Pen and Ink Reflections - Pen and Ink Reflections

disrupting divorce, defending the discardable

10/6/2024

‘anyone who divorces and marries another commits adultery’ – what are we to do with these words that sound so condemning? Is there any good news here for those who have divorced or are contemplating divorce? Should those, Penny, like you and me, who’ve been married nearly forty years, just be thanking our lucky stars? How do we read this troublesome text?

but who speaks for the Earth?

9/8/2024

I invite us today to reflect on three things: on the divine justice we are called to share, on who are the children of mother Earth, and on who or what is treated as deaf and mute. Let me begin however with a song. For songs are among the abiding things I carry from the political activism of my teenage and young adult years. Not least these words:

The Land! The Land! ‘Twas God that made the Land.
The Land! The Land! The ground on which we stand,
Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hand?
God made the Land for the people…

church beyond?

6/23/2024

Our lives and world are shaped by the stories we choose to tell, and how we tell them. That is one reason the study of history is so vital. For it makes a huge difference what we choose to include, remember, and carry forward in the story of ourselves we share. So what story about ourselves and our world do we want to tell, and to carry forward, on this 47th anniversary of the official founding of the Uniting Church in Australia? How does this reflect the vision of church as beloved community which we heard about in our readings (from Ephesians chapter 2.17-22 and John chapter 17.1-11)? And how, vitally, do we see this story developing in the future?

the strange transforming truths of resurrection

3/31/2024

image: Brandy Martell, 400 block of 13th St near Frankland St, Oakland

‘Tell all the truth', wrote the poet Emily Dickenson, 'but tell it slant’. For ‘The Truth must dazzle gradually/Or every one be blind.’[1] That is pretty much Mark’s Gospel’s account of resurrection, isn’t it? Whilst other resurrection stories were attached later, the two earliest, and arguably the best, manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel stop abruptly at verse 8 of chapter 16, with women fleeing from an empty tomb and ‘saying nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.’ Furthermore, the text simply stops in mid-sentence, with the little preposition which means ‘for’. Mark’s Gospel, at least, is clear that resurrection is both truly astounding and impossible to convey straightforwardly. For how do we describe resurrection? How do we communicate resurrection? How do we live resurrection? The nature of resurrection is that it involves strange truths of transformation: which require, like so much great art, ‘telling it slant’; which rest on mystery; and which revolve around deep, lived, experience. For art, mystery, and experience: these three things are at the heart of the strange truths of resurrection we exult in today, as witnessed to by our readings and key images this morning, and the continuing life of you and I, and all who follow Christ…

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...

magic realism and earth healing

9/17/2023

Un Mundo, by Ángeles Santo, Museo Reina Sofia

What value does the book of Revelation have for us, especially in the face of ecological crises? My guess is that most of us have not spent too much time on the Bible’s last book. Some people of course have, including those looking for a special secret code to life and history, and those puzzling out different timetables for Christ’s second coming. Such interpreters however typically have little concern for ecology, and some even welcome signs of environmental apocalypse. Faced by the strangeness of John the Divine’s visions, we may therefore be tempted to dispense with the book altogether. Yet that would be a mistake. For, as this morning’s reading (ch.12 vv. 1-9 & 13-17a) illustrates, truth and light can be received in the strangest places…

emancipation, embodiment and equity in the first Last Supper

4/6/2023

Plautilla Nelli - The Last Supper (c 1550)

In many ways I hope that when you picked up your liturgy sheet tonight and saw the Renaissance picture of the Last Supper you saw nothing unusual. It’s Maundy Thursday – of course we’ll have a picture of the Last Supper. Some of the art historians among you however will I think have recognised that this is no ordinary painting. This is in fact – as far as we know - the first Last Supper by a female artist – Plautilla Nelli, a contemporary of Michelangelo, Titian and Tintoretto and influenced of course by Leonardo da Vinci who died some five years before her birth in Florence...

On dragonflies drawing flame: for the Trans Day of Remembrance

11/20/2022

How do you regard dragonflies? In the poem we heard earlier (As Kingfishers Catch Fire), the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins not only encourages us to be like them, but, in so doing, to be like Christ. Not everyone has always agreed however. In early colonial Australia for example, white fellas tried to kill dragonflies, just as they/we tried to kill so many other life-giving things that they/we did not understand. Those early colonialists saw dragonflies flying around and landing on their valuable horses, and they saw the horses moving and flicking their tails. So they thought the dragonflies were biting and making them crook. The colonialists were making things worse. The dragonflies were actually eating the mosquitoes and the gnats that were troubling the horses. They were life-givers, saviours even, not devils in disguise. In so many positive ways, dragonflies are thus evocative symbols for transgender people today. For, on this Transgender Day of Remembrance, we do well to attend to how bearers of light have been treated as embodiments of darkness. We do well, as our Gospel today (Luke 23.32-43) reminds us, to remember how Jesus was not crucified alone, and how others are also crucified today. And above all, we do well to affirm that it is only in recognising the light, in strange places, that we find salvation and hope for us all…

better or best? - beyond the binaries in Luke 10.38-42

7/17/2022

Martha and Mary: from the JESUS MAFA archive, from Cameroon, a project of Vanderbilt University

This is a well known but in some ways seriously annoying story, and I blame Luke – to say nothing of centuries of largely male, monastic interpretation - which can basically be summarised as ‘Hurrah Mary’ and ‘Boo Martha’. Or more aggressively as ‘stop complaining and pray harder’! Anyone out there feel like they’d like to muster at least a small cheer for Martha? Hurrah! This is a story that has been used as a means of social control in church and state, and a means of silencing the voices of women. For the very way this story is constructed, tends to make us choose sides. So, whether we are sympathising with Martha and feeling she’s a bit hard done by, or cheering Mary for breaking the gender stereotype, it is hard to remain neutral. The story itself sets up the two supposed sisters in opposition to one another...

silence, dreams, and strength

12/12/2021

Henri Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest, once said that “somewhere we know that without silence, words lose their meaning”. When there is silence, words also become infinitely more powerful. An enfleshed Word, like an infant Jesus – remembering that the word ‘infant’ comes from the Greek for ‘not speaking’ – carries most meaning of all; ‘the Word without a word’ as T.S Eliot expressed it in his poem Ash Wednesday...