Light Shiners and Glory Givers

 A sermon based on Matthew 5:1-2, 14-16

“You are the light of the world … let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”

This exhortation of Jesus to his listeners occurs within the context of what we now call the sermon on the mount. Within the sermon Jesus challenges people to consider what it means to be blessed and within this there is a theme which points towards inclusion, justice, and an identification with those who have been dispossessed.

Artwork by Zoe Belle
Guwa Koa and Kuku Yalanji woman.

I suspect Jesus audience, including his closest followers, would have found Jesus’ teaching difficult. He turns norms on their head and pointed at the rectifying of systems of life within the community that privilege some and excluded others.

Yet, his belief was that in turning things on their heads the sum result would be that the light of God’s love would shine forth and glory could be given to God.

As we hear Jesus’ teaching 2000 years later and they interpret who we are I believe Jesus’ teaching remains uncomfortable for us. The challenge to love unconditionally, to seek justice, and to advocate for those whose voice is silenced. When we consider Jesus’ words about shining our light before others and giving glory to God, we do so within the context of living in this land we now call Australia.

Each one of us as a person of faith is called to be a light Shiner and the glory giver. The way I understand this is that through our own lives and the decisions we make we can shine with Jesus’ love. In addition to this, we have the opportunity when we observe the light of Christ shining through another person to give glory to God and articulate to that person how we can see God's work within them.

In thinking about this I would want to encourage you to understand the Holy Spirit may be at work in any person we meet regardless of their personal faith or understanding of who Jesus is. God works where God wills.

Given that today is Australia day and is also recognised as a day which contains great difficulty four First Nations Peoples, I am reminded of the words of a person who I count as a friend, a Waka Waka woman, Brooke Prentis.  At the Preachfest conference in Sydney in 2021, Brooke challenged us to consider how any sermon that we preach might sound to a person of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander heritage. Or to put it another way how I might as a preacher be a light shiner and glory giver to God in this context.

As I thought about this, I was reminded of the words of an elder from Cherbourg who spoke to the students from Eidsvold. He shared this little nugget of wisdom, “We have two ears and one mouth. We should listen twice and speak once.” This seems to be consistent with a concept that I learnt about recently which is called deep listening called Dadirri. Which comes from what we now call the Daly River region in the Northern Territory.

One place that we have been invited to listen deeply in recent years has been the Uluru Statement from the Heart. As I read the statement this week, I was caused to contemplate how the statement might help me understand what it means to shine the light of God’s love and give glory to God. As I prayed, contemplated, and listened I was drawn to the three actions that the Uluru Statement invited us as people to think about as we seek reconciliation: Treaty, Truth and Voice.

In shining the light, I want to explore these three words through three different lenses and invite you to listen with me to some of significant Aboriginal voices who might teach us as we give glory to God for the light which shines through them.

I begin with the notion of Treaty.

Whilst there are some Australian States and Territories that have begun conversations about the concept of a Treaty, I want to shine the light on what the Uniting Church has done. Last year at the National Assembly we recognized 30 years of the Covenant with Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Congress which was established by the then President Dr Jill Tabart and Pastor Bill Hollingsworth. These two visionary people modelled for us humility and grace in giving us a way forward.

Pastor Hollingsworth said in the Covenanting Statement:

 

Because it is pleasing to God to love one another, and it is our commitment to do so, we invite you on behalf of Congress members to develop a new

relationship by entering into the struggle of those issues that presently are the cause of continuing injustice resulting in broken relationships.

 

You seek our forgiveness because your understanding has been enlightened

by the Spirit of the living God to recognise the failures and mistakes of the past and you desire to establish a new relationship based upon real recognition, justice and equality.

 

The grace expressed in Bill’s words should not be underestimated given the impact of the arrival of the British in Australia in 1788.  The commitment to work towards reconciliation in our relationship with First Nations people has been a complicated one. In the recent book The Present and Future of the Basis of Union there is a conversational Chapter between Rev Dr Michelle Cook and Rev Ken Sumner a Kukabrak/Ngarrindjeri korni (man). In this chapter Ken says, “I could not find my songlines in the Basis of Union.”

Part of the journey towards helping people with First Nations people find their identity in relationship to the Uniting Church and a step to deepening our journey toward reconciliation was the adoption of the Preamble to the Constitution of the Uniting Church. In its third point it made a radical claim concerning the concept of revelation:

The First Peoples had already encountered the Creator God before the arrival of the colonisers; the Spirit was already in the land revealing God to the people through law, custom and ceremony. The same love and grace that was finally and fully revealed in Jesus Christ sustained the First Peoples and gave them particular insights into God’s ways.

As people who come from the Protestant and Reformed traditions, we tend to relate our understand of revelation to the Bible. One of the catch cries at the time of the Reformation was Sola Scriptura – by scripture alone! Here, though, the Uniting Church points to a more nuanced understanding of revelation – the idea that we can experience and encounter God’s presence in other ways. I will come back to that in a moment.

Whilst neither the Covenant Statement nor the Preamble are a Treaty as such, that is a matter of government, these actions shine the light of God’s love in a way which values and recognizes our history and relationship in a more formal way. It is something we can give glory to God for. If you have never taken the time to read the Covenanting Statement or the Preamble, I commend them to you as a place in which you can encounter the light of Christ shining and the glory of God.

This brings me to the question of truth. One of my first areas of academic study as an Arts student was Australian history. I studied my arts degree in the years spanning the bicentenary. During that time, I learnt a great deal about the history of our country which I had not known. I remember reading Ian Breward’s collated bicentennial lectures Australia the most Godless Place under Heaven and being challenge by the title of a collection of essays collated by W.E.H. Stannard White Man Got no Dreaming which was a quote from an Aboriginal Elder.

The decades of the 1980s and 1990s were awash with music that taught us aspects of our history. From Goanna’s ‘Solid Rock’ to Midnight Oils ‘Beds Are Burning’ to Yothu Yindi’s ‘Treaty’, Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody’s ‘From little things big things grow’ and Archie Roache's haunting ‘Took the Children Away’.  As we grapple with all of these things as a nation, I shared a friendship with a young Aboriginal guy at University who was part of the stolen generation. It was a journey I did not relate to our understand and in many ways continue not to.

The truth of Australian history and the atrocities that have been part of it have been glossed over and whilst many of the issues seem distant to us, they are closer to our generations than make us comfortable. Last year I had the privilege of meeting Brenda Matthews. Brenda wrote her story down in a book called The Last Daughter. A documentary of the same name can be viewed on ABC iView. Brenda, alongside her 6 siblings, was taken from her family in 1973. He father was a Pastor at a church but in those days, she says an Aboriginal Pastor was not paid. She was later returned to her own family and within the story the place of faith.

In the book Brenda shares the unusual Will her father wrote. Whilst I would like to share the whole document, I am restricting myself to what he left Brenda in his will.

 

To my youngest daughter I leave my peace. The kind of peace that can only come from above and is found in Jesus. Make him King of your heart and you will have peace forever. (p.243, The Last Daughter, Brenda Matthews.)

 

If I ask myself, what does it mean to be a light shiner and glory giver Brenda’s truth-telling about her own story and her father’s words stand out to me. More than that her humbling and instructive words written to me as an inscription in the front of my copy of her book, “To Peter, Healing begins with you.” 

How can I too be a light shiner and glory giver in this land we now call Australia?

This brings me to the third and final aspect which is Voice. A voice that has inspired and challenged me is the voice of the Wiradjuri man, Stan Grant. The last Synod took place just after the referendum about the Voice to Parliament and we had Stan as our key guest speaker. His pain and hurt, his confusion and loss, were palpable as he spoke to us at the Synod and as he tried to begin to process his disappointment.

In December last year Grant released a new book called Murriyang: Song of Time. As I read the book it is clear that Grant has been on a deep journey of healing. The book is a prayer, a meditation, shaped by the Wiradjuri spiritual practice of Yindyamarra – deep silence and respect.

Echoing the conviction of the Preamble to the Uniting Church constitution Grant says, “nothing of God was strange or unknown to us. We lived here in a thin space between earth and heaven – Murriyang - where the mystical realm was a breath or a touch away. I was entrance by the stories of the spirit world that my parents told me, never did I think to question it, why would I? To me it was the evidence of things unseen. If faith loses its mystery - what Greek Orthodox called the Mysterion - then God becomes just another rational being, competing with us for meaning and it is a short journey from there to where we become masters of the universe.” (p. 16, Murriyang, Stan Grant)

The mystery of our faith is ever before us and the presence of God in our natural world has always been a witness to us. I wonder how many of you consider that you feel closest to God in nature. If so you have a kindred spirit in Grant who has rediscovered God’s presence in nature and silence. I want to finish with his words today. It is a longer quote. If you wish to you might closer your eyes bask in the light of his wisdom and give glory to God as we contemplate how healing can begin with us as we live in God’s presence.

“There was no time when I did not have faith. But it had dimmed as I moved away and let the world into my soul. Now though something more profound and more troubling and more inspiring is stirring in me. God feels so much closer, close enough to touch. God came to me when I wasn't looking. God has crept up on me. In recent years I have begun to hear God in songs, see God in nature, experience God in the little things - looking at the stars, eating a meal, walking at dawn. God was waiting. God was where he always was, I just couldn't find him, I was blinded by the world. Now I see by faith not by sight.

The best way that I can describe this is that God has called me home. God has led me away from the life I have to live, returning me to a life I need. God speaks to us as who we are, and he has spoken to me as a Wiradjuri person. I did not want to hear, so he embraced me with silence. That's how God found me, he just stopped talking. Instead, he put me in places - by a Creek, under a night sky, sitting on a rock, curled up in a chair with a book - quiet places where his gentle presence could settle my mind. God reenchanted my Wiradjuri soul. How I needed that.” (p. 12-13, Murriyang, Stan Grant)