God gives us death; the gift is nature kind. Death puts to an end the pains of old age, making space for those in the queue behind. God writes each chapter and the final page.
Species yield to species, each man to a new, Deep time sweeps all away to stubborn death. Death’s truth’s not sad, it’s merely stark worldview: Each allotted our finite store of breath.
So death spreads from past until the very end. But wait! There’s a surprise: God….! A new thing surpasses all we can know: Fresh universe of power and love to grow.
God rips death‘s fabric the curtain to transform, The new-made mystery; pristine creatures swarm. Alleluia!
- Genesis 1:20-23, & 2:7-8, John 1:1-18, Mark 15:38 - Ted Witham tssf, Easter A.D. 2025
I prepared the Prayers of the People for the Eucharist this morning – only to discover that they weren’t needed.
There is so much talk on social media about the dire state of the world and the possible end of the world, that I feel it is incumbent of us Christians to recall that Christian faith brings hope not despair.
Below is what I would have prayed:
The response for this morning’s intercessions is:
God of hope and assurance,
We thank you and we bless you.
God of peace, we thank you for those who bring peace to their neighbour and turn their despair and grief to hope and determination;
Empower those who are in negotiations for peace in Palestine and in Ukraine. Give them diplomacy, skill and a vision for the future.
Strengthen the leaders who are turning their word of peace into action.
God of hope and assurance,
We thank you and we bless you.
Lord of the Church, we thank you for those who show us the way of the Gospel, for our teachers in the faith as they assist us to work and pray.
We thank you for our ministry of encouragement one to another.
We praise you for your world-wide Church and the ways it witnesses to peace and kindness.
God of hope and assurance,
We thank you and we bless you.
God, you are the author of all healing. We thank you for all who care for the sick: for nurses and doctors, for care workers and researchers, for hospital staff and volunteers. We bless you for their ministry.
We thank you for parents and adult children who take time to care for their loved ones and nurture them back to health.
We thank you for all who are restored to health, and especially we thank you for Milton as he recovers from surgery.
God of hope and assurance,
We thank you and we bless you.
God, you call us into community. We bless you for the love of all who build and maintain community. We thank you for politicians and councillors as they work to make a more loving community. We thank you for each other as we contribute to the solidarity of our parish community.
God of hope and assurance,
We thank you and we bless you.
God, the author of all life, we praise you that you have called us into this life. We thank you for the joys and blessings of life, for those who love us, for our gifts well-used. We confidently praise you for leading us to a marvelous and eternal life.
Sermon at Saint Brendan’s-by-the-Sea, Warnbro, October 8, 2023
If you would rather listen to Ted preaching this sermon, click on the audio below:
The Lord be with you.
And also with you.
The Holy Gospel according to Saint Matthew
Glory to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
(Matthew 21:33-46)
33 ‘Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watch-tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. 34 When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. 35 But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. 36 Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. 37 Finally he sent his son to them, saying, “They will respect my son.” 38 But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.” 39 So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. 40 Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?’ 41 They said to him, ‘He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.’
42 Jesus said to them, ‘Have you never read in the scriptures:
“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone;[a] this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes”?
43 Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.[b]44 The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.’[c]
45 When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. 46 They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.
This is the Gospel of the Lord
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
In the name of the Living God, + Creator, Redeemer and Spirit.
Amen.
From Psalm 24:
The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it. (Psalm 24:1)
Ngaala kaaditj Noongar moort keyen kaadak nidja boodja We acknowledge the Noongar people as the original custodians of this land.
I have a special reason this morning for acknowledging that we are walking on the land of the Whadjuk people here in Noongar country near the border of the Pinjar Noongars.
There is something powerful and mysterious to reflect that human feet have trod this part of God’s world for at least 40,000 years.
I’d like to take you back just 65 years to Tambellup School, 80 kilometres north of Albany. I went to this school for seven years along with 200 other kids. About a quarter of the students were Noongar children.
One day when I was about eight, a group of three or four of the Noongar kids said to me that they had something special to tell me – but it had to be outside the school grounds. I was a well-behaved kid, so they must have been persuasive, because I found myself outside the school in the scrubby sandy country with the Noongar kids.
They told me an exciting story. I didn’t understand much of it, but I gathered it was about their grandparents being shot at. Some were very brave. Some hid in the river. Others ran away. One or two of the old men threw spears.
The same thing happened to me when I was about 11. Different kids, same story. I understood it more this time around. A band of white men on horseback attacked an Aboriginal camp. As they shot indiscriminately into the people for a full 90 minutes, an hour and a half, the frightened Noongars ran. The only way they could go was to the Murray River. They were forced into the river. Some hid in the water for hours using reeds to breathe. Others ran away. They were all brave.
I eventually found out that this event is known as the Pinjarra Massacre. The stories I heard were so vivid, I thought they were describing events in the life of their immediate grandparents, in 1934, but the shooting of perhaps 30 Noongars, maybe more, actually took place in 1834, just 30 minutes from here.
When I started putting these events into the context of European settlement and the taking of Noongar land, I found I wasn’t the only one to hear this story growing up. Other West Australian kids had had the same experience in the 1950s.
It seems to me this was a plan: to encourage Noongar kids to tell white kids the story of the Pinjarra Massacre, and to encourage us to tell other white people the story.
What amazes me is the tone in which this story was told to us. It wasn’t an accusation. It wasn’t to make us white people feel guilty. It was so that we would see the story from their side. It was to acknowledge that this is our shared history. It was to declare that the Noongar people want to walk side by side with us.
When they say, ‘Welcome to country’, they mean it. ‘We want to make peace. We want you to walk on our land together with us. We welcome you.’
If I have heard that message of welcome correctly, it’s amazing. The Pinjarra Massacre, as you know, was not the only mass killing of Noongar people near here.
Ambitious Lieutenant Bunbury making the road ‘safe’ for travellers heading south from Perth, led two mass shootings. One, which took place near York, was so ferocious that the Swan River Guardian in 1837 reported it as ‘Barbarities of theMiddle Ages.’[i]
… and they named the city after the young Lieutenant!
Where we used to live in Busselton, we learned that, on two occasions at least, settlers killed numbers of Wadandi Noongars each time in retaliation for a settler being killed.
Of course, I am not saying that the Noongars like what Europeans have done to them. Of course not. Mass killings to drive the First People off their land has meant that today – in 2023 – more of them are locked up, more of them die young, more of them have poor health and low levels of education. They grieve all that has happened and is still happening. It creates a burning anger. Noongars have every right to resist, and they have done in the past and they are still fighting. Yagan is a hero for a reason.
But each time violence is done to them, Noongar people still say, ‘We welcome you.’
To go on inviting us to peace, over and over again; this is crazy brave, and, I think, quite amazing.
The parable Jesus tells in this morning’s gospel is about the violence that the tenants in the vineyard inflict on the servants the landowner sends.
‘When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized the slaves, and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first. And they treated them in the same way.’ (Matthew 21:34-37).
Over and over. Slaves come. They are beaten. Others come. They are stoned. Others are sent. They are killed. The tenants inflict violence over and over. Finally, the landowner sends his son. They throw the son out of the vineyard and kill him.
When you hear this parable the first time, it seems to be about violence. The story shows the violent end that will come to people who live by violence.
But what if the parable is not mainly about the tenants and their violence?
What surprises me about the parable is the landowner’s actions. Right from the beginning we see that how patient this landowner is.
Anyone who plants a vineyard is patient.
My brother Jim decided to grow grapes on his farm at Broomehill. He planted the grapes and fenced the area. He tended the grapes. He attended lessons on viticulture at Harvey Ag. It was four years before he got any kind of harvest, and a couple more years before he could sell his own vintage. If you’ve ever been to Broomehill and bought Wadjekanup wines or Henry Jones port, you will have enjoyed the result of Jim’s patience.
So this landowner in today’s story is prepared to wait for his vines to bear fruit and produce wine. And then, when he thinks he can collect his share, his servants meet violence after violence. And what does the landowner do? He sends more servants. And then what does he do? He sends more servants. Even if they are only slaves, they are worth something. It’s extravagantly expensive to lose so many servants. It must break his heart each time. But he keeps sending them. Despite the repeated violence, the landowner still believes he can do business with the tenants.
In this way, the landowner is like God. God comes, God invites Godself into the life of his vineyard, over and over again.
God sends servants to us. Moses, for example. We keep hearing about Moses and the Ten Commandments. And we need to. The Ten Commandments are like a fence for the good life. Moses invites us to keep within those boundaries. But it’s so easy to say, ‘We don’t need moral guidance. We know what is good.’ We reject Moses. But God keeps sending him. At least once every three years in the lectionary, Moses pops up. God reminding us of the good life.
And poor Moses. Having led the people of Israel to within sight of the Promised Land, Moses dies on Mount Nebo before he can enter the new land.
God sends other prophets. Jeremiah is a whistleblower who speaks out about corruption. He ends up dropped in a dry well and then exiled to Egypt.
And on and on, through the Old Testament, and still after the time of Jesus.
God keeps sending servants. Last Wednesday, we celebrated the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi. For me, St Francis is a special prophet.
Through him, God reminds us that all of creation is our sister or brother. Through St Francis God reminds us not to be sucked into consumerism and greed. We need God to go on sending prophets like Saint Francis. Just look at the polluted environment we live in. Just look at the greed that capitalism engenders.
But for all his positive message, Francis ended up ill with malaria, managing the wounds in his hands and sides from the stigmata, coping with blindness and stomach complaints.
I think God is crazy brave, continuing to send us his servants. God is like the Noongars, continuing to invite us into their story, despite our repeated violence to them.
But finally in the parable, the landowner sends us his son. The son is treated no differently from all the other good servants. But we know now that there is a different ending for the Son of God. His death and resurrection are a signal from that the cycle of violence does not just go on and on. God will bring it to a joyful end.
So what is Jesus teaching us in this parable?
Firstly, that God is so generous. God keeps sending people and signs and messengers of all sorts to make sure that you and I know God’s love.
We are full of gratitude that God takes so much trouble to reach each one of us. This morning, as every Sunday morning, God comes to us in the bread and the wine, God’s presence among us and within us. We thank God for God’s persistent love.
Secondly, we too are God’s servants. We may find ourselves called to be messengers of God’s persistent love to others. We see the young Mum in the shops with a baby in her arms and a rebellious toddler screaming her lungs out. We can express sympathy. We’ve been there before. We might even find a way to help her.
Or a relative comes to talk to us about their faltering marriage. We listen. We may even dare to offer some advice.
Or we meet someone with a terminal diagnosis. We hesitantly find the words to say that, in Christ, death is not the end of the story. That God’s love goes on forever, in a more glorious fashion than we can begin to imagine.
Of course, when we are called to be a messenger, there’s a cost. The young Mum may angrily refuse our help. She may misunderstand our intentions.
Other members of the family may resent our intervention in someone’s marriage.
When we try to express God’s love for someone on the journey to death, we trip over our own grief, and our own fears. It hurts us, too.
We just sang William Vanstone’s hymn,
Love that gives, gives ever more, … spares not, keeps not, all outpours. … Drained is love in making full, … weak in giving power to be.
But God gives us the grace to go on being God’s persistent messenger of love. And, whatever the cost, we know ourselves to be more and more deeply immersed in God’s love.
Let us pray the prayer attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi.
Lord, make us channels of your peace: where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.
[i] Barbarities of the Middle Age have been committed even by boys and servants, who shot the unarmed woman, the unoffensive child, and the men who kindly showed them the road in the bush; the ears of the corpses have been cut off, and hung up in the kitchen of a gentleman, as a signal of triumph.
“He will search out your works and inquire into your plans.” (Wisdom 6:3b NRSV)
Deep under Duke University in a series of fluorescent-lit rooms, lies a whole different world. If you enter from the Divinity School library and take the elevator down to these “stacks”, you wander from room to room. Eventually, you leave the Divinity School library and meet the subterranean rooms of the main University library. In total, the Duke libraries contain 6 million volumes.
On a few occasions, I spent an afternoon searching for books and journals in this lower world. Because it is so vast, I found myself losing my orientation. I was drawn more and more deeply into the search: from this book, to this author, to this journal, to this Dewey number. It was a totally immersive experience: I felt pleasantly swallowed by the library.
As Christians, we seek the same immersive relationship with God, not necessarily through books, but through our lives, reflection on Scripture and conversations with fellow believers. We are drawn more deeply into who God is, experiencing more fully God’s love, God’s joy and God’s compassion for ourselves and others. We even experience a sense of dislocation, like wandering in the underground parts of Duke Library, never quite sure of the God who is ultimately beyond our understanding.
The writer of Wisdom reminds us of the surprising truth that this deep searching is reciprocated. Not only do we have the opportunity to search into the depths of God, but God searches us out and “inquires into our plans”. God loves us so dearly that he wants to know us through and through, intimately and passionately. God immerses Godself in us, roaming in our lives and tenderly exploring each part as he finds it. And as God discovers more and more who we are, so God’s searching love transforms this, then that, aspect of our lives.
As we search the depths of God, and God searches our depths, so we become more like God, forgiven and free to be loving, joyful and compassionate.
God is open to our searching. God invites our immersion
in God’s life. God rejoices in our deepening understanding of his nature. We too must decide to open ourselves to God’s searching, knowing that there is no part of us that God cannot redeem, and knowing too that God is determined to know as and to transform us.
Thought: God seeks to know us so he can love us more deeply. We seek to know God so we can love God and all God’s creatures more deeply.
Prayer: Open our hearts, God of Wisdom, and come into our lives and change us into your glory. Amen.
Can you breathe through spreading pain? Can you bear the suffering again? Can you bleach the blood-red stain? Can you stop the rape of Ukraine?
Can you dull the loins of those on heat for war? Can you block their guns as you’ve done before? Can the hope of peace-talks cry, ‘No More!’? Can fiery minds change their very core?
God, so implement the love of Calvary, Your eirenic Spirit blast the fighters free, Caress the world with mastery, Your love that heals painstakingly.
I didn’t expect, at age 70, to have to contend again with the dark. Not the dark of my childhood, when I feared a dressing gown draped over the door was an alien axe-wielding murderer, but the darkness of not knowing the God of my Christian faith.
Each time the darkness comes, I find it is easy to forget all I have been taught. Each time the darkness comes, I feel shame; shame as if the relationship with God I thought I had was sham; shame as if the faith I have taught I no longer experience; shame at the thought of having to profess publicly that I was wrong.
Along with the shame comes fear. At age 70, my thoughts turn healthily to my coming death and whatever follows. What if there is no “life after death”? What if there is no “beatific vision”? What if there is nothing? What value then do I have?
So it is good to be reminded by French Franciscan Thaddée Matura, in his essay An Ardent Absence, that darkness in Christian life is the norm, that grand encounters with God are infrequent and fleeting. Matura recalls us to the teaching that God is a fiery furnace, and if we were to encounter him as he is, we would immediately be burnt to nothing. It is due to his grace that we do not see him face-to-face in this lifetime.
Father Matura also reminds us that despite the darkness, we can continue to follow the paths to God to which we are committed. We are to prepare for the beatific vision, for the great meeting that will raise us to God ’s presence.
The darkness is hard. As we pass through it, we do not know what we are doing. We experience both fear and boredom. We may encounter the ‘plague that destroys at noonday’ (Psalm 91), the acedie of the desert fathers and mothers, as we question the whole of Christian life; we wonder if this darkness is the normal, then why? Why?
But I hang on to those fleeting moments of revelation, those traces, hints of reality. A realisation grew through 1969, the year of the Leighton Ford crusade, that friendship with Christ is the heart of Christian living. I remind myself of the dove I saw [in my mind] flying up and expanding its wings over the congregation after we had received communion on the Fourth Sunday in Easter in 1974 in St Mark’s, Fitzroy. I revisit my tears when, meditating in the hard seats in the chapel in Perth’s Wollaston College, I felt enveloped by love. I feel my heart jump when the icon of St Francis behind the chapel of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary in Brisbane appeared to move and gaze back at me.
And I can simply be affirmed by Thaddée Matura, as I am by St John of the Cross, by St Francis, by St Richard of Victor, by a lengthy list of Christian teachers, that we make our way through this world blind, in darkness, and our joy is real — but anticipatory.
George
Appleton, the prayerful Archbishop of Perth during the 1960s, once
wrote, ‘I go on in cold faith only because you push me.’ That push from an-Other keeps me going.
A young mother, grieving for the death of a baby, asks the question, ‘Will I be reunited with my Olivia in heaven?’
An elderly widower expresses certainty that he will be with his bride in heaven.
It’s almost as though Christian faith depends on after-death reunions of loved ones. The guidance, however, that Scripture gives us on this is vague and contradictory.
So, the totally honest answer to this question, especially as no-one has returned to tell us, is that we don’t know. But when faced with the direct question, ‘Will we be reunited in heaven?’, I hesitate.
Of course, the temptation for us pastors is to give the easy answer, the answer that people want to hear. The reality, however, is that we understand so little about life after death: what does time mean in life and after we die? What does resurrection mean for us as individuals? Will there be a different experience for those who do not identify as Christians? How will we connect with those from whom we have been estranged in this life? Cynical Sadducees asked Jesus a similar question, ‘In the resurrection, whose wife will she be?’ (Matthew 22:28)
Many people believe firmly that the church teaches that we, as individuals, will be united after death with loved ones. Many clergy taking funerals, without directly endorsing this view, allow it to stand as an implication of their pastoral message. I understand this prevarication: we are motivated to tell good news. I am deeply uncomfortable, however, with its dishonesty. This teaching falls short. There is better news.
The idea that we will be united with loved ones after death springs from a good place: it is an idea that the best God has given us in this life is love, and the one thing that we should expect from the eternal God is ongoing love.
In this life, we love with our bodies: we make love with our spouse with our body; we are present in the body to our friends. When we are absent from our loved ones, we project our bodies through space to continue the contact – our image on FaceTime, our voice on the telephone, our hand-writing in a card. These symbols of our body tell our loved one that we yearn to be present in the body.
Death destroys the body. Dust we are, and to dust we return (v. Genesis 3:19). The body is then transformed in resurrection. We know almost nothing about what Saint Paul calls the ‘resurrection body’, only that we would be a ‘foolish person’ to imagine it to be the same as our current body. It is as different from the natural body as the wheat plant is from a grain (I Corinthians 15:36-37)!
Love, after death, will also be the same and categorically different. While our bodies can love gloriously, God promises a love after death that is different in degree and in expression: a much better love. All bodily limitations to love will be removed and transformed. Who knows whether we will rise as individuals, or as love promises, somehow joined in love? Or something entirely different, and, as yet, unimagined?
My plea is that we settle for more than the idea that we will be reunited with loved ones, and that we take the Bible at its word (I Corinthians 2:9, quoting Isaiah 64:4), that God will exceed our imagination as to how wonderful love in the resurrection will be. It will be heaven!
The snake, in his tempting, makes us confused,
What is the sin, what punishment to come?
Is it pride, or wisdom or God’s traits to be used
that we deeply desire with our heart’s sum?
The snake, in his tempting, is skilled at misleading,
Look here, I’m a snake! Flabby sin at that address!
Is it sex, is it shame, is it clothes now receding?
Our focus is blurred by cold thoughtlessness.
The snake, in his tempting, makes our souls judder,
Shining skin in its blackness pretends to go deep:
Is it fear, is it self’s fickle flutter
that we dunk our souls in ourselves to steep?
Banish this snake, his crooked advance and sick ways,
Place God at the heart of our loupes’ precious gaze.
Lorraine Parkinson, Made on Earth: how the gospel writers created the Christ, Richmond, VIC: Spectrum Publications, 2016.
ISBN 9780867862546
Online: Paperback $49, Kindle $11.99
Reviewed by Ted Witham
For some years, I’ve held lightly to the doctrine that Jesus Christ was fully human and fully divine. It’s not that I wish to demote the importance of Jesus, which was the purpose of the original dogma. It’s more that a pre-modern conception of divinity does not do justice to the ways in which Jesus of Nazareth actually connects me with the sacred world.
Lorraine Parkinson’s new book Made on Earth helps me on my journey of belief by adding to the ways in which I can articulate my unease about Christology. She systematically works through the gospels in the order of their writing – Mark, Matthew, Luke and John – to show how the message of Jesus about the kingdom was deliberately transformed into a message about the identity of Jesus as the expected Messiah.
Lorraine Parkinson is a retired ordained minister in the Uniting Church based in Victoria, and is in demand as a speaker for meetings of progressive Christians around Australia.
She tells the story crisply of how the infancy narratives appear to have been added to Matthew and Luke inventing the idea of Jesus being conceived by the Holy Spirit, and thereby being God’s Son. She reveals how the life of Jesus was fitted into the typology of Moses or Elijah to further the argument for Jesus’ more than human status. The gospels
incomprehensible?
were a sermon to persuade readers that Jesus had transcended Judaism and that his followers needed to distinguish themselves from the Jews.
She makes a plea for ‘progressive Christians’ to turn back to the original teachings of Jesus. The gospel of Jesus as the one Messiah has led to a church that
relies on fear (making sure you are right with God so you can enter the afterlife),
that promotes anti-Semitism (the Jews are depicted as Christ-killers), and
that ends up as Christendom (the Church as a new Roman Empire focused on power).
Returning to a simple reliance on the Sermon on the Mount and the parables of Jesus will invigorate individual followers of the Way of Jesus and remove the weight of having doctrinal commitments to a divine Christ.
She asks us to remember that the Gospel writers were ordinary human beings who believed they were inspired by the Holy Spirit. Her arguments here appear to be based on common sense alone and I would have liked her to wrestle with the theology of inspiration a little more deeply. As followers of Jesus, understanding God’s truth and how we know it is an important issue.
This book is dangerous. It emits a whiff of heresy. I admire Lorraine Parkinson’s honest courage in questioning the 3rd and 4th Century interpretations of the meaning of the Gospel. We need prophets to show the way forward for followers of Jesus of Nazareth, and Made on Earth is an important step on that path.
I walk this distant red gorge path alone.
My feet seek strength but I fear its sheer side,
I reach out searching for my God: unknown.
I touch nothing and weep; my faith has died.
I trudge on with the bread and blood and Word
These connect me to the church not to God.
“Scriptura sola” is literally absurd
My only joy is that others have trod
This way; and overstepped the bounds of linking.
I’ve lost the power to feel where God creates,
Abandoned zeal, fearing downfall, am sinking —
Instead of love, my worship isolates.
I falter, fall, free-fall down the chasm deep,
I faithless, God grasps me, who makes the leap.
Luke 9:28-36 (February 7, 2016)
“Scriptura sola” – Latin tag meaning “Scripture alone”.
Lorraine Parkinson,
Mind Journeys 