What is God’s work on earth and how do we participate in it? These seem to me questions that arise from our reading today - a reading that begins with Jesus appearance to his disciples, and ends with Him sending them out as witnesses to the work of repentance and forgiveness that is to be proclaimed to all nations...
 Caravaggio's 'The Incredulity of St Thomas' If I were to ask 100 people to give me a nickname or adjective for the disciple Thomas, what do you think would be the most popular reply? I suspect it would be ‘Doubting’, don’t you? That is a shame. For there is much more to Thomas than an element of doubt. Ask any Indian Christian for example. They will tell you that Thomas was the great apostle of the ancient East, and that Indian Christianity traces its origins to him. In the very passage we have just read, we also heard Thomas confess Jesus Christ as ‘My Lord and My God’. What a powerful statement of faith! Historically many Christians have paid a great deal of attention to St Peter for saying something similar. Yet Thomas has been largely passed over. Makes you think, doesn’t it? I mean we don't go on talking about Betraying Peter do we? We might just as well do so. For Peter is manifestly more of a betrayer than Thomas is an iron-clad doubter. The fact is that Thomas is much much more than a doubter. You could even call him Affirming Thomas for that theological statement about Jesus as the Christ. However, I’d like to call Thomas something else altogether. Reflecting on today’s reading from John chapter 20, I’m inclined however to call him Bodily Thomas, or, maybe, as the Welsh might call him, Thomas the Body. For that name points us to some very important aspects of the Resurrection of Jesus…
 I want to talk about being locked shut and about being breathed open. And I want to explore what it might mean, as Jackie will do today (as she comes to baptism as an adult), to begin again.
‘The doors of the house where the disciples met were locked for fear of the Jews’. Those early disciples were a pretty terrified bunch. Even as the possibility that Jesus could be alive was dawning on them, they remained uncertain, afraid of being arrested and killed. It seems to me likely that they met secretly for a long time. The texts of the New Testament compress what was probably a lengthy process, into the shorter units of symbolic time. But whether these things happened over a few hours and days, or many years hardly matters. What matters is that a change occurred and a new beginning became possible...  Today is April Fool’s day, and there can be no better day for foolery and laughter than Easter Day. For there is a tradition of laughter and joke telling on Easter Day that began hundreds of years ago. The story goes that a monk in Bavaria was pondering the solemn events of Good Friday and the earth shattering events of Easter Day and suddenly he had a new insight, and he began to laugh. Once he started laughing he couldn’t stop; he laughed and laughed and laughed. His hearty laughter startled his companions from their solemn contemplation and they looked at him with amazement and disapproval. ‘Don’t you see?’, he cried out, ‘it was a joke! The best joke ever. On Good Friday when Jesus was crucified, the devil thought he had won. But God had the last laugh on Easter Day when he raised Jesus from the dead.’ And the monk began to laugh again, and his fellow monks began to get it, and they laughed and it became known as the Easter laugh, and the tradition of laughing and telling jokes on Easter Day began. So I am hoping that in a little while over morning tea we can share all our best jokes and laugh together.
The laughter echoing through the ages is a tangible witness to the good news of Easter- that Jesus Christ is alive among us; that death does not have the last laugh; that darkness does not conquer light. All the forces that conspired to kill Jesus, the fury, the lovelessness, the betrayal - God makes of them all a laughing stock. God laughs...  We wait at the tomb. As Gregory of Nyssa pointed out centuries ago, Jesus lies in the tomb, in order to bring to life all who lie in tombs. We pause this Holy Saturday night, on the very threshold of resurrection. The Latin word for threshold is limen, from which we derive the word liminal, to describe all those spaces and times that are ‘in between’ - the ‘not quite yet’ spaces; the crossing points from one state of being to another.
Tonight is a liminal time and this is a liminal space that we have created, in order to draw near to Christ. For it is easier to draw near to Christ in a liminal time and place than in any other. Between light and dark, there is the twilight of dawn or dusk, exactly the kind of light in which the women went to the tomb on the first Easter Day. Between grief and happiness there is a space that belongs to the shy gift of joy, whose nature partakes of both. Between life and death, death and life, there is the waiting time; the time when nothing appears to be happening, but actually everything is happening. This is the chrysalis time, when the caterpillar dissolves and the butterfly emerges. The work is done inside, unseen and unknown... Are homilies necessary in Holy Week? I wonder. Even more than at other times, our liturgical patterns are shaped so much by the Passion narrative as a whole that interrupting it with other words can seem somewhat intrusive. For the main thing is to enter into the narrative and drama of the Holy Week and Easter mysteries. We do not have to understand everything, or even say or do anything. We are simply invited into the narrative to become part of it and to allow the drama to form the core of our lives. For our task in the whole of our Christian lives is to become more like Christ, in Christ’s life, death and resurrection: to be Christ-formed, cross-formed, resurrection-formed. So it is not a doctrine of the cross we seek to know today. It is its claim and shape in our own lives. Maybe however, just a few words can help us on that journey?...
Recently I’ve pondered a good deal about healing - both in relationship to myself and to others I know.. How about you? For it is a strange thing: the Gospels are full of healings, but, for many centuries, healing did not bulk large in Christian teaching or practice. Healing is prominent in the early Church and in Christian revival or minority movements. Yet it largely drops out of focus until the last century. Then a number of features, including modern challenges, spiritual and liturgical renewal, and the charismatic movement, gave rise to fresh healing emphases. Significantly perhaps this has gone alongside a reduced emphasis on certain ideas of sin, judgement and mortality. For Christian theology changes, or it dies. Today, healing, suffering, and sin are categories with which we wrestle afresh. Like our Gospel story today, we also wonder about them and their inter-relationship…
 apophatic Christ by Peter Klein, Lenten artwork for the Chapel of the Holy Spirit Milton When we first came to Australia on a permanent basis, we lived and worked in the Anglican Parish of Gosford. One of the very lovely things about the parish, and its main church building, is its baptistery. This includes some modern stained glass windows, with words from the Gospel story of the baptism of Jesus strongly and beautifully emblazoned: ‘This is my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’ It is such a joy to see and take to heart. Indeed, increasingly, I have come to believe that this is at the very core, not just of the baptism of Jesus, but of the baptism of every Christian. When we baptise a child, we are helping to share with them, and with those who love them, the message of God for us all: that ‘you (too) are my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’ What an amazing truth that is if we could but all believe it. Surely, this is a gorgeous message of love which Christians should be able to share with every person. For everyone is a child of God and everyone is created as beloved, in whom God is well pleased. Imagine if that was the main message, the heart of the Gospel, the truly good news, we shared as Church with others. After all, this love - not sin, nor judgement, nor moral concern – is the ultimate reality of all our lives. Yet this astonishing love for each one of us comes at a cost, and with a challenge…
It is very helpful to think about the beginning of Jesus’s ministry from the perspective of Peter’s mother-in-law. For her story, like those of so many women in the Bible and Christian tradition, tends to get passed over and forgotten. Yet today's text involving her includes, in three verses, three of the most foundational words in the history of the early church. They are very obvious in Greek, rather easier to miss in English. So what are these words?...
One of the strangest requests I received when I was General Secretary of the NSW Ecumenical Council was from the NSW Greens. They were trying to remove the saying of the Lord's Prayer from the opening of NSW Parliament and wanted support on the grounds that the 'Protestant' form used, with the doxology at the end, was excluding of Catholics, as well as of other faith groups. I did not have to contact the then Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Pell, or Jewish, Muslim, or other leaders to know how ridiculous they would have found the argument. For what mattered to all of them was not so much the exact words as the setting of public life in the context of the sacred and transcendent. I was reminded of this at this time of year in more recent times in being involved in planning the annual civic Remembrance Service at St Luke's Toowoomba. Some of the older and more conservative figures would insist on the inclusion of what they called the 'traditional' English-speaking version of the Lord's Prayer whilst others would support the 'modern' form which has been used for many years in Australian churches. Do the words really matter however or is the real substance of the prayer the key?...
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sermons and reflections from Penny Jones & Jo Inkpin, Archives
February 2018
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