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 Let’s meditate a little on Mary from these four words. For we live in very unsettled times. Times when everything we have known is being overthrown. And in such times. we need Mary – not just as an archetype of womanhood, but as a living, breathing example of the approach we need to life and faith....
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 It is Palm Sunday – the crowds are cheering and waving their palms in the air, and Jesus is riding along on the back of a donkey. Now a donkey is not a horse. It is not an animal that signifies power and authority – and though possibly the donkey in Shrek has done something to rehabilitate the donkey as a figure of wisdom, they are still often ridiculed. Victorious Roman generals rode into Jerusalem, through the other gate, on the backs of tall stallions telling the world of the power of Rome and its generals. Jesus by contrast chooses the humble donkey, beast of burden and the Biblical equivalent of a modern day ute.
The donkey was not glamorous, but my goodness it was useful. Have you ever wondered what the disciples would have done if the owner of the donkey had said ‘no’ to the request to share it? Their ‘yes’ was almost as important as the ‘yes’ of that other faithful disciple, Mary, without whom Jesus would not have been born. And why did they agree? - because they were told ‘the Lord needs it’. ‘the Lord needs it.’ That is a beautiful phrase and one that we should sit with this Holy Week. For we do not often consider that God needs us. We know very well of course that we need God. But God needs us too and cannot accomplish what needs to be done without our co-operation and that’s especially true in such a time of crisis as we now face. I believe that every single one of us has our donkey – that thing, that possession, that talent, that set of connections, that nest egg of money, that calling that God needs. It is the thing that God has given uniquely to us and that God asks of us. It is our ‘donkey’. At some point – maybe at many points – God is going to say to us ‘I need that now.’ And we need to be ready to say to God, ‘Yes of course, here it is, do with it whatever you need.’ So, between now and Easter, let’s talk to God about our donkeys. Let’s ask God, “what’s my donkey? What’s the thing that I have, that you need? Show me how and when to offer it” And if we all do that God will be able to do all kinds of amazing things among us. Penny Jones, for Palm Sunday, 5 April 2020 (photo by Daniel Fazio for Unsplash)  As you may be aware, there is a tradition in more Catholic Christian circles of using rose pink as a colour for this Sunday. For the third Sunday of Advent has often been known as “Gaudete’ – or ‘Rejoice’ – Sunday, and rose pink, became linked to it, as rose pink is also associated with Mary the Mother of Jesus. So, being a bit into colours at the moment, especially pink ones, I thought I’d do a little investigation into the subject. The first thing I came across was the Readers Digest guide to rose colour meanings It begins very interestingly. The red rose is said to symbolise love, and, I quote, is ‘Perfect for: freaking out your first date; covering beer stains; wooing a hunky bishop.’ So, something to bear in mind there? In contrast, according to Readers Digest, the pink rose is said to express grace and elegance, as well as sweetness and sympathy: and thus: ‘Perfect for: sick secretaries, (and) the platinum blonde in your life.’ Again, is there something useful for us to remember there? Well, maybe just a teens-weensy bit of gender stereotyping in that, don’t you think?! It is a little like many approaches to Mary, the Mother of Jesus …
‘No room, no time, no way’
As the calendar flips over and we come to Advent, life can often seem this way. It can seem as though we simply have no room in our over crowded world for the ideas so central to Advent - silence, stillness, waiting. It can seem as though the time to attend to the things of God, is eroded by demands of hospitality, celebration and preparation. It can seem as though there is no way to change this, or to change the relentless patterns of our lives and world. Yet this is to misunderstand the nature of waiting. I don’t know about you, but waiting is not something that comes easily. It can seem easier to rush onwards, seeking the next activity or the next opportunity. The slow natural processes of change and transformation can be a challenge to those of us raised to the high tempo of modern life. Our consumer culture reflects this, taking as its subtext ‘why wait’? Why indeed?...  All through Advent we have been enjoying a wonderful art display here at St. Luke's exploring the themes of advent and incarnation. It has set me thinking about what I would paint on this theme if I was an artist. I wonder what you would put into a picture of Christmas for instance. Any one like to suggest something?
I want to go back to the picture of the nativity - Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, the angels and the wise men. It is the picture familiar to us from our crib scene here in church and as a symbol of Christmas it cannot really be bettered I think. We have of course St. Francis of Assisi to thank for our Christmas crib, for it was he who first set up a manger scene, with ox and ass and invited local villagers to celebrate the Eucharist around the manger. And I have been struck very much by this year by the power of this scene as an expression of the gospel, understood as the good news that in Christ every division is overcome and brought to wholeness...  The first Christmas sermon I preached here in Toowoomba empolyed words of a great poet songwriter singer: Leonard Cohen who, sadly for us, died recently. Let me then preach my final Christmas sermon here with reference to the words of another great poetic songwriter singer: Bob Dylan, who was recently awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature. For like Leonard Cohen, Dylan’s lyrics have typically been grounded in a relationship to existence which we can call religious, in the very best sense of that word: namely a relationship which is not always conventional, and certainly not ‘churchy’, but which is always seeking to connect with the deepest ground of our being. It is from this place that we find our truest meaning, both for our individual lives and for our families, communities and wider world. For, in Dylan’s words which take us to the heart of the feast of Christ’s nativity, whoever ‘is not busy being born is busy dying.’ In the nativity we see the ultimate meaning, source and purpose of life. We are invited to share that light and love, by allowing it to be born more fully in us and the world around us…
Joseph has a problem! Mary's pregnant and the baby is not his. It is not exactly a unique problem. This is the kind of scrape that appears somewhere in most people's family history, no matter how much pontificating and covering up goes on. I am sure we all have tales we could tell of the judgments that family members make of one another, and of the harshness of some 'good Christians'...
 One of the wonderful things about many Jewish people I have met is their capacity to wrestle with our human experience and ideas of God. They just do not settle for simplistic answers, especially when it is comes to the really big human questions of hope and suffering, life and death. Indeed there is a famous saying: ‘ask two Jews, get three opinions.’ Now, of course, this, can occasionally lead to a certain stubbornness and unnecessary conflict. It points us however to the very heart of biblical religion, especially as we find it in the Hebrew Scriptures. For the God of the biblical tradition is very much a God with whom to wrestle. We see this, not least, in the book of Hosea, from which we hear again today. Indeed, the God whom Hosea reveals is very much a God wrestling with God’s own compassion, very much as a parent wrestles with their own hurts and hopes for their child. This is the deepest, most mysterious, heart of love, and it is into this kind of love we baptise Margaret Rose today…
 When I was a child I was a member of the Tufty Club. Quite possibly I still am. I’m not sure the membership ever really lapses. Certainly almost every child of my generation in the UK was encouraged to be a member. For Tufty (or Tufty Fluffytail to give him his full name) was the brainchild of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. He was, and still is, a squirrel created to tell stories and messages and be the emblem for the road safety of children. So all kinds of merchandise has been produced around Tufty, including films, games, and badges. At one stage there were indeed as many as 24 500 registered Tufty Clubs in the UK, mostly based in schools. All of which was great fun as well as learning for children, not least red-headed children like me who loved Tufty’s life, colour and native character. Sadly, the native European red squirrel is today under serious threat of extinction in the UK, due to the advance of the larger, aggressive, North American grey squirrels and the continuing loss o habitats. Yet Tufty’s message – to ‘stop, look and listen’ – lives us on today. For it is good advice not only for children and road safety, but also for all our lives and spiritual journeys. It is indeed close to the heart of today’s Gospel story and Jesus’ own words for Martha and Mary…
I want to talk about wine, woman and wedding; and about what Jesus's first sign can teach us about our Mission Action Plan and our giftedness in this parish. First of all however, just notice how our gospel reading begins. It starts with the words "on the third day" - and that's very odd, because in the previous chapter we have had a day when the Pharisees question John the Baptist, then a day when John sees Jesus, then a day when he declares Jesus the lamb of God, and then a day when Jesus calls Philip and Nathaniel, so that by the count of the narrative we are now up to at least the fifth day not the third. Which should alert us that the counting that is happening here is not literal but symbolic. So if symbolic, what as Christians do we all know happens on the third day? ...that's right, Jesus is raised from the dead. So this tells us that the story that follows is a highly symbolic story, all about Jesus's resurrection and what it achieves. This is going to be a story about transformation, that is for the whole church. And if we are in any doubt about that we need only look to the last sentence of the story, ' Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him'. There are to be six more 'signs' in the gospel of John, each of them revealing more of the glory of Jesus, culminating in the raising of Lazarus, before John turns to the final story, the story of the death and resurrection. So this story, which appears at first glance to be about a good time at a wedding, is in fact all about Jesus and the transformative power of his death and resurrection...
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sermons and reflections from Penny Jones & Josephine Inkpin, an Anglican married clergy couple serving with the Uniting Church in Sydney Archives
March 2021
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