WE GATHER TO WORSHIP GOD ON DHARAWAL LAND
We gather to worship God in community as the body of Christ.
We gather to celebrate the life we have in Christ, sustained by the loving power of the Holy Spirit.
We declare in Jesus’ name that this is a safe physical, emotional and spiritual environment for all who gather here and online today as we search for meaning and purpose, healing and hope in life.
We gather on Dharawal land, which was taken and sold because our forebears could.
We acknowledge their dispossession and their search for truth telling and for justice making; and
we acknowledge their deep connection to land and honour their elders past, present and emerging.
CHRIST CANDLE
We light this candle because it brings light to this place. We light this candle because it reminds us of Christ Jesus whom we proclaim is the Light of the world and we want His light to be part of our lives.
LET US PRAY
God of our past and our future. We gather in your Name so that you may be honoured and our faith alive for all that today may require of us. You want to engage with us now, right now, even if we are thinking about what we will be doing during the rest of this day and coming week. You can only truly speak to us, be a Word of Life for us now, in this moment. Be present to each one of us and in each one of us today. In Christ Jesus’ Name we pray. Amen
HYMN Music – Judy
Blessing and honour glory and power
Be unto the Ancient of Days
From every nation all of creation
Bow before the Ancient of Days.
Every tongue in heaven and earth
Shall declare Your glory
Every knee shall bow at Your throne
In worship
You will be exalted O God
And Your kingdom shall not pass away
O Ancient of Days
Your kingdom shall reign
Over all the earth
Sing unto the Ancient of Days
For none can compare
To Your matchless worth
Sing unto the Ancient of Days.
CCLI Song # 798108 Gary Sadler | Jamie Harvill © 1992 Integrity’s Hosanna! Music (Admin. by Integrity Music) For use solely with the SongSelect® Terms of Use. All rights reserved. www.ccli.com CCLI Licence # 31951
WELCOME
BIBLE READERS Susan & Brad
GOSPEL: Luke 17: 11 – 19 (NRSV) On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!’ When he saw them, he said to them, ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests.’ And as they went, they were made clean. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, ‘Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’ Then he said to him, ‘Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.’ In this we hear God’s surprising word of healing and hope. Thanks be to God.
HYMN TIS 26 Susan introduces
Just as a lost and thirsty deer
longs for a cool and running stream
I thirst for you, the living God
anxious to know that you are near.
Both day and night I cry aloud;
tears have become my only food
while all around cruel voices ask,
“Where is your God? Where is your God?”
Broken and hurt, I call to mind
how in the past I served the Lord
worshipped and walked with happy crowds
singing and shouting praise to God.
Why am I now so lost and low?
Why am I so troubled and confused?
Given no answer, still I hope
and trust my Saviour and my God.
© WGRG, Iona Community, 1989 Used with permission CCLI Licence #31951
PRAYER OF CONFESSION Susan
Let us pray. Lord, we believe that all of humanity is made in your image. I wonder if today’s 10 lepers felt that too? And whether they might have found the song we have just sung, from Psalm 42 something they would cling to? Maybe it was the basis for their cry ‘Jesus, Master have mercy on us’.
Forgive us Lord when we stop calling to you and believing in ourselves and each other.
Lepers and Samaria were people and a place to be avoided by all self-respecting Jews – forgive us Lord for the people and places we automatically dismiss as not part of your Kingdom of healing touch.
Lord, we give you thanks for the many times we have known your healing presence and compassion, might we never take your presence for granted. May this Reading, this Psalm and these our prayers help us to worship you with all that we are, never tiring of inviting you again and again into every part of our lives. Christ Jesus, hear our prayers. Amen
MESSAGE Whose kingdom do you follow?
Adapted and paraphrased from David Barrow’s longer Message at St Stephens UC in Macquarie St Sydney on 11 September, 3 days after the announcement of the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
David worships at Leichhardt UC and is the Lead Organiser of the Sydney Alliance.
As our Prime Minister said yesterday, “There is comfort to be found in Her Majesty’s own words: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love’.” Personally, I did not expect to shed a tear. I am a progressive millennial. And yet on Friday morning I was crying in the kitchen over a person I have never known.
The thing that inspired me most about the Queen was her personal humility and commitment to public service. How lucky we have been to observe someone of her calibre, discipline and Christian values, albeit in a private form, in our lifetimes. In an age of celebrity and rampart capitalism her personal conservatism has demonstrated an alternative set of values.
Paul Keating, avid republican that he is, wrote some beautiful words:
‘In the 20th century, the self became privatised, while the public realm, the realm of the public good, was broadly neglected. “Queen Elizabeth understood this and instinctively attached herself to the public good against what she recognised as a tidal wave of private interest and private reward and she did this for a lifetime. Never deviating. She was an example of public leadership, married for a lifetime to political restraint. Remaining always, the constitutional monarch”.
No one else has been such a ‘public constant presence’ in our lives for these past 70 years.
Perhaps the attraction of Queen Elizabeth’s long reign is also that she, a rich and powerful inheritor of an empire, put her own humble trust in God. Who remembers her Christmas Day messages?
Hers was a conservative faith. It did not challenge power, though there were moments of great human generosity through her life. Her humble faith & her restraint made her the exception to so many in the line of queens and kings since William the Conqueror. So how do we hold these two ideas in tension?
Love and grief for the person and deep concern about the empire she inherited, enabled and represents? We who, courtesy of our Governors General, are still part of this constitutional monarchy.
The stories of Empire are already emerging. We are hearing from those around the world in the Caribbean, in India and here amongst Indigenous Australia that do not share this moment of grief for the monarch. Their grief is much closer to home, about the losses of life, livelihood, land and culture to a violent state that was built in her name and that of her predecessors.
“The blood never dried on the British Empire” is the title of a book written a few years ago which confronted the belief that the British Empire was a kinder, gentler empire compared with others.
But we forget Britain’s deep involvement in the opium drug trade in China in the 19th C, or that Tony Blair’s hero William Gladstone devoted his maiden speech in parliament in 1833 (after 40 years of calls from outside of parliament from people like William Wilberforce and John Wesley to abolish slavery) rising to support its abolition while defending his family’s still functioning slave plantation in Jamaica.
Or of the British response to the potato famine in Ireland in the 1840’s, of the many thousands of Indians killed in their 1857 ‘Mutiny’, or of the thousands killed during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in 1952 – 1953 and sectarian ‘the troubles’ in North Ireland in the 1970’s.
And the British monarch is not just Head of State but also Head of the Anglican Church thanks to a neat trick of Henry VIII’s when he wanted to marry Anne Boleyn in 1533. So how is that possible?
I thought Christ was the head of the Church?
You have to go back to the Roman Emperor Constantine who in 313 CE proclaimed that Christianity was now their State religion – the great sin of Christendom, the great lie, was that state power & violence with its rigorous conformity was somehow compatible with the radical love of Christianity.
That belief in what has ever since been called Christendom – where Church & State operate as one, meant that all western countries from that time embraced & saw as an automatic given God’s ‘blessing’ on for example a British Empire built of steam and steel, built on naval and land battles. Built on colonisation of the 3rd World on the backs of young children in their factories and mines of England, Scotland & Wales, on slaves, on indentured wealth, on privilege, and on the plundering of the resources of continents by companies and colonists – all ‘blessed’ as a God sanctioned monarchy.
So many of the English hymns that we still sing from the 18th & 19th C inherently reflect this blessing.
And let us remember that for we who have come out of our pre Uniting churches – we are Wesleyan abolitionists, coal workers in Welsh congregationalist churches & English Puritans and independent minded and sometimes bitter Scots Presbyterians — these our own faith traditions for 300 years have been deeply sceptical of Westminster & London and the excesses of unchallenged wealth and empire.
As a Christian, I do not lay my trust in kings, not in queens, nor in powers or, principalities, princesses, politicians or presidents. I trust no humans who have through wealth or guile, inheritance or luck accrued great power. As Christians, we are not called to monarchy, nor to hereditary rule; the ancient Hebrew Testament had no love for Kings, theirs was a tradition of judges and prophets, it was not a Hebrew invention, but one inherited from those around them & God warned them of such kings!
How easy and how so tempting it is for people to give our faith, love & loyalty to human constructions of pomp and ceremony, of privilege and power. Yet in our New Testament we have a radical invitation:
they were tending their nets, fishing, labouring, doing the accounts. They put down their tools, in their towns and villages and followed a young carpenter, Jeshua of Nazareth.
The Roman Empire and its Jewish client kings like Herod and his sons weren’t very appreciative of the disciples efforts. As they set out on the dusty path toward the centre of theological and political power in Jerusalem. And neither did they trust in Pharisees, or Sadducees either, nor in the eternal city of Rome, its Senate or in its military legions that had occupied Judea since 63BCE.
But rather they put their trust in love embodied in the man called Jesus, the Messiah. It is to that man, who lived and liberated, who was executed violently at the hands of a Roman Governor and who rose again and is the Saviour of all things, of the universe — in him, we put our humble trust and follow his radical servant leadership.
We have inherited the wealth & privilege of an at times violent British Empire with a constitutional monarch at its heart. We are now in a moment of renewed national identity and debate not just about monarchy or becoming a Republic but Indigenous recognition, Truth Telling and a Voice to Parliament.
Every person here today, will have more power to see the realisation of this work of our Risen Lord — than the new King of England. It will take time and God’s Kairos time of sacrificial service to achieve.
Let us put our grief and love and our desire for God’s Kingdom into that work as a People of God who increasingly work and find our identity on the margins of life amongst the powerless and dispossessed. Amen.
HYMN
Will you come and follow Me
If I but call your name
Will you go where you don’t know
And never be the same
Will you let My love be shown
Will you let My name be known
Will you let My life be grown
In you and you in Me.
Will you let the blinded see
If I but call your name
Will you set the prisoners free
And never be the same
Will you kiss the leper clean
And do such as this unseen
And admit to what I mean
In you and you in Me.
Will you love the you, you hide
If I but call your name
Will you quell the fear inside
And never be the same
Will you use the faith you’ve found
To reshape the world around
Through My sight and touch and sound
In you and you in Me.
Lord Your summons echoes true
When You but call my name
Let me turn and follow You
And never be the same
In Your company I’ll go
Where Your love and footsteps show
Thus I’ll move and live and grow
In You and You in me.
CCLI Song # 4668756 Graham Maule | John L. Bell © Words: 1987 WGRG, c/o Iona Community, Glasgow, Scotland (Admin. by Willow Publishing Pty. Ltd.) Music: 1987 WGRG, c/o Iona Community, Glasgow, Scotland For use solely with the SongSelect® Terms of Use. All rights reserved. www.ccli.com CCLI Licence # 31951
OFFERING
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE Heather
LORD’S PRAYER
HYMN
God of grace and God of glory
on your people pour your power;
now fulfil your Church’s story
bring the bud to glorious flower.
Grant us wisdom
grant us courage
for the facing of this hour
for the facing of this hour.
See the hosts of evil round us
scorn your Christ, assail his ways.
Fears and doubts to long have bound us
free our hearts to work and praise.
Grant us wisdom
grant us courage
for the living of these days
for the living of these days.
Cure your children’s warring madness;
bend our pride to your control;
shame our wanton, selfish gladness
rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom
grant us courage
lest we miss your kingdom’s goal,
lest we miss your kingdom’s goal.
Save us from weak resignation
to the evils we deplore;
let the gift of your salvation
be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom
grant us courage
serving you whom we adore
serving you whom we adore.
Henry Emerson Fosdick 1878 – 1969 Used with Permission CCLI Licence 31951
BLESSING & BENEDICTION
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