Pen and Ink Reflections - Pen and Ink Reflections

waiting with desire

2/2/2025

'Illuminare' - award winning photo of myself, Josephine Inkpin, by Charmaine Lyons

Pink Floyd surely had it right about the vocation of love, in the closing section of the rock opera The Wall. For the vocation of love does not belong to Christians, never mind clergy, but to all human beings, but Christians, and clergy, at our best, can help point us towards it. As Pink Floyd wrote:

All alone, or in twos
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down, outside the wall
Some hand in hand
And some gathered together in bands
The bleeding hearts and the artists make their stand
And when they've given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it's not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall.

In my experience, ministry can certainly be like that. As it happens, the first music album I remember buying was appropriately entitled Walls and Bridges, by John Lennon. For core to my own ministry has been building bridges, and what the writer Ursula le Guin called the vocation of ‘unbuilding walls’. As I come to the end of my time as Minister of Pitt Street Uniting Church, I want therefore to reflect on such things, in the context of the Gospel story of the presentation of Jesus inside the temple walls. For in their own vocations of priesthood and prophetic love, waiting in holy desire, and glimpsing salvation in their own day, the old folks Simeon and Anna can still speak to us in our own spiritual journeys, now and for the days ahead…

icons of belovedness

1/12/2025

image: Arian Baptistery in Ravenna

When I hear today’s story of the baptism of Jesus, what often comes to my mind is a stained-glass window in the Anglican church of St Luke Toowoomba. It was certainly a handy teaching aid over the years I presided at baptisms there. After all, there is much truth in the well-known saying that a picture can paint a thousand words. That is certainly a strength of churches like St Luke Toowoomba, which also has a number of other even more significant stained-glass windows, accompanying its Gothic Revival architectural features. Not all those windows are also reflections of other ages on another continent. The great western window above the baptistery is a particularly beautiful contemporary stained-glass window. This, with its mandala-resonant patterns, highlights a wide range of Australian animal, cosmic, and other natural features, and resembles a kind of dot-painting as a whole. The church is thus in some ways a veritable picture book, as well as a key city centre space for worship, music and other artistic and festival events. In a similar manner, our current liturgical season of Epiphany is also like a picture book. It too contains various images to encourage and challenge us: significant stories which are icons of God’s love. Let us therefore reflect today on the baptism of Jesus, which is a particularly powerful icon of God’s love, and of our beloved place within it. Indeed, in some Orthodox traditions, it is much more important than the birth narratives of Jesus. After all, they are an amalgam of different stories in only two Gospels, whereas the baptism of Jesus appears as a vital narrative in all four Gospels. Crucially, for example, in the Synoptic Gospels it is found immediately before the stories of Jesus’ temptations. Its central declaration of the beloved-ness of Christ, and our associated beloved-ness, is therefore the vital antidote to the threats and traumas of our world. Let us then look at three particular features of today’s iconic story, with the aid of three significant contemporary painters of the scene, and, thereby, encourage us too to share and become icons of divine beloved-ness ourselves…

gifts for groundedness and growth, in the power of three

1/5/2025

Adoration of the Christ Child, Mughal India, ca. 1630. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Symbolism abounds in the season of Epiphany, this great season of revelation, or spiritual revealing, that we are now entering. This morning it is focused especially in the visit of the Magi to the newborn Christ, a narrative rich in symbolic meaning. For today, let us reflect on two features: the significance of the gifts brought by the Magi, and of the number three associated with them. In doing so, let me speak briefly about three things: firstly, interpretations of the gifts and their three-ness in Christian Tradition; secondly, further perspectives on the gifts and three-ness which we may glean from other traditions, somewhat as the Magi helped enlarge the Judaean context of Jesus; and, thirdly, what gifts and symbolic three-ness we might offer up from our Australian contexts to bring further Epiphany meaning and spiritual revealing…

on elf pilots and dianellas

12/15/2024

Do you remember the twelve days of Christmas? No, I don’t mean the song. I mean the time when the festival of Christmas began around Christmas Eve and ran through to the eve of Epiphany, otherwise known as twelfth night. That is where the song comes from of course, alongside the tradition, now long gone in many places that used to practice this, of taking Christmas decorations down before January 6. Today, in contemporary Australia, the Christmas season seems to start at the beginning of November and is essentially declared over before the feast of St Stephen, aka Boxing Day. This year this has been vividly illustrated by the Wundrful World of Christmas,[1] which opened near us on the corner of York and Market Streets on 8 November and continues until Christmas Eve. Complete with helpful elf pilots – mainly friendly students and backpackers needing a job – it is billed as ‘an epic animated walk-through immersive experience and journey to the North Pole’, with ‘stunning’ VFX and CGI, and tickets from $25 but free to under 3s, all coming with a free Santa letter pack and complimentary North Pole digital family photo. No, sadly, especially for our treasurer, I am not getting a commission! What it does give me however are three questions. Firstly, in that context, and many other such lively things, what are our churches doing in marking the ecclesiastical season of Advent? Secondly, how, in doing so, are we engaging with the contexts in which we live? And, thirdly, and not least, what has the message of John the Baptist we hear today (in Luke 3.7-18) to say to our world?

beyond embarrassment: the cry of the blind

10/27/2024

healing of Bartimaeus by William Blake

Deep faith is often embarrassing. Maybe that is a reason we human beings avoid it. We typically prefer to seek to live ‘good’ lives, or the opposite: to seek to be respectable in our opinions and behavior, or, alternatively, to find value and reputation in kicking against, or rorting, the system. Admittedly, in choosing radical pathways, we may also conceivably live out of the vulnerability of a type of deep faith. Yet that also risks centring ourselves in our own egos. Deep faith however is not only about letting go of human conventions but also about letting go of ego, into God in godself. The expressions of this can be quite embarrassing, even alarming. Maybe that is why organised religion, including much of our Uniting Church traditions, often tries to keep deep faith under control, in liturgy and in church life. Imagine, for example, if, like Francis of Assisi, we were indeed to heed Jesus’ to the rich man and give away all we have to the poor. What if, like the original Quakers and Shaker communities, we were to be so overcome by the fire of pentecostal love that we would literally move in the Spirit, shaking and quaking, in our prayer and witness? No wonder, faced by the zeal of early Methodism, that Bishop Joseph Butler famously told John Wesley that ‘enthusiasm is a horrid thing.’ That, surely, is not simply a classic English reaction to faith’s embarrassments. It also expresses much general unease about the consequences of letting go into God. For deep faith is beyond embarrassment, as we see in today’s Gospel story (in Mark 10.45-52)…

leaping in faith

10/13/2024

Byard's Leap

‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Today’s Gospel story (Mark 10.17-31) is a challenging one, and, in the poem we heard,[1] Malcolm Guite is surely right to ask each of us to wrestle with it and what God may be asking of us. To assist that engagement, let me speak about three things: about conventional human assumptions of security, about addressing our wealth, and about the deep call of discipleship. Each are certainly key themes of this passage and the wider Gospel. Firstly however, let me share a story from Lincolnshire, the English county in which I grew up…

Wisdom embodied

9/15/2024

‘but who do you say that I am?’ said Jesus. What a question! How do we respond? Let us explore this vital faith inquiry a little bit this morning, also asking what the figure of Wisdom in our reading from Proverbs might have to say to us. And let us further ask what the question of the identity and purpose of Christ might have to say in relation to our own identity and purpose in this Season of Creation and Faiths for Climate Justice Week of Action. For how we name and understand the divine makes a big difference to how we relate not only to God, but to ourselves, and to the wider world…

rejoice and play

8/11/2024

Powerful proclamation is at the heart of today’s Gospel reading (from John 6.35, 41-51). Let me therefore speak about three things in relationship to it: about Christian doctrine, chess, and two Reformed gifts; and about how they may each help us to rejoice and play in this our current season of gratefulness…

treasure in clay jars

6/2/2024

The writings of Paul tend to get a bad rap in progressive Christian circles. He gets the blame for the subjugation of women, the rejection of queer people and the affirmation of slavery. He is seen as a conservatising force, taking the early church away from the radical message of Jesus and turning that message into something more palatable to conservative Roman culture and thus enabling its spread. Some of that critique is certainly appropriate to the second century writings, such as the pastoral epistles of Timothy and Titus ascribed to Paul by much later writers. However, parts of Paul’s writings reveal a radical thinker, capable of reframing the reforming Judaism of his upbringing into an entirely new faith – a faith moreover informed by his own experiences of persecution and imprisonment. Today’s passage invites Paul’s readers to a number of fresh perspectives on God, creation, and the purpose of life, that continue to challenge our own thinking today. Let’s look at some of it a little more closely...

is it I? - recognising myself at the Last Supper

3/28/2024

Over the past few years at this service we have tried to focus on those who are presumed to have been present at the last supper of Jesus, but who are invisible in the written accounts – especially those who were not male or in any kind of authority. In a city like Sydney, where the presence of women and sexually and gender diverse people in church leadership is questioned in many quarters, it seems important on this night to say, ‘we were there too’. With this is mind, I looked for images of women at the Last Supper and came upon this one by Jamie Beck. I know too little about her, but Google suggests she is an American photographer and author of the 2022 book An American In Provence. She worked in New York for various prestigious fashion houses before moving to France. During COVID with her husband Kevin Burg she created a series called Isolation Creation sharing one photo per day of the lockdown experience, creating something beautiful positive each day. They were sold with proceeds going to the Foundation for Contemporary Arts COVID19 Emergency Grants Fund...