One of my favourite stories of transgender resistance to oppression comes from India. A group of hijra people were being harassed and humiliated. Of course, this was/is nothing new. Whilst hijra have their gender officially recognised on the Indian subcontinent, they are outcasts among outcasts, typically living on the margins, in the very poorest quarters, and they stir a range of reactions in others. Like all marginalised people, behind their own remarkable brave lives lies terrible and very real fear, and many sad stories: of the sex trade and exploitation, of cruel and/or dangerous castrations, of being cast out and shamed.[1] In one community this shaming grew intolerable. Exclusion, humiliation and actual physical and sexual violence grew exponentially. What could the hijra do? The law, politicians, even religious leaders, did not care. They were actually deeply complicit. Then, after one particularly awful day, the hijra hatched a plan. In the early hours of the morning, after stripping off their undergarments, they would walk, en masse, to the houses of the worst abusers, rattling pots and pans, bells and whistles, and anything they could put their hands on, seeking to wake up the whole neighbourhood, and make the maximum impact. This they did, raising a mighty commotion. Then, they waited whilst the worst offenders, particularly the leading fathers of the community, opened their doors and windows, and came out to see what the terrible din was all about. Standing in line, shoulder to shoulder, the hijra together then took hold of the hems of their dresses, and, with an extraordinary shriek and song of pride, lifted them up, and displayed their genitalia, in all their glory. All those who watched on were taken aback, not only with shock, but with shame. For the hijra had turned the tables on them. The shame now rested on those who were rightly shameful. The powerless had, if only temporarily, transformed the powers that oppressed them, into tools of life and liberation...
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I thought today we might play with the ideas of hooks and fishing; of hooking and being hooked; of catching alive and who is to be caught. Our beautiful weaving here in church today (see image left) and photographed on the front of this week’s worship booklet reminds us that fish and fishing are woven into the story of Jesus from the beginning. Indeed, it is believed some early Christians made eucharist with bread and fish rather than bread and wine – probably not a great choice in the Australian sun and I hate to think what the COVID regulations would make of that idea! But there is no getting away from the fact that some of the first disciples of Jesus made a living from fishing. One of my grandchildren was particularly fascinated when I was in England in December. She was trying to grasp how it was night with me when it was daytime in Australia, and how it was so warm here and so cold where I was. One day, she had it sorted. Speaking to Penny on the phone, she loudly proclaimed ‘GranJo is upside down!’ I am not sure whether she thought that I was standing or walking on my head. However, in more than one sense, she was right - not least spiritually. After all, as Acts of the Apostles chapter 17 reminds us, like other early Christians, Paul and Silas were accused of ‘turning the world upside down’. It remains part of our Christian calling and sits well with the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, otherwise known as the feast of Candlemas, which we mark today. Wherever, or whoever, we are in the world, we are all called to ‘live upside down’ in spiritual terms… Good morning! It is a delight to be back here in Pitt Street after several weeks away on personal ‘sorry business’ and study leave. In the context of the continuing pandemic, it has certainly been what some might call an ‘interesting’ time, marking an important watershed in my own life and that of my wider birth family. In offering some reflections today, I would therefore like to begin by expressing my deep gratitude for the many, many. wonderful expressions of support from members of our Pitt Street community, and for the prayers which have been offered. I continue to be so grateful for the gift of loving relationships I am given as part of our life together, and I look forward to their further and deeper unfolding in the days to come. For relationship is such a core element of our lives, and never more important than at times of loss, grief, challenge and growth. As such, it is so absolutely foundational to the Day of Mourning we mark today, as well as to the trials of the pandemic world with which we continue to journey, and the struggles of our own particular lives. In the light of these things, my own recent and continuing journey, and of our readings today, I offer up relationship as one of three words which might be central to our considerations at this time.
We should have been listening to Jo talking about baptism today – but life in Sydney has been temporarily interrupted, so that will have to wait. Instead, we have a chance to look at this wonderful story of interruption and crossing over from Mark’s gospel (Mark 5:21-43). It is without doubt my own personal favourite gospel reading, so I offered to chat with you about it for a few minutes – and I hope over our Zoom coffee we may be able to chat some more... One of the reasons I love this story, is that it is so cleverly constructed – two stories that mirror each other, one within the other like a pair of Baboushka dolls. In different ways they are each about boundaries, edges, and transition zones – the kind of liminal spots where God has the most space to work. And this is signalled in the very first verse, “when Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side”. Bit of homework for the next two weeks at home – count the number of times in Mark’s gospel Jesus crosses over the Sea of Galilee – I can promise you it is quite a few! It reminds me of Elizabeth Gilbert’s well-known book and film “Eat, Pray Love” in which the central character develops a love of the Italian word “attraversiamo”, meaning ‘let us cross over’. ‘Attraversiamo' seems to be Jesus’s motto – and a good motto for others too. But I’m ahead of myself.
On this occasion Jesus crosses over from Gentile territory where he has healed the so-called Gerasene demoniac, back to a Jewish area – a risky choice, though at this stage the crowds are more of fan mob than a lynch mob. Here Jairus, the leader of the synagogue falls at Jesus’s feet, begging for the life of his daughter. Now this is a big deal. Jairus was important, honoured – and he crosses from that powerful place, demeaning himself at the dirty feet of a ragged itinerant and highly dodgy preacher. He crosses over from the centre to the edge. Why? because his daughter – according to Luke’s account his twelve-year-old daughter, on the border of childhood and womanhood – is in the border land between life and death. Are you noticing all the borders and edges? There are more to come. Jesus goes with Jairus – of course! If the leader needs you, you drop everything and go, right ?– especially if it’s a life and death issue? But then there’s an interruption. The crowd is pressing close – no social distancing here, no boundary! And suddenly Jesus stops. He starts talking about someone having touched him and looking all around the crowd. Can you imagine that? No wonder the disciples are so confused. The leader’s daughter is dying, and he is worried about someone in a crowd bumping up against him! But of course, there was no accidental bump here. The touch was deliberate. Across all the borders of exclusion, gender, isolation, the woman who has been bleeding for twelve years reached out to touch another edge – the hem of Jesus’ garment. And it was enough. Her touch was forbidden on so many levels. Because of her bleeding, the woman would have been excluded from society, from religious ceremony, from every aspect of daily life for twelve years – all the years Jairus’ daughter has been alive in fact. Stuck on the edge of menopause, just as the girl is stuck on the edge of puberty, she dares to cross over – to be out in public, to touch a man, or at least his clothing, to make a bid for her life. And Jesus asks for more. By stopping, by acknowledging what has happened, he invites her to come across the border, from the edge to the very centre – to come and speak her whole truth. But while all this is going on, while Jesus has been ‘wasting time’, Jairus’ daughter dies, and word comes from the household not to trouble Jesus further. And watch the movement here – Jesus brought the woman from the edge, right into the thick of the crowd. But when it comes to the little girl, he allows no one to accompany him except his closest disciples and the child’s parents. Just as the excluded person needs to be brought from the edge to the centre to find wholeness, so the child whose parent is the ‘big shot’ needs to be taken to a quiet edge, away from others, there to be taken by the hand and receive the simplest of words in Aramaic, ‘ Talitha cum’, ‘little girl, get up’. (I love those two words, along with the one other word in Aramaic in the gospels, spoken to the deaf man, ‘"ephphatha," as being perhaps some of the only words in Scripture we can reasonably assume that Jesus pronounced – praying with them has a special resonance for me). Taking the child by the hand was of course forbidden – to touch the dead made Jesus ritually unclean. Yet he crosses over the border to bring her back, to invite her to cross the threshold into womanhood. Two women – two stories of crossing over and restoration to life – mirror stories that take us from the edge to the centre and back again. Don’t worry too much about the miraculous. Just notice the edges, the borderlands, the crossings, the risks, that are part of every human story of identity and transformation. For this story is of course also our story. This is who we are and just as the woman and the girl in these nested stories are restored to their true and emerging identities, so this story invites us to live out our identity; to risk the crossings, to inhabit the borders where wholeness happens. And not just at the individual level. For Pitt St is a borderland community – and I don’t just mean that we come from many different LGAs! We could easily take attraversiamo as our motto, as we cross borders of geography, religious belief, ableism, gender, sexuality, race and all the rest on a daily basis. So have a little think about the borders you have crossed in life; about the borderlands you have chosen or been forced to inhabit; and about the healing that unexpectedly you have found there. And let’s chat about some of that and Pitt Street’s calling over our tea and coffee later – but for now, ‘let’s cross over’ as we move to our affirmation of faith. Amen. by Penny Jones, for Pitt Street Uniting Church, Sunday 27 June 2021 Three things immediately struck me in recently moving back to work again in the centre of Sydney. Firstly, so many of the high buildings had either grown even higher or had multiplied in number. Secondly, particularly in the adjacent areas north and west of Pitt Street Uniting Church, different Asian shops and cultures continue to grow in number. An official Koreatown now sits close to Chinatown, and other presences, including Malaysian, and particularly Thai, are not far behind. Thirdly, in the suburb where I live, each park has an acknowledgement of country, including the prominent words Budyeri gamarruwa – ‘welcome’ in Gadigal language. Each of these things are redolent to me of both the challenges, and the promise, of Pentecost today. For if we are to receive the Spirit of God more fully - replacing hearts of stone with hearts of flesh, and becoming one body in this land - these are part of the journey we make… ‘Is your Church involved in a rally or political or symbolic action every week?’ One of my daughters asked me this, shortly after our Earthweb-led involvement in the recent ‘Sound the Alarm’ Green Faith events, followed shortly by the presence of some of us on the March4Justice and planning for today’s Palm Sunday Refugee rally. I had to be honest: ‘well’, I said, ‘pretty much every week we, or some of us at least, are involved in something.’ And why wouldn’t we be? Today’s Gospel reading after all (Mark 11.1-10) is a reminder of what I would call the ‘prophetic performance art’ which reappears again and again in the Biblical stories. The so-called ‘entry into Jerusalem’ by Jesus is but one example of this - admittedly particularly significant. For it does not stand alone, nor was it originally intended to be simply repeated or venerated. Rather, in embodying Jesus’ own call to transformation, it seeks to inspire us to our own prophetic performance art. In this we are not exactly social influencers like today’s social media stars, but we are like divine influencers in reshaping our world. All of which can sound, or become, quite pretentious. So maybe a better, arguably more biblical, way of putting it is that we are called to become the wonky donkey… I am told that the former Archbishop of Sydney Peter Jensen was quite clear what entity needed to be at the heart of a flourishing diocese. ‘What is most important’, he once said, ‘is a good theological college.’ ‘And’, he added, ‘the most important thing within a good theological college is a good library.’ Perhaps on this site, we do not have to agree with everything else Peter Jensen has also said to concur positively. The role of good Christian education was, is, and always will be, vital to a healthy Church in any generation. So, as we remember Frederick Barker, the second bishop of Sydney, today, it is good to reflect on this and hold all aspects of Christian education in our prayers. For, alongside his sterling contributions to the missionary and organisational development of the Australian Church, far beyond the bounds of Sydney diocese itself, Bishop Barker is rightly to be honoured for the commitment and support he gave to the expansion of Australian Christian education in the crucial years between 1855 and 1880. For good and, in some respects, depending on your viewpoint, for ill, he was a huge formative influence in the shaping of Australian church history. So let me briefly highlight three aspects of his work and legacy… |
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sermons and reflections from Penny Jones & Josephine Inkpin, a same gender married Anglican clergy couple serving with the Uniting Church in Sydney Archives
March 2024
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