mixed memories of my own 'first mass'

The thing is..  the memories of my own first presiding at the eucharist, my own ‘first mass’ – well, they are mixed with pain and sorrow.   For, in the late 1980s, we didn’t even have the ordination of straight women.  Nonetheless, after much personal agonising, I was ordained, living in my assigned male gender, reasoning that one more positive vote in the house of clergy was helpful, and, much more importantly, that God works in mysterious ways.  It was a time however of deep mixed feelings, and not of easy celebration.  My first mass was thus a strange affair.  It was the usual parish mid-week eucharist, in a side chapel of the old borough church of Hackney, in the east end of London, close to the tombs of the Baden Powell family (including the founder of scouting for boys).  There were but a handful of us, including a couple of regular attendees, the vicar, and, at the back, my wife Penny and a female friend: both deacons, but with clear priestly vocations, awaiting recognition in ordination.  Clinging together during the service, their tears flowed: tears of joy, but mixed with pain and sorrow.  Similarly, my heart, like theirs, was deeply torn, like a sword in the soul.  And, let’s be honest, for the marginalised, that has been the Mass, the eucharist, throughout history: a place and symbol of so much joy and healing and peace, but, at times, also of profound sorrow and rejection.  In it, as in Jesus’ own Last Supper, we therefore always bring together our memories and hopes, the realities of our lives and world, joyful and painful, and open ourselves to their transformation by grace.
 
Now I tell that story because I could not have imagined then that I would be who, and where, I, and all of us, would be today.  Perhaps Sylvia, you feel a bit like that today, and perhaps others here too?  Who would have thought?  And if then that, and now this, what else might now be possible?  For the Mass we share is a profound symbol of the transformations of our lives, of our world, and of our Church.  It invites us to bring all our past and present realities, in thanksgiving and in sorrow, for celebration and for healing.  Yet it also invites us into unprecedented futures, queering our expectations of time.  Which brings us to Melodramatic Matthew…
 
Melodramatic Matthew

How do we respond to today’s challenging Gospel reading?  It has often been bound up in speculation about the end times, including as an American Evangelical proof text for what they call The Rapture.  It certainly has a very definite either-or, black and white, sheep and goats, good and bad: a very binary feel to it.  Note the two women grinding meal together.  One is taken, the other left.  What a gift to the trans and homophobes!  No prizes for guessing how reactionary Christians determine which women will have the sticky end of things – Sylvia, that’s you, and me, and others of us here!  Such interpretations are such a travesty however, particularly looking at today’s opening verse, verse 33, which explicitly states that ‘noone knows’ the details of the end times. 
 
Today’s Gospel text really is not such a problem if we remember that, and we also remember who is writing it, and their intention.  For this is Matthew’s Gospel, which is saturated with similar theatrical features.  Yes, we have some similar aspects in other Gospels.  However, it is Matthew who offers the most fertile ground for those seeking texts to exclude and excoriate others.  After all, Matthew gives us most of the Gospel references to hell, melodramatically pictured as a place of rejection, of outer darkness, gnashing of teeth, and burning fire. Throughout the Gospel, Matthew loves such shock and awe, painting with strong primary colours, with terrific fondness for binary distinctions, and with little taste for pastel colours (as many Anglicans prefer, at least in this capital city of our continent).
 
So, can Melodramatic Matthew be our friend, and even a queer ally?  Well, with such reservations, yes.  For today’s text is about shaking up our ordinary expectations of time and life, which, of course, is a very queer thing to do.  As Australia's First Peoples also remind us, divine time is not like Western time: with past, presnet, and future all straightened out, just one thing after another.  Like Advent as a whole, Matthew's Gospel challenges us to wake up; to re-imagine our lives, world, and possibilities; in other words, to trans – to transform, transfigure, transition – even to trans the substance of our existence.  For, just like the Mass, we are invited by Melodramatic Matthew to share in the Miracle of God’s transforming Love: to embrace the full Mystery of life, becoming the people we most truly are, or could be.  Reading with queer eyes, today’s Gospel text is thus not a prescription, a straightforward prediction of woe, as if queer people need any more of that in our lives!  Rather it is a description of how life is, when times change.  Matthew is not telling us what will change, but only that times will change.  Our challenge is to stay awake, to pay attention, and to seize the opportunities of change however they happen.  Even if you want to, Matthew is saying, you can’t hold on to what is.  Instead, you must embrace the possibilities of transformation, however uncertain they may be.

the Mind and the Mystery 

This brings me to the song I mentioned and to my own story.  For ten years ago, I could no longer suppress my gender identity.  Yet how could I come out, and also be true to my priestly vocation.  At which point, I came across the American folk singer-songwriter Namoli Brennet, who is also a transgender woman.  Her work includes queer anthems like ‘We Belong’ and the poignant autobiographical song ‘Boy in a Dress’.  Yet what particularly spoke to me was her song ‘The Mind fought the Mystery’.  In this, Namoli relates the mystery of faith as something which takes us deeper than our minds ever can.  Reflecting on some of the great biblical stories, including the Resurrection, she reminds us how true life is indeed much more than we often imagine.  It is full of surprise and the overcoming of seeming impossibility.  For indeed, as in the Resurrection of Christ, 'the mind fought the mystery: the mystery won'. 
 
That song went straight to my heart and soul.  Hitherto, I had done a huge amount of fighting the mystery of my gender identity with my mind, telling myself it was impossible to be and live into what and who I am.  How wrong I was.  I am so happy now not to be a combatant against the Spirit in that way.  It is simply too exhausting. soulless, and life-denying.
 
What about you? And what about us, as people together, and as part of the world with others?  In what ways is the Mind still fighting the Mystery?  It is certainly widespread in our churches and world, where the powers of the narrowed Mind are working harder than ever to suppress the Mystery.  No wonder there is stress and strife.  Denial of deep-down truth is destructive.   Yet the Mystery that is God has this wonderful tendency to break through.  It may not be today, or even next year.  In some cases, longed-for transformation may never seem to come.  Yet human minds and structures cannot resist divine mystery for ever.  Soul-making is irresistible.[1]
 
being miracles

Our Mass tonight, and not least Sylvia’s part in it, are symbolic of this.  For I can’t help but feel, Sylvia, that you are a kind of miracle.  I say that, as someone also once said that about me, as a priest, and as others have said about female priests and others: ‘But how can you be?’  ‘I don’t know’, I reply, ‘but, by grace, we just are. Get used to it, and embrace the miracle.’   For being shaped by the the Mass, friends, is miraculous, however we understand it theologically: and, in sharing in it, all of us can become just a little bit more the miracles each of us was created to be, in every one of the rich kaleidoscopic expressions of divine love we embody.  We don’t have to be melodramatic about it like Matthew - though, then again, some of us do like our bright colours and exaggerations: hey, folks, what’s a queer party without a drama queen (at least that’s what I say to myself sometimes)! We most certainly don’t have to lose our minds: that truly is the path of religious destruction!  But we are invited to the inexhaustible joys of Mystery, through which we can become even more wondrous and do even more miraculous things.  
 
coming home and hearts dancing

Let me therefore conclude with the transformation of my ‘first mass’ story, with which I began.   For, such is the amazing thing about coming out as a trans priest, that I had a second ‘first mass’, as a woman: another regular midweek affair, in the chapel of St Francis theological College in Brisbane, with several fellow staff members and students.  ‘Today’, I remember saying, ‘I am coming home… I preside at this eucharist integrating, with… vital parts of my identity finally united, and my heart dances.’  I wonder Sylvia: do you feel too that you are coming home, and does your heart dance tonight?  I think the hearts of those of us gathered here certainly dance for you, for one another, for ourselves, and for all those in the future who will be touched by the transforming love we share tonight: our bodies, and our blood, transfigured by grace.   And, in this liminal, pregnant, time of Advent, may we thereby all come home, sharing more fully in the divine dance of inexhaustible mystery, breaking open the new possibilities awake to miracles we cannot yet even imagine.  In the name of the Transfiguring One, Amen.

by Josephine Inkpin, for Pride Mass at St Andrew's Subiaco, Advent Sunday 30 November 2025

[1] see further my blog post https://www.transspirit.org/blog/archives/10-2017

where are we headed?

These are vital questions.  For, 50 years on from the founding of this church community, we surely live in what the old Chinese curse called ‘interesting times’.     A range of destructive fires are raging across the world, fuelled not least by leaders in the Kremlin and Knesset.  Futures are uncertain, aided by rapacious White House vandalism, set on destroying the common good and accelerating so many features of the old Western worlds.  Faith, meanwhile, is typically in retreat, where its last embers are not fanned by fundamentalist rage.  Are we, and our planet, simply burning up?  Where do we find vital hope?  Is Christianity, in life-giving forms, done for?   What is the point of MCC Sydney today, in the face of all of this?

Jesus on fire and division

At first hearing, Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel (Luke chapter 12 verses 46-57) seem only to make things worse.   Do we really need more fire on the earth, and more division?  This might sound more like an encouragement to the MAGA movements than to the MCC.  However, that would be to read the Bible through the eyes of the powerful, who tend always to see a God of their own making in scripture: namely a God of power, inclined to the use of violence, punishment, and abuse, for their own ends.  Is that the real truth?
 
Where, I wonder, were you in 1975, when this church community was founded?  In my case, I was at secondary school in England, and I was blessed by having a gay man as my teacher of religion.  He himself sometimes had a bad time, as so many queer people did back then.  However, some of what he taught me about the deep compassion of the true living God I have never forgotten, and it has helped shaped my life.  For, as with this church community, seeds sown in 1975 have born great fruit.  One of the things my gay teacher taught me relates to passages like today’s Gospel text.  ‘Watch out’, he would say, ’that you don’t confuse description with prescription.’  In other words, as in the case of the Beatitudes, when Jesus speaks in the Gospels, Jesus is often describing, rather than prescribing, the life of faith.  It is not therefore that God’s blessed ones must be poor, or humble, or persecuted.  Rather, if we look for God’s blessed ones, we will typically describe people who are poor or marginalised, humble peacemakers and activists for love.   This is similarly the case with Jesus’ words about fire and division, the future and faith.
 
Today’s Gospel passage comes at a point in Jesus’ ministry when they were meeting increasing conflict.  Jesus’ words are thus describing, not prescribing, what is happening and will happen.  Their words about families being divided are not therefore about intention, as if God has designed people to be separated, or provides cruel tests of allegiance.  Rather Jesus’ words describe our realities, wherever love, justice, and mercy are deeply at stake.  Of all people, sexually and gender diverse people should therefore be able to identify with today’s Gospel.  Jesus is describing their own reality and so many of our own.  For, sadly, many of us know only too well how being fully true to God’s image in us is also manifest in family rejections, and in huge amounts of heated words and actions.  This reality, as Jesus observes, is like a baptism we cannot avoid.  For what Jesus describes is too often the consequence of living authentically: doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God.  As such, it is not just about being honest about God’s calling.  It is also about the way to hope, and finding a positive future: something which it is often hard to see, or hold onto, in today’s world.    For this we need to renew our faith by rekindling three particular types of alternative loving fire.

fire as hearth

The first kind of alternative loving fire is that of the hearth.  For Aboriginal people especially, we may think of the campfire.  For people like me, who grew up in colder north European climes, we may think of fireplaces indoors.  Yet, however we think of it, the hearth has always been both a vital practical and spiritual space of life and growth.  At the campfire, around the fireplace, young and old are warmed and bound together, stories are told, memories and hopes shared, griefs tended and courage renewed.  If there are to be flourishing futures and living faith among us, this kind of gathering has to be central.  John O’Donohue, the great Irish poet-priest, put it this way:

The hearth is ... the place of warmth, belonging and intimacy.  This is a powerful metaphor for the spiritual quest, for the hearth is the place where the heart is at home.  This is the longing in all spirituality: to come in out of the winter of alienation, self-division, and exile and into the hearth of warmth and at-one-ment. The spiritual journey is the journey home.[1]  
 
All life-giving churches are hearths, true families.  That has been at the heart of the Metropolitan Community Church’s gift for 50 years here, not least for sexually and gender diverse people otherwise denied a hearth and family.  It remains a gift to nurture, with others, not least in our own days.   I say that also partly as human beings wrestle with the challenges of AI, something barely considered 50 years ago but which is part of the huge technological revolution currently transforming our lives and world.  For AI can no doubt offer many things.  Yet, despite some people’s current fascinations with chatbot friends, it cannot provide us a true hearth.  In a recent conversation,[2] this point is well made by the notable contemporary thinker Yuri Noah Harari and Stephen Fry.   For Harari’s recent work has affirmed the importance of trust in human development.  Despite conflicts, humans have actually been amazing at cooperating throughout history, even developing international networks.  Today however, we not only have AI & algorithms, in which we do not easily trust.  We also have an Al arms race between humans, like Elon Musk, who do not trust, adding to the growth of populism and unreason worldwide.  Thus, Harari and Fry rightly say, it is vital we address the human trust deficit, investing above all in our distinctive characteristics - characteristics I would say are nurtured at the hearth - in being kind, rather than more efficient, and in concentrating on how much pleasure we can bring others.  In other words, as MCC Sydney travels onward, for others and ourselves, how well can we nurture the fire of the hearth, where genuine love and spirit can flourish?
 
fire as shared resistance

The second kind of alternative loving fire is that of shared resistance.  Again, this links both the Jesus experience and that of sexually and gender diverse people.  Truly, as today’s Gospel affirms, and queer history amplifies, this is core to queerness and loving faith.   It is also why MCC Sydney is still needed.  For whilst some other church traditions have nurtured hearths in which diversity can flourish, it is only the MCC, to use a phrase, that is ‘queer all the way down’, and that makes a difference.  Today, 50 years on from its founding, MCC Sydney can rejoice in many positive changes for sexually and gender diverse people, and should rightly celebrate its own vital part in bringing them about.  After all, MCC Sydney is older than even the first Sydney Mardi Gras.  However, there are clear signs of moving backwards, not least in the USA where the MCC is so strong.[3]  In the UK, transphobia has also significantly increased, and seen legal rollbacks.  Attacks here on queer people, through various means, including dating apps, have also shown signs of increase.[4]  More broadly, the value of diversity is not owned by all.[5]  The Gospel call to share the baptism of Jesus therefore continues to be very real, and, arguably, ever more urgent.  How then do we nurture greater intersectional solidarity, courage, and trust in the future?  On the one hand, this must surely involve growing new relationships, partnerships, and involvements with others. On the other hand, our other New Testament reading today, from Hebrews 11.29-12.2, provides us with another vital clue; namely, keeping alive our histories of shared resistance so that we can live them forward.   For, as we hear that great roll call of heroes of faith today, can we be encouraged by them to show similar love, courage, and trust in God’s future?  How good it is, in this, to recall today the heroes of MCC Sydney over the last 50 years too, and other queer heroes of our lives!
​

​fire as living spiritual imagination

For, to nurture hope for the future, and renew our faith, the third kind of alternative loving fire we need to cultivate is that of renewed inner life and imagination.  Sadly, there are still tensions for many between queerness and faith.  However, and it may of course be expressed in a variety of fruitful pathways, without cultivating living queer spirituality we will neither be sustained as individuals nor fully free as a society.  This is also core to MCC Sydney and other futures.  Faith, art, and politics need one another.  Perhaps Forward Together thus also give us encouragement to make such links and alliances.   With another poster, coupled to the following prayer-poem, I conclude these reflections this morning.  For, whilst titled ‘Imprecatory Prayer to Transestors’, it is a prayer for all who have gone before us, who have tended sacred queer hearths like this one, who have shared in loving resistance, and who have lived out queer imaginaries:
 
To The Ancestors & Elders who have guided us here:
 
We honor your legacy with new celebrations.
May our bodies persist, let them shine whole & well.
May our minds calibrate to the call of the universe.
Let our protest songs transfigure to peace hymns.
Let our cultural knowledge produce nourishment.
May our homes bustle warm with abundant love.
May our communities flourish despite borders.
Let our love quake open any lingering shackle.
Let our joy obliterate any festering contempt.
As we bind each other closer,
we manifest futures more possible.[10]      Amen.

[1] in Four Elements: Reflections on Nature, found at https://rwww.hearthgatherings.com.au
[2] https://singjupost.com/ai-how-can-we-control-an-alien-intelligence-yuval-noah-harari-transcript
[3] See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/05/harvey-milk-trump-lgbtq-rights
[4] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-06/gay-dating-app-users-lured-into-violent-homophobic-attacks/105464048
[5] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-02/multiculturalism-australia-america-schools/105581050
[6] https://forwardtogether.org/about-us/
[7] image by Amir Khadar, used by permission of Forward Together
[8] poem by kiki nicole, see further about the project at https://www.them.us/story/these-trans-posters-are-lit
[9] see and hear more at https://www.tdor.co
[10] https://soundcloud.com/user-830244714/jayy-dodd-imprecatory-prayer-to-the-trancestors - image and words used by permission of Forward Together

by Josephine Inkpin, for the 50th Anniversary Celebration of MCC Sydney, Sunday 17 August 2025

Here is a third, and for this morning, final picture. 
What do you see in it?
 
This painting is by Paul Goodnight, a contemporary African American artist, who has used art to channel his life’s experiences: including the trauma of war, which left him literally voiceless.  His art hence became his means of expression.  It can thus encourage us to take heart, even when we are brought down or traumatised by life.  We too, as Luke’s continuing divine story attests, can write a new chapter in our individual, and shared lives, finding fresh identity and purpose.  The picture is also a wonderful contemporary icon which not only symbolises new and continuing possibilities of, life, but which encourages us to nurture a new unfolding dance, with all our diverse colours, shapes, and ways of being.  Like the first picture, it offers us rich cosmic symbolism, even that of eucharistic communion.  Yet it is also, like the second picture, grounded in our down-to-earth human realities.  It also points us to another key verse in Luke’s story, namely that of the eunuch’s cry: ‘look, there is water’ (that is, new life), ‘what is there to stop me being baptised?’  And what is the answer to that? – nothing!  There is nothing to stop any of us entering into the fullness of divine life – nothing.  God’s story invites us all into love, which is our true identity and calling, whatever other identities we may have, and whatever other callings we may share that love in.  That love is bound by no place, no time, and no human characteristics.  Even when we feel like nothing, or that nothing works, or makes sense, God’s love is in all and with all.
 
a queer-ing story

That, in conclusion, is part of the centrality of the Ethiopian Eunuch in this story.  There is so much more that could be said about them, some of which I will share in my address here this evening.  But, to short, the Ethiopian Eunuch is a very queer figure indeed – and I use the word ‘queer’ quite advisedly: both as relating to what we have come to call ‘queer’ today, and something far, far, more.  For, as scholars have long acknowledged, the Ethiopian Eunuch can simply not be pinned down.  They are an ambiguous figure, in all kinds of ways: in terms of religious identity, class, sex, gender, dis/ability, power, money – everything really.  However, whatever they, or we, are, we are all something – we know not what fully – in the love of God.
In the name and living presence of Christ, Amen.

​by Josephine McDonnell Inkpin, for Tuggeranong Uniting Church, Sunday 10 August 2025

beyond resignation and impatience
 
‘All alone, or in twos.’   In Anna and Simeon’s case, it is as a two, a truly biblical and feminist number.  Indeed, when I was in formation, back in the early 1980s, I went with Penny to hear the great eco-feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether speak.  ‘If you want to help change the world positively’, she said, in words I’ve always remembered, ‘you need to remember three things.’  ‘Firstly’, she said, ‘choose your battles; secondly, don’t go alone; and, thirdly, don’t wait for the eschaton (aka the end times).’  Well, Simeon and Anna did wait, but not for the eschaton.  They waited in divine eschatological, that is visionary, desire, and with eschatological action; for these are what priesthood and prophecy are really about, through the presence of eschatological love, which is still alive, even when, sometimes especially when, it seems most absent.  For whilst we may ‘stagger’ in ministry, walls do fall and divine bridges can be built.
 
In his poem ‘Wait and See’,[1] Richard Baulkham beautifully expresses this in Anna and Simeon’s ministry.   He contrasts different kinds of waiting of which we are all capable.  The first is that of resignation.  That is a natural in many circumstances.  It is akin to the flight response, though resignation can be far more stale and static: a ‘measuring out… life with coffee spoons’, as T.S. Eliot expressed it.  A second kind of waiting is that of impatience.  Like the first response, there is much of this about.  Modernity fuels it, feeding expectations with its media, technology, social change, and conflicts over rights discourses.  This is akin to the fight response, which can too easily justify behaviour which is simply knee-jerk selfishness.  In contrast, the poet offers us Simeon and Anna as another way forward, beyond resignation and impatience, flight or fight.  This is the way of active prayer as waiting on desire.
 
The poet is not saying that it is wrong to bear up in dreadful circumstances or rage against injustice.  Rather, true waiting is, as he puts it, ‘pure dependence’ on love.  As we see in Anna and Simeon, this is a waiting on God’s presence, on Love, living in the divine eschatological vision, marking and nurturing time and space through prayer and ritual.  We are not thereby so easily trapped by circumstances or triggered to knee-jerk anger.  Rather, in the poet’s words, we are drawn into ‘circling onward, spiraling/towards a centre out ahead, seasons of revolving hope.’   ‘All alone, or in twos’, those who live into the love of God, thus ‘walk up and down’, outside the walls of human struggles, fear and pain, hurt and injustice, and some gather ‘together in bands’, as ‘the bleeding hearts and the artists make their stand.’  The word desire is key.  For desire, in the deepest spiritual sense, is beautifully subversive, and indeed a very queer word.  Desire speaks of the deepest longings for the divine consummation of true love.  Desire speaks of the experience of transcendent joy, of extraordinary peace, of profound communion and complete relationship with all that is.  For in waiting with desire, as Simeon and Anna show us, and as we see in Jesus and in the saints, we can both bear all things beyond mere resignation, and we can live with the kindness of divine impatience.   We can thereby be more aware of, celebrate, and nurture, those tastes of divine love that we experience in the present.

walls do fall and bridges are possible

Mere resignation or impatience is quite understandable, not least with world events.  Yet walls do fall.  Bridges are possible.  Waiting with holy desire is worth it.  I grew up, for example, in the British Isles, in a brutally divided Europe, in a blatantly sexist, racist, and still imperialist culture, with reminders of terror not only overseas, but on my doorstep, as the Ulster paramilitary struggle raged on, taking the lives of too many, including fellow students of mine in London’s Harrods bombing.  Meanwhile, in these lands, we were still legally classing its First Peoples as flora and fauna.  I therefore give thanks for so many things that seemed near miracles back then: epoch changing events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the accompanying revolutions of eastern Europe; the Good Friday Peace Agreement in Ireland in 1998 and the end of the Balkans Wars of the 1990s.  In my native and adopted countries, I have also seen profound positive changes for women and people of many different ethnicities and diverse identities, including major steps forward for LGBTIQ+ people.  Of course, we live in troubled times today, and some challenges, not least ecological, seem even harder.  Recent world order shifts bring more uncertainties.  Yet we need to celebrate where we have come from and what can be achieved.  For this too, is part of waiting with desire, and, like Anna and Simeon, seeing the light anew.

waiting on the Church

What of Christian faith today and in the future?   The times of my ordained ministry have often been trying.  This has not so much been because of the numerical and status decline of inherited Christian structures.  That has certainly also had its effects.  For the transformative dynamics of what Christians have called ‘mission’ have often recently shrunk in to institutional survival, denominational branding and self-assertion. More soul-destroying has been the revealing of abuse, trauma, and systemic dysfunction, and the sheer weight of energy and resources put into avoidance, self-protection, and even justification of the status quo.  The current publicised struggles of my home Church, the Church of England, are a case in point.  The psalmist’s cry ‘how long, O God’ has certainly run through my ordained ministry, waiting with desire for walls to fall.   In the past, I have literally stood in protest outside Church gatherings with placards saying ‘waiting’, and metaphorically, this has often seemed at times my life’s work: in Pink Floyd’s words, banging my heart ‘against some mad bugger’s wall.’  Yet, thank God, walls do fall, and bridges can be built…

Illuminare

A few years ago, a photographer friend, Charmaine Lyons, took a photo of me (see above) as part of an exhibition to celebrate Queensland women.  It pictures me in St Francis College chapel in Brisbane.  It has the title of Illuminare, which means to illuminate, or light up.  How do you react to it, I wonder?  There are layers to it and much ambiguity.  Charmaine, in her artist’s statement, saw it reflecting my significance as a transgender priest, ‘illuminating the way forward from old to new’: acting both as a ‘beacon’ of hope for gender diverse and other people, and also ‘disrupting right-wing exploitation of God to maintain inequality.’  ‘Standing’, Charmaine said, ‘in an ancient tradition as a spiritual Mother, she brings new life amid stones of strength and oppression, opening a window to a more just future.’  I hope so.  For myself at least, it is certainly an image of waiting with desire.  Indeed, it reminds me of one of my great English spiritual forebears, Julian of Norwich, who waited on God in her spiritual cell through the tumultuous events of the late 14th and early 15th centuries, bringing spiritual comfort and strength to others.  And it speaks of Simeon and Anna, in their waiting with desire.  Unlike them, my vocation has been more like another of my English forbears, John Wesley, more peripatetic and more border crossing, seeking to be faithful to the Holy Spirit despite what norms and structures might say.  However, all of us who wait with holy desire are bridges to other possibilities and other worlds.

the continuing vocation of unmaking walls and building bridges

In drawing to a close, let me therefore give thanks today for all of us who seek to be faithful to holy desire, whatever traditions we are born into.  Sometimes, when we’ve given our all, we may indeed also stagger and fall, because it is indeed not easy, banging our hearts against mad buggers’ walls.  After all, if we are honest, we know too that others can find it hard to bang their hearts against our own walls.   To be bridges of course is a great thing, even if bridges are often walked on, and sometimes even blown up.  I rejoice therefore to have been part of building bridges, and sometimes of being a bridge, between many types of people and many types of tradition and culture, dreams and possibilities.  That is at the heart of the calling of Pitt Street Uniting Church, which is why this is such a place of freedom and possibility, and why it has been such a joy to band together with others to wait with desire, to address walls, to build and be bridges, not simply 'another brick in the wall'. 

Safety in God alone

A final word: for, of course, unmaking walls and building bridges is a continuing vocation.  We are reminded of this at the very end of Pink Floyd’s rock opera.  For as the Wall falls, children pick up debris and bricks, begin to put them upon one another, and the words are heard ‘isn’t this where we came in?’   As Anna and Simeon knew well, even when we see change, it is incomplete: until, in our waiting with desire, we experience the light of Christ and its fulness.   Soon, in the Gospel story, the temple walls inside which Simeon and Anna worked were literally to fall, destroyed by a merciless empire and its treatment of resistance.   I think the old priest and the old prophet would have sensed that coming, and would have been deeply grieved.  Yet their faithfulness had been rewarded.  For in the struggles of their day, they had seen a new and brighter light coming into being: a light that still shines and will always shine.   That is part of why we bless candles today as symbols of this experience.  In like manner, during the sharing of communion, it will be lovely to share one of my favourite songs, from the English acoustic progressive medieval folk rock band Amazing Blondel, which originated in my old school.  Entitled ‘Safety in God’, it speaks of the need to wait with desire, lighting up all our candles as at this great feast of Candlemas, for salvation is indeed always just in sight.[2]     It is part of the spirit by which I have always sought to share in ministry and part of the continuing gift we all have to offer.   For when we are downhearted, as Anna and Simeon would surely have been, may we continue to wait with desire that we may see the light that is not only to come, but already present with us.  In Amazing Blondel’s words:
 
Light up all your candles/Keep the vigil tonight
Praying for salvation/For it's always just in sight[3]
 
In the name of Christ, the Light of the World.  Amen.

[1] https://artandtheology.org/2021/01/27/wait-and-see-simeon-and-anna-richard-bauckham/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXm2Obz0N1c&t=36s
[3] https://genius.com/Amazing-blondel-safety-in-god-alone-lyrics

by Josephine Inkpin, for Pitt Street Uniting Church, Sunday 2 February 2025

light transcending darkness

These great themes of the dynamic movement of divine love and its expression in images of water are then intimately linked to that of the ineffable light of God to which icons of the baptism of Jesus point. This is powerfully expressed in the third icon I offer, that of The Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan by Jerzy Nowosielski, who, among other things was a graphic artist, Eastern Orthodox theologian, and, arguably, the greatest of modern Polish icon painters.  For Nowosielski’s work combines both the sacred and the profane, fusing the profundity of Orthodox mystical theology with secular reality, literally drawing together canonical tradition and abstract modern art.[7]  Like the Lviv school, the context of Nowosielski’s work involved his journeying through personal and national suffering, and finding transcendent light amid the darkness.  He indeed echoed Dostoyevsky’s dictum that ‘beauty will save the world.’   ‘Art’, he wrote, like deep spirituality, ‘will help us carry our reality onto that other side.  Grace does not cross nature out and we will still bear the marks of our sufferings, but they will be transfigured.'  This is part of what his icon seeks to reveal, with the powerful colours, like a Kandinsky or Mondrian work of art, pointing us to transcendent light.

Do such icons touch your soul? Do they draw you into the ineffable light of divine love?  Their point, like the Gospel text, is to encourage us all to recognise that dynamic movement of love in our own hearts and lives, to go deeply into the waters of life with renewed focus, and thus to become living icons of love ourselves.  For, whoever we are, wherever we come from, we are all not only accepted by God but fully beloved and, in God’s grace, sources of light.   Amen.
 
[1] https://artandtheology.org/2018/01/06/contemporary-icons-of-the-baptism-of-christ/
[2] in An Experiment in Criticism
[3] https://calltoworshipjournal.org/art-and-baptism-the-choreography-of-visible-and-invisible-grace/
[4] https://iconart-gallery.com/en/
[5] https://artfiragallery.com/exhibitions/icon-saves-lives-ukraine/
[6] Rowan Williams, in Being Christian, 2014
[7] See further, for Nowosielski’s work at depth, Artur Rosman’s reflections at https://imagejournal.org/article/acquainted-with-the-night/
 
by Josephine Inkpin, for Pitt Street Uniting Church, Sunday 12 January 2025