Blog, Sermon or Both

I am not sure whether a sermon counts as a blog but here goes. This is from 26 October 2014.

Last Saturday, the Feast of St Luke, Evangelist and Martyr was a significant event for me for three reasons.

The first was that it was the occasion for the St John’s Parish Fair. This is always a joyous event for me. It is one of those occasions when I can just wander around among people, communicating with members of our parish community as well as people who I have not met before from the wider community. There is no particular reason for me to be there. I don’t have anything to sell. I just enjoy being with the people who are there for a couple of hours. In clergy circles we call it ‘loitering with intent’ and it is one of the greatest privileges that we have. I would say that some of the most important conversations that I have had over the past 8 years have occurred at the Fair and this year was no different.

The second reason for the significance of the day was that it was 25 years since I learnt that I was to be ordained deacon at the ordination that year. The interesting thing is that I was informed that I was to be ordained by Bishop Owen standing under the Lychgate here at St John’s.  It was at the conclusion of the funeral of my good friend and mentor John McKellar. John was one of the last of a group of men who were ordained by Bishop Burgmann as deacons in the workplace. Most of them were later ordained priests and many went on to serve as full-time parish clergy. John was the exception. He served as a deacon and priest in this parish, St Paul’s Manuka and St Alban’s Lyons while maintaining his career in science with the CSIRO. I had felt for many years that I was called to a similar ministry in the workplace and had learned much about the pressures and great rewards of such a ministry. Bishop Owen’s challenge to me that day was to take up the baton that John had laid down.

The third reason for the significance of St Luke’s day last Saturday was that it was the culmination of 18 month’s planning by my friend Jim and a small committee of our colleagues to bring about an amazing reunion of the 1964 class of Coffs Harbour High School. That’s right, I know I don’t look that old but it is 50 years since my school friends and I did the NSW Leaving Certificate. I had heard about the planned reunion in the middle of last year and embraced the concept with enthusiasm. I thought it was a great idea to have the opportunity to catch up with people most of whom I had not seen for nearly 50 years. We were really the first big batch of baby boomers to hit the school so there was a very large number of us in the first 3 years of High School. Even in our final year there were nearly 70 of us, a previously unheard of number.

So we planned our year so that I could be there. It was one of those events where my ability to talk the leg off an iron pot comes to the fore so I would have been in my element. Unfortunately, there was no way to take into account the vicissitudes of life or that it would take well over 3 months for me to recover from a bout of whooping cough. So in the end I had to pull out.

The great thing was that even though I was not there I still felt very much included as I was asked to contribute in a number of ways. One was to make a short video with a message that could be played at the dinner. This proved much more difficult than I had ever imagined. It is not easy talking to a camera which refuses to respond no matter what. I said to my friend who had asked for it that preaching to a congregation of a couple of hundred was a piece of cake by comparison. Eventually, since no one else had managed to send a DVD we decided to cut our losses and not worry about it, but by that stage I had resorted to writing a brief script. So in the end I sent him the script which was read instead.

I talked about the enduring nature of the friendships that we made back then in which conversations could be taken up again as if it was yesterday. This was true even though in many cases we had not been in touch for 50 years. I went on to say, “We are a special community that has been around for the past fifty years and more – mostly unnoticed. It has taken the efforts of a few people to bring it to life. We all need this community to be vibrant – to be a visible sign of our care and support for each other.”

It is amazing where, and how easily, community pops up in our world today. In a place I visit, I am able to walk to church on Sundays. I walk past a particular café and there, Sunday by Sunday, are groups of people, sitting at tables together enjoying breakfast and each other’s company. Are these groups of people ‘community’? It is impossible to tell. But there is certainly a vibrancy about the interaction between the individuals which makes me realize that there is something positive going on here. Of course, communities like this and the community of the 1964 leavers from Coffs Harbour High School are of their nature closed communities. They incorporate a particular limited group of people who qualify for membership in a particular way. The community of the church is entirely the opposite. We are an open community that welcomes everyone.

We in the church pride ourselves on our ability to do community. We proclaim week by week that we are the community of the Body of Christ. And we mostly do incredibly well putting our community ideology into practice. This is never an easy task and it is one that we struggle with at times. For example, I often ask myself how effective we are at reaching the ideal , an open community where all people feel welcomed and at home no matter what their circumstances; how readily do we accept the stranger and those who are different from us? It is not at all surprising that we feel comfortable with a stable community. We know where we stand in a stable community and living in a community which is completely open can be exhausting. Being open to new and different people means constantly readjusting our lives as the people of God to incorporate others.

And it is this issue which was central to the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees which reaches its climax in the Gospel today. For the Pharisees, the thing that determined whether you were part of the Jewish community was whether you lived according the law. And it wasn’t this simple summary law that Jesus proclaimed. It was literally thousands of rules that governed the minutia of everyday life. These determined whether an individual was inside or outside the community. Trying to live according to the prescriptions of the law was oppressive. The revolutionary proclamation of Jesus was that in the Kingdom of God everyone is welcome. The Kingdom of God is an entirely open community which is based not on living by the law but on living in love.

As followers of Jesus Christ we are called into a community of love which is open to all without distinction.