HOMILY: Paul writes: “… work out your salvation with fear and trembling … It is God at work in you that creates the desire to do God’s will” (Philippians 2:12-13). The good news: cooperation with God. The good news: gift and task. The good news: grace perfecting nature (Thomas Aquinas).
HOMILY: The priestly account of Creation in Genesis 1 sees Elohim creating human beings in the divine likeness, to be loving and caring toward the fish, birds and wild animals. Responsibility is the watchword. “Stewardship” is a faithful translation, though “subjugation” is a sadly familiar one.
HOMILY: We have received a record number of entries for the Blak & Blu pen-on-paper art prize. This year’s theme, set by founding sponsor Blak Douglas, is “Deep within”. And so, we have entries with titles including “Joy deep within”, “Deep within the chrysalis”, “Gadigal land – deep within the garden”, “Seeds of courage” …
HOMILY: John’s Jesus is a teacher of Wisdom. John’s Jesus is also Wisdom personified, Sophia incarnate. The offence, the “stumbling block”, has to do with this.
HOMILY: “To believe in God is to eat bread not by yourself but by some other magic …” (Joseph Pintauro, 1968).
HOMILY: John’s gospel refers to the miracles of Jesus (and there are seven in all) as semeia or signs. John understands them differently from the other three evangelists, the authors of the synoptic gospels, who call them dunamis, meaning powers. John is telling us that a mere fascination with the miracles misses their deeper significance. A sign, by nature, points beyond itself to a deeper reality.
HOMILY: Philosopher Richard Kearney describes the sense of touch as double sensation – touching and being touched – a figure for much else, including tact, vibrant relation, interpretation …
HOMILY: Standing up for what’s right and compassionate is to risk/live your life. Paranoid powers – gluttons and abusers like Herod – deeply resent social and political criticism, and prophets like John the Baptiser are undermined, ridiculed, imprisoned.
REFLECTION: This is an exciting and challenging time for the SSUC congregation-community-garden.
HOMILY: The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) says that a person is both spirit and matter, eternal and temporal, and that despair (Kierkegaard’s word for sin) consists in clinging to one or the other.
