Christmas | Filling earth with the culture of heaven

Scene: The minister sits in the wooden throne behind the pulpit, gazing fixedly at her phone, while the congregation waits anxiously for her to begin the sermon … One from the archives. (Listen here.)

Whoops, sorry, is it me? I was just praying with an app. It’s awesome, it helps me be more spiritual. And it’s been recommending other apps: there are so many! There are apps for prayer and meditation. There are apps for reading the Bible in a year, and for memorising scripture, and for reading a single passage very slowly. There are apps to log my spiritual habits; apps with the Ignatian examen; apps with daily liturgies from monasteries; apps to frame silence.

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Matthew | Love in the shadows

God demands Joseph wake up to a deeper reality, where love takes priority over obedience to God’s law and scandal forms the womb of grace. One from the archives. (Listen here.)

This Sunday, in the midst of Christmas chaos plus a funeral, I brought out an oldie but a goodie for Manningham Uniting Church. You might hear it as a simple reflection personal faith, and that’s well and good. But for those who have ears to hear, it also has much to say about current events, whether the shootings in Bondi, the ongoing deaths in Gaza, or so much more. For, in Matthew’s story, God demands that notions of righteousness and holiness are set aside in favour of love. In such a faith, violence is impossible, not only the violence of holy war but the violence which demands we destroy the violent. This loving insistence on nonretaliation is one incarnation of the scandal of grace. But for now, let’s turn our attention to a man caught up in another aspect of scandal incarnate: Joseph.

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Matthew | Expectation management

What are we waiting for? And how, then, do we wait? (Listen here.) Content note: One mention of suicide, in the first paragraph only.

The saddest funeral I ever did was for a young woman who died by suicide. She attended a very high energy local church, all praise and worship. However, it did not do funerals and certainly not for suicide. Trying to find a pastor who would hold a service for their daughter, her distraught parents were eventually given my name.

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Matthew | On Baptists, snakes and holy fire

As our faith matures, some things will be burned away. (Listen here.)

It was my first Sunday at Manningham Uniting Church. After the service, a person came up to me looking rather anxious. ‘I understand you’re a Baptist,’ they said. I confirmed that this is indeed the case. ‘Well,’ they said, ‘it may interest you to know that some people here believe in science.’ I suddenly realised why they looked so worried.

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Matthew | Our hope in the dark: Being left behind with Jesus

Maybe being left behind is the better thing. (Listen here.)

My friend came home from school one day and found the house empty. His mother was visiting with the neighbour, but my friend didn’t know that. He walked around that empty house calling, ‘Mum? Mu-um!! MUM!!!’ No reply. My friend went up the stairs and checked the bedrooms. No mum. He checked the bathroom, the linen closet, the laundry. Still no mum. He went out into the garden and checked front and back, then he checked the shed. Nothing. Once he realised that she really wasn’t there, he collapsed into a foetal position, sobbing. His worst fear had been realised: the rapture had happened, his mother had been taken, and he’d been left behind.

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Colossians | The visible image of God

Corporate logos vs the cosmic λόγος. (Listen here.)

Whenever I hear Colossians or pretty much any of Paul’s letters, my brain has a tendency to shut down. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I think or maybe, ‘Yeah, nah,’ as I impatiently wait for the gospel reading. Why? Because Paul’s letters are packed with political and cultural references that we all too often miss. So we tend to talk about them using formal theological terms and other religious mumbo-jumbo, spiritualising what are actually explosively political texts. In this way we answer questions no-one’s really asking, rendering the texts abstract, lifeless and marginal to our faith.

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Isaiah | A vision for the City of Manningham

Isaiah’s vision of the city of joy, shared at the induction of Rev Con Apokis. (Listen here.)

A city of joy, its people a delight: this is what God promises through the prophet Isaiah. It sounds wonderful! So, what are the elements of this joyful city? First, says Isaiah, health and wellbeing. No child will die young; no senior die prematurely (Isaiah 65:20). And we can imagine it. In this city, the air is clean, and the soil and waters, too. There are no coal-fired power stations; no rampaging wildfires; no unprecedented floods. No children or elders are struggling for breath through air yellow with smog; no one is sick from forever chemicals because these are forever banned; no one is collapsing from extreme heat.

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Luke | Resurrection now!

Resurrection life starts today! A little something from the archives, refreshed for a new context. (Listen here.)

If you’re a fan of Bon Iver, perhaps you know he takes his stage name from the greeting shared in the quirky tv show, Northern Exposure. Bon hiver! Good winter! In the show, a young urban Jewish doctor is sent to small town Alaska to pay off his medical tuition. There he encounters all sorts of eccentric inhabitants, including Maggie. Maggie’s a bush pilot whose boyfriends have all died in bizarre ways. Steve was hit by lightning. Harry ate tainted potato salad. Bruce had a fishing accident. Glen took a wrong turn into a missile test range. Dave froze to death on a glacier. Then Rick is killed by a falling satellite: and Maggie is somehow blamed.

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Psalms | Even the hard pathways overflow with abundance

A meditation on rivers and soil and economies of gift and abundance. (Listen here.) For the record, I preached this, said Amen, then there was a great long rumble of rolling thunder followed by beautiful, softening rain. We at MUC took this as the earth’s Amen; you can draw your own conclusions.

Back in the 1800’s, a vast swamp and river basin in Toronto were covered over. The wetlands were buried eight metres deep in dirt and gravel so that the city could expand. In the 1920’s, the river itself was re-routed into a concrete channel, so its path could be fixed and the area even more heavily industrialised. Factories poured their waste into the river; raw sewage was also directed there. The river became so polluted that it was declared dead. On several occasions, it caught on fire.

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Luke | George & Ruby & the long arc of history

Justice takes prayer and persistence. (Listen here.)

Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a war on. Authorities were concerned that power stations might be bombed, and with them, the people who lived nearby. So, along with many other children, a boy named George was evacuated from his home near the power station at Yallourn and sent to live in Bendigo. At his new primary school, he sat next to a girl named Ruby, and they’ve been sitting next to each other ever since. Last week, they celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary.

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