Sermon: Jonah versus God

Sermon for Romsey/Lancefield

Epiphany 3, 22^nd of January, 2012

Jonah 3:1-5, 10

Normally, on days when we have a baptism, I preach a sermon that says something about what we believe happens in baptism. I’m not going to do that today. Later this morning, we’re going to commission Jay Brooks as a lay preacher, so I could take this time to say something about the ministries to which all Christians are called, of which preaching is one. I’m not going to do that either. Because today the lectionary gives us what I think is the only reading from the Book of Jonah that we get in the entire three year cycle, and the Book of Jonah is so awesome, and so hilarious, that I want to talk about it. We’re only given six verses in the lectionary, but I’m going to take you through the entire book. So, sit back and relax.

Reflection for Christmas Day 2011

Isaiah 52:7-10
John 1:1-14

God has rolled up God’s sleeves and got down to it. ‘The Lord has bared his holy arm’ and is participating in the everyday life of the world. This is what God has always done, from the beginning of creation, but today we celebrate the strange, new way God did it in Bethlehem some two thousand years ago. In the birth of a baby the pre-existing Word took on flesh and became a human being like us. He came to bring us the good news of peace and salvation, and to show us in his life what that good news looks like.

Sermon for Social Justice Sunday: Boat People (2)

Sermon for Romsey and Lancefield Uniting Churches

September 25, 2011; Social Justice Sunday

In September, as I said last time I was here, we’re given the option to turn aside from the lectionary for a few weeks and celebrate the Season of Creation. This Season recognises that God didn’t just create humanity, and that the world Jesus entered includes more than just us. Man and woman may be at the heart of creation, but we’re not the whole of creation. We’re one part of it, and we depend upon it. So today we’re invited to think about rivers, and for most of this service that’s what we’ll do. But today is also Social Justice Sunday and the first Sunday after the 2011 meeting of the Synod of Victoria and Tasmania, and for both those reasons in this sermon I’m going to turn our attention from the non-human creation back to humanity. The World Student Christian Federation, which had a huge influence on my formation through the Australian Student Christian Movement, says that Christians need to approach the world with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, and that’s definitely what I want to do today. I want to talk about boat people.

Sermon: We are all boat people

Sermon for Riddells Creek and Mount Macedon Uniting Churches

August 7, 2011; Ordinary 19

Matthew 14:22-33

Listening to today’s gospel reading is one of those times when our twenty-first century Australian mindset can create a problem. Generally, we’re happy coastal dwellers, much more apprehensive about Australia’s vast inland than about its oceans. In contrast, as I’ve mentioned before, the people of Ancient Israel did not like the sea. The Book of Revelation actually offers a vision of paradise where the sea will be no more, (Rev 21:1) which isn’t a vision of paradise that works for me. For the people of Israel the sea was traditionally the source of deep and threatening power, a place of danger and terror. So when the disciples, in today’s reading, are in a boat, battered by the waves and far from land, they feel not only the immediate fear caused by their situation, but the primeval fear of chaos and the abyss inherited from their ancestors.