds
* continuing to develop respectful and reconciling relationships with First peoples across the life of the church
* developing culturally sensitive and appropriate policies that respond to the needs of UCA members
* fostering models of cross-cultural ministry and mission, outreach and evangelism that reflect the hospitality of God

The President of the Uniting Church in Australia, Dr Deidre Palmer, has prepared the following statement for the One Great Sunday of Sharing, which celebrates the 1985 statement that the Uniting Church is a multicultural church (the accompanying video can be viewed at the top of this post).
“From the traditional custodians of this land, the First Peoples, to the many who have come from countries around the world, Australia is rich in culturally and linguistically diverse peoples, and fortunate to benefit from the richness of the many cultures that make up our nation. The Uniting Church rejoices in the diversity of races, cultures and languages as God’s gracious gift and seeks to be a truly multicultural church living its faith and life cross culturally’ and interculturally.
This year marks 35 years since the 4th National Assembly declared ‘the Uniting Church in Australia is a multicultural Church.”
It is a Pentecost vision that people hear and share the good news of Christ in their own language and cultural context, as the Holy Spirit weaves us together as God’s beloved community.
Today we worship in 49 languages other than English. We have more than 201 groups, who worship in a language other than English and we have 13 National Conferences which support congregations and communities from across our cultural diversities. This One Great Sunday of Sharing held on the third Sunday in July, gives an opportunity for Uniting Church congregations, faith communities and fellowship Groups to celebrate that our present, and our future as the Uniting Church, is Christ-centred, Spirit led, intercultural and intergenerational in its leadership, ministry and expression of faith.
It has been a joy for me as President to share with Uniting Church communities across our country in different languages in a diversity of cultural contexts. It has been so encouraging to participate in National Conference gatherings, where we have celebrated in worship, in singing and dancing, our praise to God and our joy at being one in Christ. We have encouraged one another in God’s mission of love, justice and reconciliation.
We live with a common identity in Christ – followers of Jesus, infinitely loved by God, gifted with God’s grace. We honour the cultural contexts in which that common identity in Christ is nurtured. We are committed to being who God calls us to be – a “Church for all God’s People”
In this time of global crisis, where we are witnessing tragic losses of life and devastation of communities and health and economic systems, we need more than ever, to remember who we are called to be as Christ’s Church – a loving, inclusive, multicultural community.
In this time, where the sin of racism continues to undermine our common life, creates fear and threatens the safety and wellbeing of individuals and whole communities of diverse cultures, races and religions, we need to stand in solidarity affirming our call to live out the way of Christ, who breaks down all the barriers that would separate us, and speaks the good news of God’s inclusive welcome and love for all cultures and races.

Pilgrim Uniting Church has also prepared a video for the One Great Sunday of Sharing, with contributions from some of the many cultures represented by people in the UCA. Some of the video will be shown in the 9.30am service on Sunday 19th July.

The Sower and the Seed and Black Lives Matter

by Dr Raj Nadella

The Sower and the Seed (Matthew 13) is a familiar parable that is most often interpreted with a focus on the sower (he is too generous and even profligate in sowing everywhere) or on the soil (some soil is more receptive to the word than other). The parable highlights the disparate locations where seeds fall and juxtaposes the final fate of various seeds. While most seeds perished because they fell along the roadside, on rocky places, or among thorns, a few that fell on good soil flourished.

Parables by nature have many different meanings and occasionally call for readings different even from allegories that accompany them. A key aspect of this parable is the arbitrary manner in which the sower scatters seeds resulting in their contrasting fates. Where they fall and each environment—birds, scorching sun, and choking thorns—determine whether they perish or flourish. Seeds that fall on the path, or on the rocks, or among thorns have the odds stacked against them from the outset. None of the seeds in the parable have much, if any, agency. No doubt people should be good seeds, but can we really attribute failures or successes to seeds themselves if they have little agency in their destiny?

The parable takes on a new meaning when read in the context of growing economic disparities and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Many individuals and communities cannot grow, pursue their dreams, or realize their full potential as humans because they are excluded from systems (fall by the wayside), lack access to sufficient resources (fall on rocky soil) or are stifled by oppressive structures (choked by thorns). It sheds light on the role social determinants such as race, rather than hard work, ethos, and commitment, play in one’s flourishing or perishing.

In Matthew 13:7, Jesus describes seeds that were choked by thorns. The Greek word for choking—πνίγω—refers to strangling, throttling and suffocating. When read in the context of Black Lives Matter movement and the brutal killing of many African Americans like George Floyd by chokehold, it brings to memory a disturbing phrase we have been hearing too often—”I can’t breathe.” The fate of seeds that were choked by thorns parallels the plight of individuals whose lives and aspirations are crushed by thorns in the form of police brutality and dehumanizing economic structures.

But the parable in Matthew also highlights seed that fell on good soil and produced a crop—a hundred, sixty, or thirty times. Read in current political and economic contexts, it exposes the American Dream that enables some to flourish on account of their social location but turns into a nightmare for others as they are pushed to the margins and suffocated. In some cases, the few thrive precisely by pushing others to the margins, scorching them and strangling them—figuratively and literally. Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel, The Parable of the Sower, set in a context of climate catastrophe, growing economic disparities and police brutality in 2020 aptly captures some of these disturbing social realities.

In a culture that celebrates seeds that fall on good soil and calls them blessed but blames less fortunate individuals for their own economic and political misfortune, it is hard to expose the extent by which social determinants impact one’s success or failure. It is even harder to reduce their ability to choke individuals and remove impediments to growth of the marginalized.

But that is precisely what lies at the center of Jesus’ mission in the Gospel of Matthew.

Within the literary context of this parable (Matthew 12), Jesus heals many and empowers them to realize their full potential. Prominent among them is a man with a withered hand that Jesus restores to its fullness. The Greek word for withered hand—ξηράν—is semantically connected to the Greek word for withered seeds in the parable. Such a close link illuminates the plight of the seeds that are cast on rocky soil and scorched by the sun when they attempt to grow.

The blessed in Matthew are not those who are fortunate enough to fall on good soil, benefit from favorable structures, and flourish. In the Beatitudes (5:3-11), Jesus proclaims blessed are the ones who mourn, the meek, the marginalized, and the persecuted.

The blessed in Matthew are precisely those who fall by the wayside, on rocky soil, and are grasping for life.

In most Beatitudes, the agency in the second half is in the passive voice (they will be comforted, they will be fed, they will be shown mercy, etc). The passive voice leaves the agency open-ended and calls for human agency—the church and community—in addition to divine agency.

Accordingly, it is the church’s job to advocate for the interests of those who are scattered by the wayside and move them to fertile soil. The community has an obligation to safeguard the interests of the seed that fall on rocky soil and are scorched by the oppressive sun. The Church is invited to participate in and with the Spirit as it breathes over the breathless and challenges imperial forces that seek to choke individuals and entire communities.

Blessed are those who are cast by the wayside for they will no longer be excluded by structures.
Blessed are those who fall on rocky soil for they will be moved to good soil.
Blessed are those who fall among thorns for the Spirit, the ultimate breath, will let not thorns throttle them.

Raj Nadella is the Samuel A. Cartledge Associate Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary.

This article was posted on 7 July 2020:
https://churchanew.org/blog/posts/raj-nadella-the-sower-and-the-seed-and-black-lives-matter

To everything, there is a season (Ecclesiastes 3)

The pulling down, removal and defacing of statues around the world has had mixed reactions – some applauding the eradication of statues of slave traders, some saying the statues need to be retained to remember our history. Toppling statues marks a break with the past, but makes it more difficult to learn from it, and to see how that past still shapes the present.

In 2017, when the statues of Governor Macquarie, Captain Cook and Queen Victoria were defaced, Bill Shorten suggested that additional plaques be made to indicate that contemporary thinking may have moved on. Indigenous Affairs Minister Ken Wyatt says, “Statues can remind us of things that were offensive. That’s a good thing. He also suggests some of the statues may be more valuable if an additional plaque is added to explain and honour a different perspective. That’s also a very good idea”. (Amanda Vanstone)

Similarly, Condoleezza Rice, former US Secretary of State and the first black woman to hold the position, has commented: ‘Don’t sanitize history by taking down monuments. I am a firm believer in ‘keeping your history before you’ and so I don’t actually want to rename things that were named for slave owners. I want us to have to look at those names and recognize what they did and to be able to tell our kids what they did and for them to have a sense of their own history. When you start wiping out your history, sanitizing your history to make you feel better it’s a bad thing”.

“Erasing the past, however painful it may be to remember it, is a mistake. Imagine if the German government sought to have all the concentration camps from World War II levelled to the ground. Wisely, they spend millions of dollars maintaining a visible reminder of a terrible past. It is right to say we should never forget the Holocaust. We need to be reminded just how terrible things can happen. We might be able to stop a repeat event. But how can we tell people to never forget something if we never told them of it in the first place?” (Amanda Vanstone)

Lea Ypi writes: Focusing only on whether statues should stay or go obscures how unjust histories are still borne by current structures. The struggle is broader than toppling offensive monuments and removing problematic traces of the past. If we scratch the surface, we may discover that since capitalism has historically relied on colonial structures to survive, it may be difficult to demand the end of one without demanding the end of the other.

Julia Baird’s article is worth reading. She writes: One of the more perplexing arguments made in recent days is that toppling, relocating or removing old statues amounts to the erasure of history. It is in fact the very opposite: it is history. To seek a fuller understanding of the past is not wrecking, but restoring, salvaging and deepening history. History is not just a set of facts but a series of questions, a mode of inquiry that seeks to comprehend and put flesh on dates, events and places, to understand and include all possible perspectives, all while knowing that, until about 50 years ago, history was almost solely written by white men, about white men. This history was comprised of flawed, incomplete and often deceptive stories that not only excluded vital records, but were frequently used for propaganda purposes, and the buffering of myths like: all war is good, mighty and noble, if somewhat sad; the expansion of empire was jolly impressive; all important people sat in parliament or courts; and women and non-white people have not done particularly much of note for millennia. What has happened to statues – rolled into harbours, set aflame on their plinths, defaced with graffiti, hung with signs – is merely the visible form of what historians have been quietly doing to the myths of the past for decades – documenting a more complete account. The time for a public reckoning with the ongoing legacy of slavery, the horrors of colonial expansion, and the fact that we have not considered violence against people of colour, or women, to be of particular note, has come. We need to stop thinking about history as a kind of binary “positive” or “negative”, as either nice or bad, but as something that reflects all of the wild chaos, dark violence, and glorious triumphs of humanity; the story of all of us.

The story of all of us.

What might this look like in considering the history and practices of the Church, and as we consider the Biblical narrative – the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures. What have we preferenced, and ‘placed on a pedestal’. What has been overlooked? What do we name, reframe, ‘tear down’, read or do differently? The following insights come from an article by Gretta Vosper in which she reflects on Jesus and Martin Luther (though the same lens could be used for other reformers). She writes:

Both Jesus and Luther honoured their traditions. Though we long assumed Jesus was Christian, we now know he wasn’t; he was a Jew. Luther learned the only acceptable religion of his day, a Rome-centred Catholicism. They were steeped in their traditional religions, born into and formed by them. Like everyone around them, they were supposed to fit in. Their education, far above the level of the average believer, was supposed to further hone their beliefs. It was not supposed to expose the little hypocrisies and gross abuses that had been so artfully woven into the everyday business of religion. Once noticed, however, the normal way of doing things became unacceptable. There were no options for Jesus or Luther but those that would bring about catastrophic change in their religious traditions. Even as others fought to maintain the status quo, forcing banishment or conspiring toward more final solutions, the Reformers laid out and presented their arguments. And the world changed.

We stand on the shoulders of great men and women. Countless Reformers dared challenge the norms of their day – religious, political, economic, and social. And they did it at great cost. We are grateful to them for their struggles, for their lives, for their blood, and for the first discomfort noticed that set them on their course. They created the world in which we live, the freedoms we cherish, the perspectives we are welcome to embrace or refuse, the right to make our own decisions, whether wise or foolish. They set in course the possibilities from which we have chosen our new realities and so have become, with them, co-creators of the world we know.

They also, however, created gross disparities and abuses that yet plague humanity and the planet: the economic enslavement of whole nations for the provision of privileges assumed by others; the legal jargons that entrap indigenous peoples in politically ritualized battles for sovereignty; the lines that set out who is worthy of the right to choose their own lifestyle and who is not; the notion that humanity is separate and above the natural world rather than enfolded within and vulnerable to it; the entertainments by which we anaesthetize ourselves to the truths that quake around us; the cruelties endured by herded, caged, and crated animals so we might pleasure our taste buds and sooth our sun-scarred skin. And we, in making our choices, remain co-creators, complicit in a litany of normals that, had we the heart of Jesus or Luther or the millions of unnamed men and women who have poured their lives out in the pursuit of justice and compassion and the building up of love in the world, would make every one of us a Reformer.

There is a legacy in the Reformation that I believe belongs in the middle of our work, calling out the power brokers, the hegemonists, the deceivers. Ours is not the work of complacency or settling for imperatives that take decades to conjure only because it takes that long to soothe the sensitivities of those still wielding ecclesial powers that make no difference to the challenges facing our world. Our reforms must be much bolder, our work in the world more creative than what those beyond our walls believe is all we do. It may be that humanity is facing the greatest crises of its too-brief history as it reels with the challenges of global warming and climate change, exponential population growth, and resource depletion. There may be no future moment for us to step up. Now may be all there is. Literally.

Change is our very birthplace. It is our right and responsibility as heirs of the Reformers, to stare down every comfortable “normal” that sings its siren song and refuse to be enchanted by it. It is our right and responsibility to count up every ease and privilege we enjoy and educate ourselves about its source – what makes it possible? Who pays for our pleasures and how? And when we find that “normal” is built on the subjugation of others – our tea, our chocolate, our party-ready shrimp rings – work to redistribute or limit those pleasures until all have access to shelter, security, food, clean water, and the joy of planning for their children’s futures.

Rev Liellie McLaughlin (Community Connections Coordinator) is currently in Canada to be with family, and ‘enjoying’ the required time in isolation. She writes:
“I am so blessed to have heard some great ‘good news’ in the form of Rutger Bregman and his new book: ‘Humankind‘, where he places the emphasis of our future as the survival of the friendliest (rather than survival of the fittest).

Rutger believes that humankind is far kinder than most people assume as he quotes studies to prove that bystanders would help 90% of the time, rather than be mean. He asks those people who believe that compassionate work mainly comes from our own selfish desire to feel good, to wonder how the world would have been like if we felt nauseous if we did something good for something else….says that we are ‘wired to be inspired’.

If one basic principle has served as the bedrock of bestselling author Rutger Bregman’s thinking, it is that every progressive idea — whether it was the abolition of slavery, the advent of democracy, women’s suffrage, or the ratification of marriage equality — was once considered radical and dangerous by the mainstream opinion of its time. With Humankind, he brings that mentality to bear against one of our most entrenched ideas: namely, that human beings are by nature selfish and self-interested.

By providing a new historical perspective of the last 200,000 years of human history, Bregman sets out to prove that we are in fact evolutionarily wired for cooperation rather than competition. He offers little-known true stories: the tale of twin brothers on opposing sides of apartheid in South Africa who came together with Nelson Mandela to create peace; a group of six shipwrecked children who survived for a year and a half on a deserted island by working together; a study done after World War II that found that as few as 15% of American soldiers were actually capable of firing at the enemy.

The ultimate goal of Humankind is to demonstrate that while neither capitalism nor communism has on its own been proven to be a workable social system, there is a third option: giving “citizens and professionals the means (left) to make their own choices (right).” Reorienting our thinking toward positive and high expectations of our fellow man, Bregman argues, will reap lasting success.

On the flipside, when we want to blame (stereotype?) people for their poor decisions….. people’s IQ falls by at least 15 points in scale when they go through thin times. He concludes that if leaders assume the best in people, then our policies will be much kinder, inclusive, and create hope, and cites this quote from George Orwell: Poverty annihilates the future.

Bregman states that he believes that the most dangerous thing to lose is hope….!

Sounds like the beatitudes without the Bible verses….

Enjoy!

(this post includes a quote from a Goodreads review)

Book published June 2nd 2020 by Little, Brown and Company

Originally posted on ArtWay, Visual Meditation
(Since we’re ‘grounded’ and can’t travel to Italy, this post highlights an amazing art work from Venice)

This week is the Feast of the Ascension of Jesus Christ, also called Ascension Day or Ascension Thursday (May 21st), as recounted in Acts 1:1-11. As John van de Laar says, ‘The Ascension is one of those significant days in the Liturgical Calendar that is also really difficult. There is so much meaning, so many ways of approaching the readings, and yet so many questions that can potentially bog the day down in controversy, theological debate or heavy academic discourse. Yet it remains a day of celebration and an invitation to deeper encounter with God”. Ascension Day marks the end of 40 days when the risen Christ was present with the disciples. When those mysterious angels show up again after the Ascension and speak to the disciples they are almost reproachful of them; why are you looking to heaven your work is here on earth? The apostles return to Jerusalem to watch and wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit (which we will celebrate on May 31st). The writer of Acts tells us that the apostles, the women, and Jesus’ own family gathered together frequently to pray, waiting and anticipating.

Meryl Doney, an art curator in the UK, has written about an impressive art installation called Ascension.

Set centrally below the impressive dome of the Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice is a white drum-like pedestal. There is silence. Then, suddenly, a rushing sound and a turbulent blast of air. Smoke begins to pour from the centre of the drum, twisting as it goes, ascending towards a cone-shape high in the dome. The feeling is of an overwhelming upward thrust. The piece is called Ascension by British sculptor Anish Kapoor.

Kapoor is well known for Cloud Gate (2006, colloquially known as ‘the Bean’) in Chicago. In 2006, he installed arguably his best-known work, Sky Mirror, a three-story stainless-steel sculpture for the Rockefeller Center, reflecting the New York skyline. He described it as a “non-object” because its reflective surface allowed it to disappear.

With Ascension, the immaterial becomes concrete. He says of it, “In my work, what is and what seems to be often become blurred. In Ascension, for example, what interests me is the idea of immateriality becoming an object, which is exactly what happens in Ascension: the smoke becomes a column. Also present in this work is the idea of Moses following a column of smoke, a column of light, in the desert …”, to guide the Israelites tthrough the wilderness. The column of smoke was the powerful, material evidence of God’s presence with them.

In naming the work Ascension, Kapoor is also making reference to the ascension itself – Jesus’ last moments on earth, when as Luke’s gospel describes, “While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven.” (Luke 23:51)  

This pivotal moment has been a perennial subject for artists. The earliest direct depictions date to around the beginning of the 5th century. One of the earliest, an ivory generally dated 400AD, shows Christ climbing a mountain towards the outstretched hand of God. Later images, particularly in northern Europe, show Jesus’ feet ascending into the clouds, while some include his two footprints left on the earth.

Kapoor’s Ascension is different. Wholly abstract, yet uniquely challenging in conveying something of the experience of the Ascension. The images of the piece can convey something of its power, but in the absence of the work itself, it is even better to experience the sound and moving image captured in videos made at the time.

Visitors gaze upwards, as Jesus’ disciples would have stood. In the cathedral, as on the Mount of Olives, something strange and unprecedented is being witnessed. Immaterial smoke has become a twisting, rising column. Because of its very size and materiality the piece evokes a powerful sense of upward movement and force, capturing for the individual onlooker something of the sense of awe and mystery that must have overwhelmed those first disciples.

And what do we do after we’ve been transfixed by this installation?

If the Ascension has led us to faith in a disembodied, removed God who is watching us “from a distance”, we have missed its message. Whatever the disciples actually saw happen that day, the facts of the experience are far less important than the meaning. The Ascension certainly does not mean that heaven is “up”, hell is “down” and God is looking down on us from some far removed place. Rather, the Ascension offers us crucial truths that, in this world of injustice and inequality, we desperately need to reclaim. Jesus did not die, but was seen to “return” to the Godhead physically is a continuation of the story of incarnation. God does not despise the human body – rather God embraces it, inhabits it and glorifies it, making human flesh part of the Godhead! This means that the needs of the body – for food, clean water, sanitation, shelter, and loving, intimate touch – are all part of the Gospel and are included in God’s gift of salvation. The Ascension comes with the promise of the Holy Spirit’s power which tells us that God is not absent and removed from us, but continues to be completely immersed in the world and in the lives of human beings. The gift of the Spirit also assures us of God’s resources and God’s inspiration and God’s guidance to strengthen and enable us as we seek to live as faithful followers of Christ. It may be tempting to make this celebration about Christian triumphalism, but that would be to deny the meaning of Christ’s earthly life. Rather, the Ascension is the necessary next step in that life, ensuring that God remains involved with human beings, that God’s presence continues to be available to us, and that we know that everything that makes us human – including our physicality – has been embraced and welcomed into God. It’s less about “Christianity” defeating all, and more about Christ drawing all things into the life of God. (John van de Laar, Sacredise)

By Sebastian Shehadi and Miriam Partington

As Covid-19 reminds us of life’s fragility, an increasing number of people are turning to faith and spirituality.

Corinna Camilleri was five years old when she began attending church in her hometown of Mdina, Malta. She remembers learning to recite prayers word for word from the Bible, many of which she still remembers today. “I always believed in a God,” says the London-based artist. “But looking at the coronavirus situation, I’m questioning his agenda. What kind of twisted entity would allow such suffering?”

While Corinna may be experiencing a crisis of faith, recent data shows that others may be engaging more with religion since lockdown. The fact that Bible app downloads shot up in March globally is one indication of this. The top English-language Bible on Google Play and App Store was installed almost two million times, the highest amount ever recorded for March, according to Appfigures. Similarly, one of the UK’s largest online Christian bookstores, Eden, has seen physical Bible sales rise by 55 per cent in April, while Google searches for “prayer” and “Christianity” have skyrocketed.

The pandemic has triggered a “historic spiritual moment”, says Dr Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, who is unsurprised by the growth in Bible-reading. He notes that engagement with online church services is also booming, and that it is a response to feelings of disorientation, fragility and fear caused by the crisis.

“Online, one can preserve a measure of anonymity. You can tune into something without committing yourself, and expose yourself to something fresh,” he adds.

Since lockdown began, one of the UK’s largest churches, Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), has seen turnout double for its online Alpha course, a space for non-believers to ask questions about faith and Christianity. 

“I’ve never known a time in my life when people are more open to [God’s word] than they are now,” said HTB’s vicar, Nicky Gumbel, in an online Easter conference. “There are no other distractions. There’s no football, there’s no sport. There’s no entertainment. People have time to hear the Gospel.” Indeed, never in modern history have so many people been sanctioned to their homes, in what the Dean of Gloucester Cathedral, Stephen Lake, calls “an enforced period of reflection.” 

Islam has also seen increased engagement. Google Play’s most popular Quran app saw record high downloads in March, doubling February’s numbers, according to Appfigures.

“People are reaching out for help. All holy books talk about suffering, and that it leads people back to faith,” says Sayyid Fadhil Bahrululoom, an Islamic scholar at London’s Alridha Foundation.

During his time in war-torn Iraq, Bahrululoom saw many people turn to God – a reaction to crises that he says is “instinctive in human beings”. 

The world’s major religions are not the only ones witnessing increased engagement. Reiki, an alternative medicine involving energy healing, has become more sought after than ever since the lockdown. The UK’s largest reiki group on Facebook – home to thousands of members – has seen rising demand for online healing and reiki-teaching since lockdown began, as well as a spike in fraudsters offering scam services and “spells”, according to the group’s admin. 

Reiki practitioner Hilary Kingston says that people are looking to a “higher source” for comfort and explanation during the crisis – much in the same way as an ill person prays for their return to health. For others, reiki carries political significance. Katrina Kiritharan is an energy healer and intuitive life coach says that it symbolises an “inclusive and [alternative] beacon of hope” for marginalised people who feel that their governments have failed to support them during the crisis.

With healthcare being so unaffordable in many countries, and psychotherapy carrying a stigma in certain communities, spiritual healing presents a cheaper and safer option, Katrina explains. Inexpensive self-help is growing in the form of meditation too, with popular apps such as Calm and Headspace booming since global lockdown began. 

Rowan Williams says the pandemic highlights other important issues in our world, describing it as a “remarkable moment of truth.”

“It occurs at a time when the international global economy was more overheated and feverish than ever before. Covid-19 shows us that we live in a world with limitations, [something] we so badly need to remember in respect to the environment,” he explains.

Others spy a wholly different meaning behind the pandemic. Bahrululoom says that in Islamic communities in Iran, Iraq and the Gulf most scholars believe the coronavirus to be caused by mankind’s sin, which is why many leaders are urging people to be “closer to God”. A small minority of Muslims and Christians believe that Covid-19 heralds the apocalypse.

Equating suffering with God’s will is nothing new. From Noah’s flood to the Aids outbreak, some individuals see nothing but divine punishment. Others, such as Williams, see free will. Coronavirus was caused by human actions, or lack thereof, he argues. Meanwhile, the Dean of Gloucester Cathedral says suffering is part of human life: Jesus suffered pain on the cross, as we suffer pain.

It is easy to forget, however, the extent of worldwide suffering. “The limitations of human empathy are profoundly sad. We need a face on the statistics of suffering to speak to us directly,” says Williams. “I remember when asked about the horrors of 9/11. It was dreadful, yes of course, but it’s a dreadfulness that quite a lot people live with almost routinely, and we’ve simply just not noticed,” he adds. 

Indeed, approximately 3.1 million children die from malnutrition each year, a tragedy without a global lockdown that is, therefore, more easily forgotten or ignored.

“We are pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding animals. Today, we’ve crafted a world in which we can tune out when things get hard. With the coronavirus, this discomfort is omnipresent. We turn on our devices and it’s there,” says Katrina. The universe will keep bringing the lesson until we wake up, she adds. 

Lessons are already being learnt. For example, many people do not want a full return to pre-lockdown life, due to cleaner air and a stronger sense of community, highlights one YouGov poll. “We need a real rediscovery of a moral and spiritual politics – one that has a sense of public good, accountability and service. One that creates trust,” concludes Williams. Will politicians and business leaders hear these prayers? 

Sebastian Shehadi and Miriam Partington are freelance journalists.

This article was originally published on 27 April 2020 in NewStatesman, a British political and cultural magazine published in London.  See:

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/religion/2020/04/how-coronavirus-leading-religious-revival?utm_source=BenchmarkEmail&utm_source=BenchmarkEmail&utm_campaign=SACC_E-News_6th_May_2020&utm_campaign=SACC_E-News_13th_May_2020&utm_medium=email&utm_medium=email

An article by Charlotte Wood, published in The Age, April 24, 2020

The garden is in disrepair. In fact it seems to me, peering through the glass kitchen doors on this third Saturday morning of the lockdown, that our pocket courtyard garden has never been in such urgent need of restoration. The sight of it fills me with gloom. Plants overburdened with woody growth sag into displeasing shapes, oppressing the more delicate, undernourished plants beneath. The leaves of others are shrivelled with disease and there’s a puddle of mucky sludge in the bird bath. Junk clutters the pavers: tangles of hose, the wheelie bin with its lid flung back, a pair of running shoes tossed out, soles up, for the sunshine to disinfect.

I have a powerful feeling that this disarray isn’t just cosmetic, but symptomatic of some deeper malaise. The sense of spacious, considered serenity – the reason to have a garden in the first place – has died, along with half the plants. There’s no order, no cohesion, no beauty. I pull on my work boots, take up the secateurs, the gloves and spade.

Of course, it’s not just the garden that’s in desperate need of repair; it’s me. Or my spirit. What might be called my inner life is, like the space before me, half dead, fragmented, mouldy in some parts, dried out in others. Unbalanced, undernourished, filled with dispiriting mess.

What is an ‘‘inner life’’, though, really? Is it the same place we’re supposed to find our ‘‘inner resources’’? Does everybody have one? Does it matter if we don’t? I think about these things through the day as I work in the garden, ripping out dead stuff, forking compost through the powdery old soil.

What I do know is that for artists and writers, the inner life is inseparable from our creative work. My writing mind is a kind of home I can return to, apart from and beyond the limits of my physical world. And as the latter has shrunk and grown a lot more frightening, escape to the former seems more essential than ever.

I wonder if artists have easier access than most to the interior, at a time like this? We habitually spend a lot of time there, after all. When we have a work in progress on the page or the canvas or the piano, we’re carrying on two lives at once – one in the physical world, another in the imagination. Quite often the inner world has a largeness, an excitement and sense of possibility the outer world lacks. Right now that difference is a stark one.

The mind is a place of great freedom, a place that with effort can be made – like a garden – peaceful yet full of movement, wild but safe at the same time.

But of course it’s not only artists who live rich inner lives. If you attend thoughtfully to your personal domain – your interests and surroundings, the people you love, your work – you will quite naturally have a substantial interior world. And while your inner life and mine might be very different, I’d posit that when they’re at their best, they might share some common elements.

First, perhaps, is a purposeful attentiveness to the concept of the mind itself as something of value, to be cared for and exercised, fed and challenged. The mind is a place of great freedom, not to be damaged or filled with rubbish; a place that with effort can be made – like a garden – peaceful yet full of movement, wild but safe at the same time.

I think the inner life needs structure and clarity, as well as moments of unruliness, to truly flourish. A beautiful garden takes planning, good boundaries, patience. It needs protection from invasive destroyers and, at the same time, acceptance of constant change. It knows that beauty takes time to develop, that some cherished elements will die while other gifts appear as ‘‘volunteers’’, those self-seeded surprises that just arrive and put down roots. A magnificent garden, though, like any work of art, is bolder – it takes risks, is prepared to sacrifice, to fail and begin again. It’s visionary, introducing new ideas, making unlikely connections. When I’m immersed in my writing mind, time expands and everything else drops away – the neediness and strain, fear, the depletion and fragmentation that pervade so much of contemporary life.

The trouble is that ordinary contemporary existence seems purposely designed to kill every aspect of the inner life. Modern capitalism depends on relentless productivity and expansion, twinned with its opposite: unceasing, completely passive consumption.

When I consider the possibility of stopping all this – of simply going still – I’m drenched in relief.

Even now, as we seem to be suddenly valuing ‘‘things that matter’’ more than ever – meditation and books and cooking and yoga and music and art – for lots of us, it’s really just a posher form of indiscriminate consumption. In our anxiety we shovel the stuff in, grabbing and discarding, mindlessly cramming one ‘‘meaningful thing’’ then another into every available space in ourselves and our days, in the same rampantly acquisitive way we’ve always done. At least, I know I have. Lately I’ve watched myself seizing up books and songs and yoga tutorials and recipes, gorging on them, then forcing them on others, pointing and urging, scarfing down all the ‘‘mindfulness’’ I can before marching on, voracious as a locust. What I’ve been doing might look like reading or meditating or cooking or ‘‘connecting’’, but much of it has been the manifestation of sheer panic.

When I consider the possibility of stopping all this – of simply going still – I’m drenched in relief.

Productivity and consumption demand constant movement, constant noise. It’s why, when first learning to meditate, we’re sent into a state of terror. For most of us, stillness gives rise to dread. Yet, at those times my imaginative world has been most alive, I’ve learned something that feels important – that stillness is not a void, it’s a well. If I let it, it will fill itself. I can return to it again and again, and it will offer me something to draw upon in moments of crisis. I think this paradoxical fear and need of ‘‘emptiness’’ is why artists have always been such enthusiastic walkers. It’s a useful trick: silent walking allows the mind to empty without the paralysing fear of stillness. A letting-go takes place. An easy, featherweight attention must be paid to the material world of the kerb, the footpath, the pedestrian crossing, which then allows the ethereal, invented world to expand inside the mind. This imaginative growth – without hope, without fear, without despair – is the precious fruit of the inner life.

Of course there are other threats to a flourishing mental state – such as distraction and fear, those eternal enemies of art-making. One of my favourite teaching tools is a study I came across some time ago, a meta-analysis of 25 years of research into the most creative mood state. The researchers found three main elements were common to experiences of profound creativity. These were a positive affect; a slightly elevated ‘‘activation’’ or energy level; and a ‘‘promotion focus’’, in which the creator works with intent to seek gain rather than avoid pain. No surprise, then, that severe agitation, fear, anxiety and anger were associated with the least creative state.

When I began consciously trying to alter my mood before I began a writing day, practising transforming my customary bleak, nervy fear into a state of quietly excited, curious optimism, my whole writing life changed. Even if I somehow forget these things every single day and must constantly work my way back to them (why? why do I revert, always, to fear?), it’s still this state of curious optimism that brings me riches. It’s this state that allows me to sink into silence, and the profound peace of creative attention to open up inside me. It’s this that allows time to expand.

It makes space, too, for bravery and risk. The necessity of risk is why too much time online is the greatest menace to my own inner world. I feel my courage seeping away with each anxious scroll through other people’s confident thoughts and assertions. Every emphatic opinion delivered by someone I respect reveals my own awkwardly forming ideas as incorrect, flimsy, even destructive. This is the signal to shut the garden gates and return to the work of composting and watering, at least until my growing creation reaches adolescence. Then will be time to let the light in, to shape and prune, to weed out imprudence or vanity or simple untruth. But until then, in this muddy germination phase when obscurity and unknowing are nourishment, sovereignty over the inner world must be absolute.

But enough of threats. What might be the things that feed a prosperous inner life?

Quite a lot from the outer, it turns out. For me, anyway, it’s best when there’s a level of tranquillity in my surroundings. A clean(ish) house. Fresh food in the fridge, exercise, frequent contact with nature. A lot of sleep. I’ve always loved that command attributed to Flaubert: ‘‘Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeoise, so that you may be violent and original in your work.’’ If I can maintain even a shred of bourgeois order, it helps.

Paradoxically, the one essential that should be most available right now – unfilled time – seems in shortest supply. Our current hypervigilance, our terror of the uncertainty ahead and phobia of stillness, has thrown us into a frenzy of overscheduling. I am that Italian guy in the meme, trying to cram in yet another appointment between the online yoga and pilates, the Zoom drinks and meetings, the chat rooms and podcasts and classes, the virtual festivals, the endless talking, talking, talking.

But now I’ve calmed down enough to recognise all this, I have the choice to step back, go inward. Of course this means I’m lucky. I have a safe home, no children to school nor elderly parents to worry about. I have good health and people to love. Despite all the cancellations, my own job is really no more precarious than it’s ever been. I have the resources for basic good citizenship – obeying safety rules, the various small economic and political acts incumbent upon the haves for care of the have-nots – and still some left over to devote to my inner world, my work.

Which brings me to one last precious nutrient for the life of the mind: joy.

So much of our world is in unspeakable pain right now. As individuals we have no way of easing most of it. But it feels important to say that despite all this we’re allowed, when it doesn’t hurt others, to protect and nurture that which helps each of us to live fully. We have a right to joy.

It’s sunset now. The garden’s pruned and fed and mulched, the pavers swept, new seedlings in the ground. All that’s needed from here is everything we already have: the autumn sunshine, some rain, and time to let it grow.

Charlotte Wood takes part in the Yarra Valley Writers Festival, a day of live streamed talks, conversations and performances, on May 9. yarravalleywritersfestival.com

Dr Deidre Palmer, President, Uniting Church in Australia, was the guest preacher at the Break The Silence Sunday (BTSS) at Pilgrim Uniting Church, 26th April 2020. This is her sermon.

As I reflected on the message to share with you on this “Break the Silence” Sunday, at the forefront of my mind and heart are those women and children who are not safe in their own homes, or in their communities. Many of them are our neighbours, a friend, a classmate, a work colleague, a member of our church, or a member of our extended family.

People in our communities, who are living with fear, uncertainty and walking on egg shells, with a controlling and violent partner, or an abusive parent.

In this time of responding to the global pandemic COVID 19, “Stay at Home” is a message that is important for us to hear. Limiting our physical social contacts is a major way that we can contribute to controlling the coronavirus impact and protecting the most vulnerable people in our communities.

When physical distancing restrictions were first put in place, I thought of the women and children for whom home is not a safe place. We have been hearing reports of an increase in calls to Domestic and Family Violence helplines across the globe from women who are more isolated than ever, and whose social supports and safety plans are in jeopardy.

The United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Guterres has “..urged all governments to put women’s safety first as they respond to the pandemic.”

In more recent days, as the isolation continues, we are hearing reports, that some domestic violence support services, are not receiving as many calls. The disturbing concerns around this development is that women and children are now isolated at home with their violent abusers, and are not able to phone or contact support people, because of the control the perpetrator has over what they are doing.

This is a time of uncertainty, confusion and fear for many of us.

An important message that we are hearing from our political, health and faith leaders, is that in response to the COVID19 pandemic, we need to work at supporting each other. We may be physically distanced, but we are in this together, interconnected in ways that we may not have imagined 10 or 20 years ago. Being part of community, being connected is important for our flourishing as human beings.

Last week in Adelaide, a 35-year-old woman was murdered. The police have arrested and charged her ex-partner. Sadly, some of the witnesses interviewed by police, had heard a disturbance on the night before, and a woman crying for help, but the police were not contacted. The police officer, who reported to the media and public noted: It is a sad reflection on society, that people would hear a cry for help and not call police. “I am at a complete loss as to why somebody would not go to the aid of a woman crying for help.”

Today we are observing “Break the Silence” Sunday. It is a global movement that calls for us to speak up about rape, and domestic and family violence.
As we face this global pandemic crisis together, we are called to speak up about those who are victims and survivors of domestic violence. We are called to open our ears and hearts, when women and children speak up. We are called to listen and to hear them.

Our Gospel reading today is from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 24, verses 13-35. In this story of Jesus from Luke’s Gospel, two disciples are walking on the road to the village of Emmaus. It is on the evening of the day when Jesus had risen. These disciples are afraid and confused. They are talking intently. Jesus walks alongside them and asks them a simple question: What are you discussing with each other as you walk along? He listens to their story. It is a story of hope: “Jesus of Nazareth, was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people”. It is a story of violence and distress: “our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him”. It is a story of sadness and disappointed hope: “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel”. It is a story of astonishment and what seemed an impossible hope: “Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive”.

Jesus comes alongside the disciples in their fear and confusion and brings a message that indicates: perhaps this impossible hope, is not so impossible after all!

In our sadness and confusion, in our distress and isolation, the risen Christ comes alongside and reminds us of who and whose we are.

We are beloved children of God – created in God’s image, of infinite value.

Jesus comes alongside us and listens to our grief, our hopes and dreams, and reminds us of God’s transforming love and liberation.

There are many ways in which the Spirit of Christ continues to journey with us, opening our eyes and hearts and transforming our lives and the lives of the people around us.

As we follow in the way of Christ, as Jesus journeys with us, we are called to walk alongside others, offering hope and compassion. Compassion is “to notice the suffering of another and to take action to alleviate that suffering.”

We are invited to join others across the world, in Australia and in our neighbourhoods, and notice the suffering of those who are experiencing domestic and family violence. We are called to see others through the lens of God’s love and liberation, and be agents of that love and liberation ourselves.

Samantha Power, worked for President Barack Obama advising on human rights policy and served as the US Ambassador to the United Nations. In her Pulitzer Prize winning book: “ A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” Power reflects on the situations of genocide around the world, including Armenia, Sarajevo, and Rwanda. In this study of genocide, she coined the word “Upstander”

She describes those who try to prevent genocide or stand up against the ‘genocide’ as “upstanders” – contrasting them with bystanders.”

While she notes that many of us will not be victims or perpetrators of genocide. There are small ways in which we can choose to be “Upstanders”, rather than “bystanders”

“But every day, almost all of us find ourselves weighing whether we can or should do something to help others. We decide, on issues large and small,
whether we will be bystanders or upstanders.” (Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist, William Collins publishers, 2019, p.132)

Now, more than ever, is an important time for us to be “upstanders” actively engaged in supporting the most vulnerable in our communities.
Now, more than ever, we are called to attend to our neighbours, friends, and family members.

I encourage you as members of the Uniting Church, in this difficult time, to stay connected with your neighbours, your friends, family and people in your communities.

Please continue to reach out and support people who are at risk during this time of physical and social isolation.

In breaking the silence, we are called to listen, to hear, and believe the cries of those who are in situations of domestic violence.

As the people of God, embodying God’s compassion and liberation, we are called to shape environments, personal relationships and communities that are safe havens, where there is mutual respect, care and nonviolence. Environments where people are able to flourish.

As Christians, we have a narrative of hope to which we witness, of a God who loves us infinitely and desires us to be in loving, life-giving relationships with others. We have a responsibility, as followers of Jesus, to be bearers of this hope. Our teaching and preaching, the ideas we uphold about God, relationships and ourselves, can contribute to our understanding of equality and partnership between women and men, and to a healthy sense of mutual, respectful relationships.

During my life time, I have had the privilege to hear women’s narratives from around the world. They are often narratives of hope, of women exercising their gifts, of being invited into their fullest humanity, contributing to the wellbeing of church and wider communities. I have also heard narratives of harm, from women whose sense of identity and giftedness have been undermined by those who have sought to diminish the voices of women and girls, and limited their opportunities. I am deeply saddened, when the diminishing of these women’s voices, has been through an interpretation of Scripture that has sought to justify this as God’s intention for them.

When we promote or support Biblical interpretations and theological understandings that contribute to the inequality of women, to their submission, their subservience, it leaves the door open for the abuse of women and children.

The Uniting Church is among a significant number of Christian communities and churches, whose theology and Biblical understanding affirms that all people are created in the image of God, all are called to express their gifts and are invited into human relationships that are equal, mutual, respectful life-giving partnerships. We are part of global and local movements promoting the equality of all people.

On this Break the Silence Sunday, I urge you to listen to the cries of those who are in situations of domestic violence, and I urge you to break the silence with narratives of hope, of the inclusive, liberating love of Christ.

I heard that we are in the same boat.
That ‘we’re all in this together’. 
But it’s not like that.
We are in the same storm, but not in the same boat.
Your ship can be shipwrecked and mine might not be.
Or vice versa. 
For some, lockdown is optimal: moment of reflection, of re-connection.
A chance to relax, read, walk, cook, do a craft, binge on Netflix. 
For others, this is a desperate crisis.
For others, it is facing loneliness, doubt, depression, uncertainty.
For others, home is like a prison and they want to escape. 
For some, a peace, a pause, a rest time away from busyness.
Yet for others, torture: how am I going to pay my bills?
Some ‘fall through the cracks’ – jobs lost, and no chance of financial relief. 
Some are enjoying a feast of music, dramas, orchestras from the internet,
while the artists, actors and musicians are now without incomes.
Some enjoy the chance to ‘let it be’.
Others dread the words, ‘we’re letting you go’. 
Some have come to enjoy the isolation – a slower pace, less responsibility.
Others have found the separation from loved ones painful. 
Cancellations of flights, holidays, events, shows, weddings, and funerals where people can gather to celebrate a life well lived.
For some, life is on hold, joy and celebration delayed. 
Others enjoy a chance for baking and creating, living in the moment. 
Others are concerned about putting bread on the table, and empty shelves. 
Some have enjoyed setting up their “home office” .
Some are anxious about how they will survive financially.
Some families enjoy time with children, creating happy memories.
Some families are pushed to breaking point, emotions running high.
Some want to go back to work because they are running out of money.
Others want to take action against those who break the lockdown.
Some need to stand in long lines at Centrelink.
Some criticize the government for the lines.
Some think the Government is doing a great job. 
Others are concerned about the loss of civil liberties. 
Some are early adopters and adapters, flexible, agile, energised by change. 
Some are disoriented by change, and find it hard to navigate a ‘new normal’. 
Some have experienced the near death of the virus.
Some have already lost someone from it.
Some are not sure their loved ones are going to make it.
And some don’t even believe this is a big deal. It’s just the flu. I’ll be fine.
Some of us who are well now may end up experiencing it. 
Some believe they are infallible and will be blown away if or when this hits someone they know.
Some have faith in God and expect protection and intervention.
Some say this is God’s punishment for an endless array of ‘sins’.  
Others say the worse is yet to come. 
Friends, we are in the same storm, but we are not in the same boat.
We are going through a time when our perceptions and needs are completely different.
And each one will emerge, in their own way, from that storm.
Some with a fresh perspective on what’s important in life.
Others will be burdened with scars on the soul, hidden from view.
Do not underestimate the pain of others even when you do not feel it.
Do not judge the good life of one and condemn the bad life of the other. 
Let us not judge the one who lacks, as well as the one who exceeds them.
We are on different ships looking to survive.
Let everyone navigate their route with respect, kindness, compassion, empathy and responsibility.
(Original author unknown, adapted)

Living with pandemic uncertainty amid the ‘Great Disruption’

by Jonathan Cole

The human psyche is dependent on regularity and predictability for its health. Imagine the psychological pressure of trying to continuously adapt to a world in which the sun rose and set at a different time each day, or perhaps rose for five days and then set for two, then rose for a mere eight hours followed by ten straight days of darkness. Imagine trying to maintain sanity in a world in which there were no seasons, just random daily weather events: minus 6 Celsius and snowing one day, 35 and sunny the next day, a tropical thunderstorm the day after that.

While human social existence by definition cannot attain the level of regularity and predictability found in the natural world, it does come close. This is because humans are veritable creatures of habit, predisposed to create and impose order and regularity wherever possible. Our professional, educational, recreational and familial pursuits and activities are ordered by daily, weekly, monthly and yearly routines, whether it is the fixed times and days of school, work or worship or when, where and how we shop, play and socialise.

With some tailoring here and there for individual predilection, most of us live by the predictable rhythms of personal, social and societal routine. It is this regularity, complementing the regularity of the natural world, that affords us the psychological security to not only live our lives in the absence of daily neurosis, but also to plan for the future, confident in the knowledge that such plans have a reasonable chance of success.

Today, however, we find ourselves living through the total disruption of the stability, regularity and predictability on which our psychological health depends. History may come to know this moment as the Great Disruption — one of those truly seminal events in human history that will animate generations of historians in perpetuity. The sun mercifully still rises and sets with its prior regularity in the Great Disruption, but the stability and predictability of our erstwhile social existence has been left in disarray by the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Many have lost their jobs or businesses and find themselves in the grip or on the precipice of financial ruin. Many of those fortunate enough to still have a job find themselves working from the confines of their homes, once the domain of recreation and recuperation away from the pressures of work. Many have additionally been thrust into the role of amateur teacher, in an unprecedented mass home schooling experiment, valiantly and vainly attempting to manage the total collapse of the boundaries that once delineated work, school, recreation and home life. Individual movements have been severely curtailed and social interactions restricted. We can no longer engage in many of the activities that have long given meaning and order to our lives. We now live in the temporary, the ephemeral, the ever evolving and the perpetually changing. Our short-term future uncertain, our long-term future utterly obscure. Time is at a standstill.

We are all painfully aware that we are living through a moment of great political, social and economic upheaval. Our daily lives, right down to what we can do with our hands and where we can do it, are now dictated by a bipartisan, technocratic national cabinet, incorporating every blue and red state and territory government, the federal government and previously obscure medical experts. Bereft of the luxury of time, and thus of careful planning, the national technocratic cabinet (where every word that leaves a politician’s lips “is following the best medical advice”) no longer pursues policies; it announces sacrifices.

But we also live a less remarked, but no less profound, disruption. This is the disruption to our psyche that is a consequence of the myriad uncertainties, individual and collective, created by the wholesale disruption of our social and societal regularity — a regularity that many of us perhaps previously took for granted, but have quickly learned to mourn. Four newfound uncertainties, in particular, now impose acute and previously unknown psychological strain on peoples everywhere.

The first relates to the immediate health crisis. We must all now live with the immediate psychological pressure of knowing that each and every one of us, or somebody we love, could at any moment become infected with COVID-19, and while the statistical probabilities of dying from it vary according to age and co-morbidities (a new word with which we are all now morbidly familiar), no one is immune from being the statistical exception that proves the rule.

In addition to confronting the immediate risk of our own potential infection and death, we live with the attendant psychological burden of being capable of unwittingly transmitting death to others, as political leaders and health experts are wont to remind us daily, if not hourly. We also live with the uncertainty of not knowing the true scale and scope of our disaster. No two experts can agree on the disease’s mortality rate, as it is too early and the data too patchy for accurate diagnostics. We have some insight into a worst-case scenario in Italy and Spain, but remain uncertain whether Italy and Spain foretell our destiny or whether a more benign course, a la Singapore and Taiwan, is still in prospect.

The truth is that we cannot even be certain that Italy and Spain represent the worst-case scenario and Singapore and Taiwan the best, as the virus is a long way from running its full course and the variables of government policy, community responsiveness and demographic profile make predicting the course in its national particularity all but impossible. The horror story of Italy and Spain today might come to represent the best-case scenario in a month or two for many countries back stream. The worst-case scenario a month or two from now might prove to be unimaginably worse than either Italy or Spain today. So we are left in the certain knowledge that the virus will cost lives and disrupt every facet of our existence, but at the same time the painful uncertainty of not knowing how devastating the virus could turn out to be even a month from now, let alone three, six or twelve.

The second uncertainty relates to the sacrifices we are being asked — and in many cases, forced — to make individually and collectively. We simply do not now when, if and to what extent they will work. Will they help Australia avert the fate of Italy and Spain or is delaying the inevitable all one can hope to do under the circumstances? Will we even be in a position to know when, if and to what extent they have been successful? The sacrifices we are making are an investment promising an uncertain return. No one, including the experts, can say for sure when and if the sacrifices will be successful? Indeed, “success” is not clearly, nor easily, defined in this situation. One certainty is that the sacrifices will be painful and, once made, cannot be unmade — at least, not easily and quickly. So we sacrifice on trust: trust that our immediate suffering is both absolutely necessary and will prove efficacious.

The third uncertainty is a consequence of the disruption of time. In addition to the aforementioned uncertainties, we live in complete uncertainty regarding just how long we will have to endure our total disruption. Experts tell us it will be a minimum of six months, possibly twelve, but also plausibly eighteen. We do not know when and if we will overtake the mythic curve we are chasing. Nor what it will actually mean if we do, given vanquishing the curve does not ostensibly promise an end to our social paralysis, a vaccine being anywhere from twelve to eighteen months away. In the meantime, our lives are universally held hostage to the disrhythms of the Great Disruption’s temporal stasis. And so we must carry on our disrupted lives in suspended time under the spectre of death at the hands of a pandemic the deadliness, trajectory, duration and denouement of which we cannot know.

The fourth and final uncertainty is that we do not know who, what and where we will be once the Great Disruption finally ends and a new regularity emerges in its wake. Instinct and common sense suggest that we will be changed by the Great Disruption in ways large and small. It defies belief that we will be able to return to the old patterns of life, as if waking from a nightmare. An even greater uncertainty — and one that compounds an oversupply of anxiety — is that we have no way of knowing at this juncture whether the new post-Great Disruption order will be better or worse than the ancien régime.

We thus live with the tension of multiple plausible futures, ranging from short, painful and recoverable to long, drawn out and apocalyptic. Will the Great Disruption prove to be a moment of creative destruction, a period of intense, extremely painful, yet ultimately short disruption followed by an efflorescence of euphoria, optimism, social cohesion, innovation and creative energy leading to the dawn of a better world? Or, will it prove to be a Hobbesian vision of mass death, bankrupt states, economic ruin, political turmoil, mass unemployment, decrepit health care systems and traumatised societies which have lost faith in the old idols of prosperity, progress, globalisation, capitalism and liberal democracy?

The human psyche is not built to cope with the prospects of a future so variable and unpredictable. Our present lot, then, is to stoically endure the pandemic uncertainties of the Great Disruption in the hope that the new order that comes in its wake will be formed from the fruits of creative destruction, and not simply destruction.

____________________________________________________

Jonathan Cole is Assistant Director of the Centre for Public and Contextual Theology at Charles Sturt University, Canberra. He is the author of Christian Political Theology in an Age of Discontent: Mediating Scripture, Doctrine, and Political Reality.

This article was first posted on Monday 6 April at:

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/pandemic-uncertainty-and-the-great-disruption/12124804

(Rev Sandy Boyce shared this witness for the 9.30am Palm Sunday service on 5th April 2020).

Our Lenten journey in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic feels somewhat dystopian. We are living in uncertain times. Lent seems ‘more Lenty’. The theme of ‘the wilderness’ seems more real this Lent, even from the safe confines of our homes.

The streets are empty here in my quiet suburban street, and in streets around the world. Tourist hot spots deserted. Animals venturing out and reclaiming some territory in the absence of humans. It’s all quite surreal.

Self-isolation and other measures will certainly help ‘flatten the curve’ in the battle against COVID19. We may be pre-occupied with our self-preservation, ensuring we stay well. At the same time as we keep ourselves safe, we hope others are doing the same, so that it will soon be safe for everyone. Otherwise, we risk this situation going on for months.

Some of us may relish self-isolation, to enjoy reading, crafts, gardening, catching up on jobs around the house and other activities. Some of us may feel isolation constrains our ‘rights’, and will be itching to regain freedom. Even those in 4 star hotels in Sydney bemoan their temporary enforced confinement. Perhaps the self-isolation suits some personality types more than others. There’s a call out to introverts to check on their extrovert friends, because they don’t know how to do this solitary thing. We need to look out for each other.

Self-isolation with families can be fraught with problems. Like the family at home with young children where a 3kg tub of honey was liberally spread around the house over ever surface, including the TV and computer etc. Not a happy ending!! Self-isolation also raises the stress for those living with domestic violence, and for children who cannot be at school which was the only safe place they had. There’s a lot happening behind those suburban front doors.

In this time of self-isolation and ‘social distancing’ there are also incredible acts of generosity and kindness. You’ve probably seen some of this in the media. You may have been on the receiving end of acts of kindness. You may have played your part in contributing to acts of generosity. Or you may have simply rediscovered what being neighbourly means. You may have seen how important it is to direct our energy to serve the common good. The late Margaret Thatcher, former PM in Britain, once famously said, ‘There’s no such thing as society’. And now the current British PM has said, ‘you know what, there is such a thing as society’. A revelation, that the fabric of a robust society is built on the common good, cooperation, collaboration and goodwill.

The reality of COVID19 has unleashed energy and fresh hopes and determination for how we might live together in our global village. It is interesting that the aspiration to preference the common good comes at a time when everyone is confined to home isolation. Maybe it’s like the whole world has been sent to their rooms to give some time to sort out better ways to act and behave with each other. This is the gift of liminal space – that time between what was and what will be. Thanks to COVID-19, normal is what was. It is gone and will be gone for quite some time. ‘Normal’ as we have known it may not return at all. As Greta Thunberg has astutely pointed out, ‘normal’ was already a crisis. We need a new way forward. One not based on competition and greed but on the common good, and the values and priorities of the reign of God. There needs to be a seismic shift in the way things happen after this period of confinement at home.

Each of us have to choose how we live in this liminal space, to find ways to occupy our time without work, sports entertainment and lists of things ‘to do’. It may be a time to develop spiritual practices. To take up new practices – or recover them. To be more intentional about being neighbourly. To make more phone calls to friends and family.

Despite being physically separated, together we can embrace our shared humanity and the shared experience of facing the unknown together. As those who follow the Way of Jesus, our call is to open our lives to God in a way that is transformative, so that we lean towards empathy, compassion, justice, kindness, care and generosity.

Our 9.30am service of worship on Palm Sunday began with a song that Geoff Boyce wrote this week:

We are…We are the church where we are
We carry the Way in our hearts
Caring together, apart…
Free, Free for the fight for equality
The freedom to live life with dignity
That comes from a sharing humanity
This is our call, to be the #churchwhereweare.

We do not need to wait to regather in the church building to be the church, to live out our call to serve others, following the example of Jesus.

The empty streets in our neighbourhoods and citiies are such a contrast to the procession we know as Palm Sunday, with the colour and spectacle and noise, as people accompanied Jesus into the city of Jerusalem. Perhaps the only connection with the story is that the military was deployed to keep things in order. The might of the Roman army deployed to ensure their presence would keep the festive crowds under control and keep the peace. The Australian Army personnel deployed to help with logistics in a time of COVID-19.

Jesus entry into Jerusalem was a subversive counter-procession. Jesus had a different vision of what God’s reign should be. Not might and power, but justice and mercy. Not the sword and violence, but peace and well-being, healing and wholeness. Jesus entered Jerusalem with the quiet determination to stand for truth and what is right. It would inevitably bring him into confrontation with the authorities. That is the journey that unfolds in Holy Week, to the cross, and to risen life.

As we stand at the threshold of Holy Week,
what does this liminal time in self-isolation ask of you?

Let me finish with this prayer by Brian McLaren: “Spirit of Wisdom, Truth, and Peace, guide us through this difficult time, and help us to resist the temptation to dream nostalgically of the old normal we have lost. Instead, help us lean forward toward a new normal, a wiser and better way of life that is more in harmony with your love for all people and for all creation. Help us better understand and value our interconnectedness on this beautiful, fragile planet. Empower all who serve the common good, encourage all who suffer, and expose all who mislead, whether through ignorance, greed, fear, or malice. Give birth to a new generation of moral leaders around the world, moral leaders who are guided by a just vision for the future rather than limited habits of the past … in our families and faith communities, in our cities and states and nations, and around this interconnected world, for the good of all. Amen.”

Support for the most vulnerable

The President of the Uniting Church in Australia, Dr Deidre Palmer, has today written to the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison MP, seeking assurances that all people currently living in Australia, who have no means to return to home countries and no income as a result of the COVID-19 crisis, receive adequate income and healthcare support.

Dr Palmer asked that Mr Morrison’s Government provide support for the more than 1.5 million people who are living in Australia on temporary visas or bridging visas who are currently not eligible for support payments.

“Some of those on temporary or bridging visas work in industries that have been heavily affected by the coronavirus crisis. Many cannot access standard social security support, such as working age payments and disability support payments. They also are not eligible to access other government services.”

“These include many people who have applied for asylum in Australia,” said Dr Palmer, adding to calls from the Australian Churches Refugee Taskforce (ACRT) to ensure asylum seekers are not forgotten. 

In its letter to the Prime Minister, the ACRT expressed concern for the vulnerability of asylum seekers in our community who are already dependent on charities for the basic necessities. 

Dr Palmer noted that, “Many of these people are no longer able to return to their home countries with flights being cancelled and borders being closed. Many who are seeking asylum in Australia are unable to return to home countries because of the security risks they face. For some, their current visas will soon run out and need to be extended. We ask that such people be treated fairly, especially given the current global context”.

Further, the Uniting Church has asked that all people living on temporary or bridging visas in Australia have access to Medicare. “Access to Medicare will encourage them to seek medical assistance at the first sign they may have Coronavirus. If such people are unable to access health care immediately or face high costs for access, they are less likely to do so, further placing themselves and the broader community at risk”.

In the letter Dr Palmer acknowledged with gratitude the measures that Commonwealth and State Governments in Australia have provided so far to support people and businesses who are being severely impacted by the coronavirus crisis.

“In particular the Uniting Church welcomes the extra $550 a fortnight payment to people receiving social security payments,” said Dr Palmer.

“These extra funds will assist the hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their jobs as a result of the measures needed to reduce the spread of the coronavirus and are most welcome.”

Dr Palmer signed off the letter to the Prime Minister with the assurance that, “You remain in our prayers, at this very difficult time for our country and for those who have the responsibility of leadership.

Uniting Church members are encouraged to contact their local Members of Parliament to remind them of our duty to support the most vulnerable, particularly people facing destitution in our country as a result of these circumstances.

Points people can raise in their letters:

• Thank the government for the steps they have taken to support people during the Coronavirus crisis.
• Ask that they extend support payments to all people living in Australia at this time who need them. Note that many people on temporary visas are unable to return home and are not eligible for existing social security payments. No person should be left destitute due to the current crisis.
• Acknowledge the government will need to implement reasonable measures to ensure the payments are made to those that genuinely need them. Acknowledge there will always be people who will seek to make fraudulent claims, but this should not be a barrier to extending support to those who meet the relevant criteria and are in genuine need.
• Further, note that Minister Tudge has already been reported in the media as working to extend the visas of people who are living in Australia and are unable to return to their home countries. State your support for this outcome and request that such people be permitted to work in Australia.
• Also, request that people living temporarily in Australia should be given access to Medicare at this time. Point out the serious health risks to these people and the wider community if they contract Coronavirus and delay seeking medical advice and assistance because they do not have easy access to healthcare.

Link to copy of UCA President’s letter to the Prime Minister of Australia, the Hon Scott Morrison MP.

200326 Letter to Prime Minister re support for vulnerable people during COVID-19 crisis.pdf

Pray, but stay away: holding on to faith in the time of coronavirus

by Rev Dr Robyn J. Whitaker

Plagues of global proportions might seem biblical, but coronavirus is creating new challenges for faith leaders. Last week in Australia, many churches, mosques and synagogues decided proactively to cancel their normal worship services. These were not easy decisions for groups for whom being a gathered community is central to their identity and practice.

On the weekend, the federal government announced new, stringent measures as part of a “stage 1” lockdown, which means faith communities can no longer gather to worship. In Victoria, funerals and weddings are also banned.

Australia’s largest Uniting Church, Newlife, was one of the first in Australia to move services online following the prime minister’s call to cancel gatherings over 500. Their lead minister, Stu Cameron, addressed the congregation online and called this “the most loving thing to do”. As a church used to multimedia worship, they are well equipped to move online.

Traditional churches such as St John’s Anglican Church in Toorak face different challenges. They have cancelled Sunday services but are keeping the historic church and garden open as long as possible for personal prayer and reflection. Their priest, Peter French, is more concerned about how they will continue to care for the dead and grieving as St John’s often sees over 1,000 people during the week for funeral services.

Weddings can be postponed, but funerals are another matter. French said:

We’re working closely with our local funeral directors and are deeply conscious of the need for love and compassion for the grieving even if we can’t physically gather together in the traditional way. Funeral services for the foreseeable will look very different.

Italy has banned funerals of any kind. Bodies are being buried or cremated with only a priest or celebrant present. This leaves grieving loved ones in limbo, waiting until they can hold a proper funeral service.

The PM’s announcement on Sunday evening now makes clear that Australian church and religious organisations are also prohibited from holding funeral services. Sitting shiva in the traditional way or gathering in other rituals to mourn the dead will not be possible for the foreseeable future.

Not all faith communities are responding in the same way. The coronavirus pandemic has exposed a long-held tension between science and faith for conservative faith communities. Conservative Christian churches such as Margaret Court’s Life Church have said the “blood of Jesus” will protect their communities.

Such claims are rooted in a prosperity theology that naively claims God will protect and bless the faithful (usually financially), coupled with a simultaneous distrust of science. This distrust is because scientific theories, such as evolution, are mutually exclusive to a literal reading of the creation stories in the Bible, particularly Genesis, and are therefore seen as a threat or in conflict with faith.

At the other end of the ecclesial spectrum, the Greek Orthodox Church has thus far continued to serve communion, claiming that one cannot contract an illness from Holy Communion, because bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ. Scientists might disagree.

Worst of all are those seeking to benefit from the fear that such a pandemic evokes. Televangelist and Trump adviser Paula White at first dismissed the seriousness of coronavirus and is now opportunistically asking for cash donations for a hospital for the “soul sick”. Citing Psalm 91, a psalm that speaks of God’s protection in a time of difficulty, she asks people for donations of $91 as “seed funding” for God’s blessing. Others are promising healing through the television. Preying on people’s fears in this way is contrary to Christian tradition and theology.

Christians were famous in antiquity for staying to care for the sick and dying during significant plagues. After all, to risk one’s life for the sake of another is a very Jesus-like thing to do.

Christians are, of course, not alone in these brave acts of service. This kind of self-sacrificial service is central to many of the world’s religions.

But the dynamics of the current pandemic are different. Staying close to others might threaten their life more than one’s own. It poses a new kind of problem: how do you “love your neighbour” when you aren’t supposed to be near them?

The challenge for all communities is how to foster community and support one another while keeping physical distance. Many faith communities are live-streaming services or sharing pre-recorded sermons. Others are encouraging small groups to meet in homes or meeting in real time via software such as Zoom.

Pastoral care is more complicated. Some faith communities have set up a pastoral care roster of weekly phone calls to check on both the physical and spiritual needs of members. Others are delivering care packages and meals to the doorsteps of elderly members or have a buddy system, asking members to commit to checking in with one another every couple of days or youth to help older folk with technology.

At the heart of any religion is community: people gathering together to worship, pray, caring for one another, and eating together. There is therefore something antithetical about asking members of faith communities to show their love by keeping away from one another. It is a difficult and counter-cultural thing for many to do. Yet, it is what most faith leaders in Australia are asking of their communities as they trust the advice of scientists and experts that this is the best way to show care for the most vulnerable in our community.

In this time of great anxiety, leaders of all faiths have both an opportunity and responsibility to step up with words of comfort and compassion, drawing on the depths of their sacred traditions and texts.

The lasting effect of coronavirus on faith communities remains to be seen. Will people flock back to their synagogues when finally allowed, joyful at being able to be together again? Or will habits be broken and connections lost as people discover other ways to pray and nourish their spiritual lives outside of Sunday church?

Perhaps the creativity these new circumstances demand will lead to a wider range of faith expressions and fundamentally change the nature of faith communities in the 21st century.

Whatever the future looks like, creative and new forms of care and worship are emerging. It is hard to imagine these won’t leave a lasting legacy on faith communities.

Rev Dr Robyn J. Whitaker is Senior Lecturer in New Testament, Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity.

This article was originally posted on March 23, 2020 12.10pm AEDT at:

https://theconversation.com/pray-but-stay-away-holding-on-to-faith-in-the-time-of-coronavirus-133692

The following is a talk presented by Rev Sandy Boyce, for World Day of Prayer, March 6th, 2020, at Noarlunga Uniting Church

I wish to add my acknowledgement of the Kaurna people, the traditional custodians on whose land this church was built and to continue to work alongside Aboriginal people for reconciliation and justice.

Thank you for having me speak at this World Day of Prayer service, prepared by a group of women in Zimbabwe. My memories of a visit to Zimbabwe in 2001 recall the faces of people that expressed love, compassion and kindness – and joy. I was in Zimbabwe to visit some of our Uniting Church Volunteers in Mission who were in placement with our partner church, the Methodist Church of Zimbabwe. Three were from SA. Rae, a social worker, who spent time as a volunteer with the AIDS Ministry team. Lisa and Murray, who spent their time at Matthew Rusike Children’s Home, established in 1950 to care for orphans and vulnerable children. Murray had an agricultural background, and along with the Lisa, helped with the productive garden and animal husbandry and the children with their school work. Another Australian volunteer was also at Matthew Rusike Children’s Home. Together we all went to a local wedding that the volunteers had been invited to – literally on a village street, with fantastic choreographed dancing featuring the bride and groom and their wedding party. At the reception, the guests sat outdoors at tables and chairs lined up along the dusty street. We were seated as guests of honour next to a PA system for the loud music. It was also used to announce all the gifts people had brought. This was not the time to have brought a Cheap as Chips present when we would have been shamed for all to hear over the PA system!

And behind these great experiences lay the shadows of grinding poverty, of runaway inflation, of stores with empty shelves, in a country where good agricultural land and gold mining might have led to a different outcome.

It was heartbreaking, and confronting to be a visitor who had ‘passport privilege’ and financial means and opportunity to leave at any time, unlike the people whose saw no signs of hope or change on the horizon. The enthusiastic joy we saw at the wedding was what people could do with the little they had.

Zimbabwe’s political and economic crises have resulted in high poverty rates, with 72% of the country’s population now lives in chronic poverty. In the space of a year, the number of people in extreme poverty in Zimbabwe rose by a million in 2019, to 34% of the people living on less than $1.90 a day. A recent UN study says poverty has reached unprecedented levels in Zimbabwe, with more than 70% of Zimbabwean children in rural areas living in abject poverty. An El Nino-influenced drought and Cyclone Idai has reduced agricultural production over several seasons, worsening the situation across many rural areas. The economic contraction has caused a sharp rise in prices of food and basic commodities and one tenth of rural households currently indicated they are going without food for a whole day. There is less than 100,000 tonnes of grain in reserve, after a poor harvest; Zimbabwe consumes 80,000 tonnes of maize every month. The World Food Programme says it needs a further $300m to meet hunger needs in the country. The unemployment rate has been estimated at 90%.

All of this has caused additional issues for the most vulnerable in Zimbabwe:
Human trafficking: Zimbabwe is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labour and sexual exploitation.
Child protection vulnerabilities including child marriage, where 32% of girls in Zimbabwe are married before the age of 18.
Gender-based violence (including sexual exploitation and abuse) – where 35% of women aged 15-49 years have experienced intimate partner physical and/or sexual violence at least once in their lifetime
Disability discrimination: people with a disability have lower education and employment opportunities, are often unable to access health services, and are at greater risk of sexual exploitation and abuse

Despite these challenges, the Zimbabwean people are generous and resilient. They remain optimistic and are working to improve their nation. The Uniting Church partner church, the Methodist Church in Zimbabwe (MCZ) and its relief and development agency, the Methodist Development and Relief Agency (MeDRA), play a vital role in serving their communities and advocating for the people in national politics. UNICEF has called on the government of Zimbabwe to recognise child poverty as a national policy priority and protect children from its most devastating effects throughout its reform agenda

The Bethesda story (John 5:1-9a) reminds us of the way that social and economic and even religious systems meant to assist the needy often keep them in poverty. People often need to doubt and challenge the system, and to look for help outside of the ‘system’.

John’s Gospel tells us about a time when Jesus went to Jerusalem for a religious holiday. The setting was the Sheep Gate where there was a pool. In Hebrew it was called Bethesda. It had five porticoes, which were filled with many invalids – the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed. (John 5:2–3). Jesus bypasses all the centres of power of Jerusalem with religious leaders and the temple, and goes to a place where no-one has power, with conditions of absolute poverty. This hospital-like place around the pool would have been dank and smelly, and filled with people lying around, waiting for a miracle, hoping for wholeness and new life.The people lay in wait for an angel of the Lord to stir up the water; and it was believed that whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was made well from whatever disease that person had. Before the days of medical science, people relied on conjuring up divine intervention. Those who were desperate and destitute, who had run out of options, and hope, gravitated to a place or to people who they thought could help. Bethesda was such a place. Would Jesus have heard the voices of many people crying out, or had they succumbed to hopelessness and simply learned to be silent in the face of despair. Jesus met a man who had been been sick for 38 years. The Greek word that describes him as a paralytic literally means, “dried out”. Jesus asks, “Do you want to get well?” Well, clearly that would be a good outcome, but perhaps the man had given up even seeking that solution. He had become dispirited, defeated, and dried out in his body and mind and soul.

Instead of waiting with the man and helping him into the water so he could be healed, Jesus asks him to get up, pick up his mat, and walk. The story says that at once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. (John 5:8–9) And he walked away from those still waiting for their miracle.

The Bethesda account has an interesting political implication (1). The paralytic and the other invalids at Bethesda had been taught that “the system is the solution”, and so they were prepared to wait. The man in the story had waited for 38 years. The system, represented by the fickle Bethesda Pool, was a solution only for some, while the others had to wait their turn for as long as it took. By telling the paralytic to get up, pick up his mat and walk, Jesus taught him to bypass the system and to challenge it. To recognise that ‘reality’ in which people must learn to survive is a product of the system, and that there is life outside ‘the system’. As we make connections to our own world, the Bethesda story reminds us of the fact that social and economic systems meant to assist the needy often keep them in poverty. Those who live in poverty will need to doubt and challenge the system, and to look for help outside of it.

Income and wealth disparities have increased in the last decades, in Zimbabwe and in so many other countries, and in Australia where we have super rich and increasing numbers of very poor people. The structures that accentuate such inequality have been strengthened. The ‘have a go, get a go’ philosophy and trickle down economics are myths, as is the idea that if only one worked long and hard, one would overcome adversity because economic mobility is for everyone. Petrol in Zimbabwe is now the most expensive in the world so bus fares have shot up to $7 where it used to cost $1, so those going to work cannot afford the new prices. So there’s no income in the family.

I went to a particular church in Harare at the invitation of one of the Volunteers in Mission who had been going there with friends, but was concerned at what we would call prosperity theology. God blesses you and you get rich. Wealth is a sign of blessing. No, wealth is a sign that some people have benefitted from the system at the expense of other people.

The reasons for the continued high poverty in Zimbabwe include where people live. A recent World Bank report, Spatial Patterns of Settlement, Internal Migration and Welfare Inequality in Zimbabwe, suggests that entrenched poverty is a result of what are called deep rural spatial poverty traps. In 2017, extreme poverty was 13 times higher in rural than urban areas. During colonial times, communal areas were designated as locations where African farmers could live and farm; the most productive land was designated for white commercial farmers. A sizeable proportion of the rural population live in these communal lands that are densely populated and far away from the main road network. They are poorly connected to markets. These areas suffer from the highest poverty rates and the proportion of the extreme poor living in communal lands increased in 2017 from 2/3 in 2012 to 3/4 – and continues to escalate.

‘The system’ is controlled by power and privilege, and not for the benefit of the poor. Looking outside the system, at grassroots movements for change, and new start up companies, here’s a great example of what can be done.

The power outages in Zimbabwe are extensive, and many women deliver babies by candlelight and torches and the light of a mobile phone. Sophisticated equipment relies on electricity, compromising maternal and infant care. The United Nations Population Fund describes Zimbabwe’s maternal death rate as “unacceptably high”. Power generators are out of the question because of the cost of fuel, with a 300% inflation rate last year. In 2019, the state-owned Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (Zesa) introduced 18-hour load shedding after reducing electricity generation due to low water levels in Lake Kariba, its main source of power. That means the power is out most of the day and comes on overnight when people are sleeping. Well, not anymore – people have adjusted their routines to get up and do the household chores overnight when the people is on.

We Care Solar, a California-based NGO, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) are working with the government to install solar power systems in clinics and hospitals nationwide. We Care Solar provide compact rugged solar electric systems called solar suitcases which provide bright lights and foetal heart monitoring. More than 4,000 health centres in Africa and Asia have been equipped with this technology. Since 2016, We Care Solar has supported 136 maternal health facilities with reliable lighting and electricity in Zimbabwe and aim to install the solar system at a total of 1,000 clinics, as part of the Light Every Birth campaign.

More grassroots movements for change and start up companies and NGOs may provide the change that is required, rather than waiting for systems – financial and political – to make the change for the benefit and well-being of all people.

‘Rise up, pick up your mat and walk’ invites us all to think about ways that empowerment comes to people in our time and place, and for people in Zimbabwe, so that all may flourish. May it be so.

Today, your understanding, prayerful and practical support and solidarity, will be welcomed by the men, women and children in Zimbabwe. Thank you.

(1) Fritz Wendt, Addressing Poverty when the System Fails

by Professor Michael Clarke

As an ecologist who has had the privilege of studying Australia’s unique fauna for 38 years, it has been deeply disturbing to witness the carnage wrought by this season’s bushfires on our people, land and wildlife. Adding insult to injury, scientists are now being criticised by Tony Abbott for getting “religious” by arguing that there are, in fact, links between global emissions, record-breaking drought in parts of the continent, megafires and climate change. Then, never one to be outdone, Donald Trump in Davos chastised scientists for being “perennial prophets of doom” — who should, instead, put their faith in technology to solve the big problems.

The broad consensus among climate scientists tells me that we humans have poured out so many pollutants into the atmosphere that we are now on the verge of altering the planet’s climate irreversibly. This climate crisis is leading to the potential extinction of hundreds of species and the suffering of millions of people. So, for a former Prime Minister, who professes a faith, to dismiss the science because it has “almost a religious aspect to it” disturbs me both as a scientist and as a Christian.

The most recent estimates by ecologists indicate that 70 nationally threatened species have had at least 50 percent of their habitat burnt by the current megafires — including the Long-footed Potoroo, the Kangaroo Island Dunnart, and the Kangaroo Island Glossy Black Cockatoo. In Victoria alone, 12 species of frogs, 27 fish or freshwater crayfish, 11 birds, 22 mammals and 12 reptiles are of immediate conservation concern. One hundred and sixty-eight species of plants in Victoria have had at least 50 percent of their habitat burnt.

But these species have not suddenly become threatened just because of the current fires. We are seeing the cumulative effect of slow, steady, incremental habitat loss, fragmentation and degradation. This is death by a thousand cuts, with the megafires delivering the final lethal blow to species already on their knees.

The current bushfires may be unprecedented, but no one should be claiming they were unexpected. Climate and fire scientists have been warning us for years that the catastrophes we are now enduring would become more frequent due to climate change. So irrespective of whether or not an American president means to demean these scientists by calling them “prophets of doom” — they were right, which is a pretty fair test of a prophet in my book.

As a scientist, I find it ironic that some leaders reject the warnings of vast numbers of scientists about the dangers of inaction on climate change, while at the same time admonishing us to put our faith in technological fixes (developed by other scientists). The latter is naïvely optimistic; the former is simply irresponsible.

Frustratingly, it is also a distraction from the main challenge we face — which is moral, rather than scientific.

I genuinely hope scientists will contribute massively to helping the world address the climate crisis, but if history teaches us anything, it is that science and technology are not deployed in a moral vacuum. Everyday, we all make choices about the kinds of technologies we do or don’t employ, and those choices have consequences for the planet. Scientists can inform us about the likely consequences of that deployment, but what we do with that information comes down to our values and the values of those who lead us.

As a Christian, I deeply regret that many of us who claim to be followers of Christ have not taken seriously enough our responsibility to care for this precious planet, its people or its wildlife. There are at least three core principles of my faith that I can’t reconcile with any complacency towards the threats posed by climate change.

First, depriving future generations of the beauty and privileges we have enjoyed violates a basic commandment: “Thou shalt not steal.” My generation’s negligence amounts to theft from future generations. Such flagrant disregard for the needs of our children and grandchildren simply can’t be concealed behind some misplaced optimism that God will bail us out at the end of the Age.

Second, a core tenet of my faith (and others) is, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It may be true that Australia acting alone to reduce emissions would not have prevented the current — or future — bushfires. However, as one of the world’s most affluent nations, we have an opportunity and an obligation to lead and set an example for others (“From those to whom much has been given, much will be demanded”). If we can’t take serious action on climate change, who can? Our nation’s creative accounting practices in claiming historical carbon credits, coupled with excuses that our emissions are comparatively trivial by global standards and invoking the “drug dealers defence” to justify our coal exports (“If we don’t sell coal to China, somebody else will”), is to me, morally bankrupt — especially while also accepting extraordinarily generous donations from the governments and citizens of developing nations like Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea to aid our bushfire recovery.

Aid agencies such as Oxfam, World Vision and Save the Children, who support the most vulnerable people on the planet, recognise that inadequate action on climate change is also a justice issue here and now — not just an economic inconvenience or technological challenge. These agencies deal daily with the suffering of environmental refugees, whose homelands can no longer support them, and they are calling on governments to be bolder in reducing emissions.

Third, and finally, I think we have a responsibility to be wise stewards of the extraordinary gift the Creator has entrusted to us. Our nation’s behaviour often reminds me of Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son who squandered his father’s inheritance. My hope is that, like the prodigal, we will come to our senses and acknowledge our reckless ingratitude and the trashing of our precious inheritance. I hope we will seek the Creator’s forgiveness for our callous disregard for the suffering of those with whom we share the planet, and be part of the solution.

Originally posted 3^rd February 2020:

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/michael-clarke-getting-religious-about-climate-change/11925520

Michael Clarke is Professor of Zoology at the Research Centre for Future Landscapes, in the Department of Ecology, Environment and Evolution, La Trobe University. In 2007, Professor Clarke was awarded the D.L. Serventy Medal by the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union for his outstanding contribution to the scientific literature in ornithology. In 2010, he was an expert witness in fire ecology at the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission. In 2014 his research on fire ecology with Professor Andrew Bennett was one of three finalists for a Eureka Prize in Environmental Research. He served as the Head of the School of Life Sciences at LaTrobe University from 2011-2019. He is a fellow of ISCAST — Christians in Science and Technology.

The coronavirus has infected nearly 80,000 people in 37 countries, causing at least 2,600 deaths so far. To date, South Korea has reported a total of 893 cases, the second most in the world and 484 came from Daegu, the hometown in South Korea of Rev Dr Paul Goh, Justice Officer, and Cross-Cultural Ministries in the SA UCA Synod office.

Paul wrote the following prayer:

Lord, in your mercy you healed those suffering in body, mind or spirit. We cry out to you now on behalf of those infected by the coronavirus. Heal the sick, and bind up the broken-hearted who grieve those felled by this illness.

As both infection and fear spread, we ask for courage and protection for healthcare workers risking their own well-being for the sake of others. We pray wisdom for government officials and those in decision-making positions. May they rightly discern what needs to be done to treat those already infected and prevent others from falling sick.

We know there are those in quarantine, afraid they might be exposed to illness, wondering when they will return to their normal lives, anxious about what might happen next. Comfort them with your peace that passes understanding and grant them patience during this liminal and frightening season.

Lord of all, we are intimately connected to one another no matter where we reside on the earth, and so we plead for healing, good healthcare, relief and wholeness for our siblings in China and in all the places where this virus has made its appearance. May our collective care, effort, resources and love bring an end to this epidemic. Amen.

On 24 January 2020, President Dr Deidre Palmer took part in a forum in Sydney organised by the Public Interest Advocacy Centre on the latest version of the Religious Freedom Bills drafted by the Federal Government.

Thank you for the invitation to be part of this conversation. I hope that at this forum we can progress this important conversation.

The Uniting Church has for many years called for religious freedoms in Australia to be protected within a broader picture of the commitment to uphold all human rights. Our preference is for the development of a Human Rights Act or Charter.

Uniting Church members enjoy the freedom to practice our religion in Australia and we seek to do it in such a way that encourages the wellbeing and flourishing of all people, regardless of their race, gender, sexuality or religion.

We would not want, in exercising our right to practice our religion, to violate the human rights of others.

The fundamental Christian belief is that every person is created in the image of God, deeply loved by God and of infinite value, and that every person is equal before God and before the law.

We have and will continue to advocate for all people to be respected, treated with dignity, and to have their rights protected.

The first and second drafts of this Religious Discrimination Bill give us the freedom to practice our religion.

This is a good thing, although I might add it’s a right which we already enjoy without impediment.

My concern with the design of this Bill is to make sure that protections for religious belief do not undermine the rights, wellbeing and sense of identity of other people.

Over the years women, First Peoples, and LGBTIQ people have suffered from particular interpretations of Scripture and practices of religion that I would call “narratives of harm”, rather than “narratives of hope”.

Within the Uniting Church context, we would expect our congregations and ministry agents to express their faith in such a way that they are contributing to the wellbeing of people and communities in which they are ministering.

From my experience, Uniting Church schools and agencies do not discriminate in their employment practices, and don’t want to either.

The exception we have sought, is the ability to discriminate in terms of belief for key leadership roles within the Church and our agencies, roles that we see as crucial to the transmission of the faith and our ethos. (President, Moderator, General Secretary, chaplains). Generally, in job descriptions for such positions, it is clearly stated that these are essential requirements.

The Uniting Church supports this legislation, where it protects religious minorities who experience discrimination. We support protection for other faiths in Australia. People of Muslim, Jewish and other faiths are much more likely to be the subject of religious discrimination.

We have heard from the Jewish community about the ongoing anti-Semitism they experience and the research from the Islamophobia project has documented ongoing discrimination against people of Muslim faith here in Australia.

To be a welcoming, inclusive, multi-faith and multicultural society, it is important that people are able to freely practice religion without fear.

Christians of all persuasions enjoy and exercise a robust freedom of speech in Australia. But privileging statements of religious belief at the expense of other people’s dignity and wellbeing is not something we support.

Christians in Australia are not persecuted. In Australia, churches aren’t victims. To cultivate some kind of victim status is disingenuous. We are significant, influential organisations, actively contributing in positive ways to the Australian community.

Uniting Church agencies deliver community services to more than 1.4 million people.

Our schools educate hundreds of thousands of students.

To sum up, my understanding of Christian faith and the way of Jesus is that it is about liberation, love and justice for all people.

These are the positive values I’d like to see reflected when Christians speak about human rights.

Whatever the outcome of this legislation, I would hope that both within Australian faith communities and in our wider Australian society, that we would promote respectful conversation among people who have different viewpoints, for the common good of all.

Dr Deidre Palmer

President, Uniting Church in Australia

REFLECTION on Matthew 5:13-16 – 9th FEBRUARY, 2020
(by Annemarie Reiner, Coordinator, Listening Heart Contemplative Centre)

When we refer to a person as ‘the salt of the earth’ we all have an image in mind of what that means. When we say someone is ‘a light in my life’ we also know what that means. During the bushfires that have happened and continue to blaze across our lands and communities, we are now hearing of stories and experiences of where the ‘salt of the earth’ people, and those who are ‘a light in my life’ have emerged and are inspiring us amidst all the horrendous suffering and loss.

These people often make suffering bearable. They expose us to courage, vulnerability, goodness and what it is to have compassion, to nurture and to Love. Such shocking tragedies often bring out the very best in us. They help move us out of our complacency and apathy and we put all sensibility, selfishness and fear aside and simply ACT from that deepest part of us. We instinctively become vulnerable. How many stories of vulnerability have we heard and will continue to hear that have emerged during these past months? Countless.

In a very real way, many of us have become sterile and allowed our ‘salt to become tasteless’, and have ‘hidden our lights under a tub’ – that is until something happens (like the fires) that can plunge us into who we truly are – people who have each other’s backs, people who will risk their own lives for the other and the ‘whole’, people who are generous, and are suddenly prepared to be vulnerable in ways they never imagined. All of us have been moved and horrified at the same time as we have watched and heard the stories. Many of us may well have been those who truly risked their lives for their ‘neighbour’ (regardless of colour, race or creed) and have survived to share their stories.

Almost certainly their lives and our collective lives will never be the same again. The Australian psyche has been forever changed and the World too has watched on in disbelief.

It seems that mostly we have to lose something before we are able to receive something. This seems to be part of our human condition. Whether it’s losing our security in such a wonderful country, whether it is the loss of loved ones or possessions, or whether we have experienced powerlessness in the face of what is before us, all suggest a loss of something, but also an extraordinary ability to become consciously vulnerable within it all. And it is this vulnerability that has the capacity to change everything for us and for our world.

We live in a time where our Earth is shattering many of our dreams. We no longer can feel secure and are scampering around trying to find ways to sure up our security and our consumerist world, we have been confronted with our powerless in the faces of the many natural forces our beautiful Earth has faced us with, and we are also confronted with just how vulnerable we are in the face of it all and we feel the very essence of our life is being threatened on many levels. We do not like it. Life as we have known it on our Earth is changing – that is our reality now. As long as we scurry around like rats in a feeding frenzy trying to shore up what we have had, and continue the life we have largely enjoyed, to bury our heads in the sand, to ignore our Earth that is pleading with us to LISTEN to Her, then we are like a person holding a garden hose to ward of being surrounded by hundred-metre-high flames in 100km hour winds. It can’t be done.

Our Earth is sending message after message to listen to her. Our scientists are begging us to see that life cannot go ahead with ‘business as usual’. We are not co-operating with our Earth; we are actually working against Her. Australia is quickly losing its credibility on the world stage firstly with our record of the way we treat refugees and secondly as a country that is in denial with regard Climate Change. There is no vision, no preparedness to become vulnerable, and no capacity to see past those words ‘a growing economy’.

Our politicians (on both sides) play us for fools, lie to us about reaching our emissions targets, play economic games with emissions figures, and encourage us to build more coal fired power stations, more dams, ‘adapt’ and become more ‘resilient’ is the advice coming from our Government. We are in CRISIS just as those who have braved these shocking fires are in crisis and are courageous enough to enter into a state of vulnerability and risk everything to survive and help others to survive. In this situation, if we are not prepared to risk, to become vulnerable, to be ‘salt of the earth’ people, to be ‘a light to the nations’ people, then we are leaving nothing for the generations to come and our very survival is in jeopardy.

Even if we doubt the Science (but with what evidence?), if we feel ourselves bound by blind political idealism and damaging loyalty, if we sense our own apathy, the call is to RISE and ACT – why would we jeopardise our human survival and the survival of all life on this planet because of our own selfish needs and often ignorant belief systems? But don’t we keep doing it?

If we are not prepared to become vulnerable, in every sense of the word, then we are ignoring the calls and cries of our Earth. If our Earth weeps, we will weep eventually. When we weep and our Earth weeps, the God within us also weeps. Our God is surely weeping even if we are too blind to see it. If we are not weeping within the Crisis we find ourselves in, then surely we do not know the God we proclaim to know? It is not a political issue, and yet we have politicised it. It is not an ‘us and them’ matter, and yet we have divided it in such a way. It is not ‘she’ll be right mate..’, because it isn’t right. We have now ignored the Scientific warnings and predictions for decades and we have had a taste this summer of what might lie ahead of us in future years – a summer that Science predicted. Our Earth simply will not tolerate being ignored. She is reactive to our ignorance and selfishness, because She, like us, has a deep desire to survive and live to Her full potential. She is like all of us and we are like her.

For those who do not want their privileged lives disturbed or disrupted, for those who have the most to lose as far as assets and business are concerned, for those who can’t be bothered with it all, for those who blindly go along with a particular ideology pushed by power mongers and so often received in ignorance and wherever the rest of us fit into this picture – the message is we must open into becoming vulnerable. We must learn to become courageous, be images of goodness, be people of compassion, and nurture Love all around us – including our Love of the Earth and Her Love for us. We keep breaking the bonds of that Love by our ignorance and refusal to ACT.

It seems pretty obvious that we would be most unwise to rely on the shocking and shameful inaction and political game playing operative within many of our politicians on all sides of politics. It is we the people who must now act. It matters the way in which we choose to live our lives. It matters what foot print we leave upon the Earth. Our consciousness about the Crises we are well and truly facing, matters deeply.

We have great power within us to change what our politicians are refusing to act upon. If we play politics with this, then we lose. What we need to do is embrace the Divinity within us that is prepared to become vulnerable for each other and for our World in a way where we truly become ‘the salt of the Earth’ and ‘a light to each other and other nations’. Because so many of our political leaders are gutless to truly lead, does not mean that is also our lot. It isn’t.

There have been extraordinary lessons emerging as these fires have burned through our various States and communities, and they have scarred deeply our souls and our landscape – our preparedness to become vulnerable perhaps being the most evident and the most Grace filled.

As Marianne Williamson says, and so many of us are familiar with this powerful quote, but perhaps we need a reminder of its confronting challenge to us all:
‘Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.’
© Annemarie Reiner, originally published on Facebook 5th February 2020