I thought we would take a look at the epistle today and perhaps over the next few weeks continue to make our way through Ephesians. This passage is particularly beautiful and I think gives us an insight into the spirituality of the community following on from Paul and of their care for the churches that were being founded, in this case at Ephesus. As Elizabeth pointed out a couple of weeks ago, there are various stylistic and theological matters in Ephesians that cause scholars to doubt whether this is the work of Paul himself, but that really doesn’t matter. What this brings us is an insight into the understanding that the author had of God in Christ, at a still very early stage of the church’s development...
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Two days ago, Bishop Jonathan broke open the beginning of this great teaching section of Luke’s gospel on prayer, by reminding us of the centrality of Jesus’s statement ‘only a few things are necessary’. Yesterday, Jo brought us a succinct summary of Luke’s raw rendering of the Lord’s Prayer under five headings all beginning with P, praise and proclamation, leading to providence, penitence and protection. To those five Ps today I want to add three more, Perseverance, Poverty and Purification. I hope these three will shed a little more light on the great P that unites them, Prayer...
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?...
 Welcome everyone to the first Formation Intensive for 2017 - my first Intensive as it is for some of you. And this is the first intensive, at any rate for some time, that has a theme. It is my intention always to provide a theme for when we meet together, mostly in order to enrich our informal conversations, and our times of worship as well as to lend coherence to the whole program.
So for the next couple of days we are gathered around the theme 'How Shall We Grow?' It is of course deliberately a theme that can be taken at many levels. How do I grow as an individual ? How might we grow together as a dispersed college community that is undergoing some significant change at the present time, with new students, movements of staff and changes on the physical site? How do we grow as church, in the many incarnations of church that we represent? How do we grow as a society, and a world, at a time of much challenge? How indeed do we grow?...  On this Ocean Sunday in the Season of Creation, let me speak about three things: about how the Gospel calls us to ocean-like risks; about how Pacific Islanders are leading us to a deeper understanding of God as ocean; and, on this Fathers Day, about how one son remembers his father best when he is close to the ocean. First however, let me rework an old story.
The story goes that Prophet Mohammed, the Buddha, and Jesus all return together and go sailing on the ocean in a boat. A storm blows up and breaks the sail, sweeping the oars and other implements away. Marooned some distance from land, what are they to do? Well, Prophet Mohammed ponders for a moment and then takes action. Relying on his physical prowess and trust in God, he leaps into the still tumultuous waves and, at the cost of much exertion and constant vocal prayer, swims his way back to shore. The Buddha is next. Remaining typically calm in the face of all the changing circumstances, he sits attentively for some time and then, picking up a piece of driftwood, slides on to it. Catching the next great wave, with profound skill and attention, he also eventually surfs his way back to shore. So, what of Jesus? Well, Jesus seems to spend far less time and effort. He simply steps out of the boat and walks easily and comfortably back to shore. Immediately, social media goes mad, making sense of these startling events. So what is the main meme, or message, that is spread? It is obvious, really: Jesus, proclaims social media to the world, Jesus can neither swim nor surf – so what kind of a saviour is that?!... Jesus 'was praying' - this is the first thing in today's Gospel reading. If Jesus himself prayed, whatever makes us think that we can get along without praying?! Prayer is all about our relationship with God, and like any relationship it needs time and nurture. The question sometimes is ' what kind of nurture'?...
 Mothers Day – what do we make of it? In some ways is a strange, and very modern, development. Indeed, if we ever needed an example of how culture shapes an idea in different ways, then Mothers Day is it. Originally it was a revolutionary rallying call to mothers to take action to save their children and stop war. Yet today it is a much tamer and commercialised affair: a largely domesticated call to do something for mothers, however small. Instead of mothers themselves organising campaigns for peace and justice, as they did when it began, Mothers Day today is mainly an opportunity for mothers to be pampered by their nearest and dearest, at least for one day. So where does God’s love fit in all of that? Is there anything Christian faith might have to say to affirm, deepen, and expand our meaning of Mothers Day? Well, yes: especially on this particular Mothers Day, which is also the feast day of the medieval saint Mother Julian of Norwich, and the first day of this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Both of those events help us see and use Mothers Day more fully, as an opportunity to share the mothering love of God more abundantly: not only by rightly valuing that love in our own mothers, but by renewing that love in our own selves, and by extending that love to others, different to us and further afield…
 What do we know about St Mark? (wrote one of the gospels, symbol is a lion, famous churches - for example in Venice - named after him?). The truth is that we don't know a great deal about St. Mark himself There are certainly a few legends that attach to his name. One is that the Last Supper was held in his house - the story goes that Mark was a teenager at the time, and that possibly he sneaked out with the other disciples and followed Jesus to the garden of Gethsemane and was the young man who nearly got arrested, but managed to get away by wriggling out his loin cloth and running away naked. If that story has truth, then Mark learned at an early age that following Jesus can be a very risky matter and that courage is important. Some scholars identify him with a disciple called John Mark, who appears in the Acts of the Apostles, first as a companion to Paul and Barnabas and later as a scribe for Peter. Certainly the gospel of Mark has many references to Peter and seems to have been written by someone who might have heard Peter tell his version of the story.
Whatever the truth of all that, when we read the gospel of Mark some aspects stand out, that I would summarise as pouncing, proclaiming and praying...  Today we come to the climax of the Epiphany season - leaving all the little 'ephiphs', the mini revelations as it were in the foothills, we come to the very top of the mountain, to the big one, to the Transfiguration; to the moment when Jesus stands before his closest disciples in all His luminous glory. All too briefly the fullness of his divine nature is there to see. He shines with all the brilliance of a hundred thousand diamonds. And it is amazing! But not as amazing as what it implies for us and our world.
For the thing about diamonds, it is said, is that in chemical reality they are just chunks of coal that kept on doing their jobs. And that is helpful to us when we think about the fullness of humanity transfigured in Jesus Christ. We are like those lumps of coal. We have the potential to be diamonds, but mostly we don't and can't see the job through to the end. In the Transfiguration Jesus shows us what we would be if we did. This is the principle of theosis, or God-becoming that has been part of the Orthodox teaching of the church from the beginning. You and I and the whole created order have the potential to be transfigured, to reveal to the world the glory of God just as Jesus did, but it is a process that even in the best of us like Moses is fitful and incomplete this side of eternity...  How do you picture peace? I wonder if your vision is quite the same as that of the prophet Isaiah in the John the Baptist story in our Gospel reading today? Isaiah says this: “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth;6and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” Well, that definitely doesn’t work for me if it were taken at all literally. For I was born in the North Pennine hill country of England, which owes so much of its life, history, wildness and picturesque beauty to the variety of its landscape, its hills and valleys. I certainly know that the folk of the Durham Dales would do all they possibly could to avoid every valley being filled, every hill being made low, and the winding paths and rough ways being made smooth. I suspect too that few people in Toowoomba would take kindly to such an environmental transformation of our own Range, valleys, hills and landscape. No. On this second Sunday in Advent, as we centre on the theme of peace, we need to look deeper if we are to find fuller meaning in today’s Gospel reading. Perhaps we are helped by re-casting Isaiah’s words a little. To that end, I offer some words of the great El Salvadorean archbishop and martyr Oscar Romero: words which I believe catch up the spirit of the Advent prophets, that “Peace is not the product of terror or fear. Peace is not the silence of cemeteries. Peace is not the silent result of violent repression. Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all. Peace is dynamism. Peace is generosity. It is right and it is duty.” Let me return to that, and to John the Baptist in our Gospel, again, in a moment…
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