Anglican Diocese of Perth

Northern Region

Sermons and Addresses

A sermon preached by Bishop Brian Farran at the commissioning of the Reverend Chris Hind as curate-in-charge of Mundaring Parish, July 24th, 2003.

Body image is a major behavioural driver in our society. Teenage boys are increasingly conscious of their body image, according to recently released social data. The impact of sports stars like David Beckham and our own Ben Cousins is powerful upon the desired body shape of many teenage males. Once upon a time females were thought to be highly influenced by fashion in determining their body shape. Now we are aware that possibly everyone thinks about their own body image. This can bring unhappiness and even depression.

So we have witnessed the flourishing of the body industry. I mean more by this than simply males becoming more fashion conscious and even beginning to use cosmetics. I refer to the growth of fitness centres, to personal trainers who accompany people on their exercise, and to the diet industry. Why even that highly intelligent television current affairs programme Today Tonight has featured the great soup diet. This programme followed various overweight Perth people has they shred kilos by eating nothing much more than vegetable soup for eight days at a time!

Getting into shape is, I think, a worthy ideal. I periodically am convicted to attempt this myself, and when you start to improve your body shape, there is an inner glow of satisfaction. Somehow looking healthy and fit is its own reward.

So we talk a lot about our bodies, and we certainly are exposed to much advertising that assumes that there is an ideal body shape for females and males. We meet the notion of 'body' in a corporate sense too. Anyone who has lived in a home unit will have dealt with the body corporate - a governing mechanism to ensure that the tenants live together harmoniously and co-operate to maintain the fabric of the building.

Originally in the ancient world, the world of the Greek and then the Roman Empires, the term 'body' was a social or political concept. Society was thought of as a body, with each citizen contributing to the overall well-being of society (the body). This understanding of society as a body was hierarchical. After all (it was assumed) that the most important part of the body was the head. Of course, the Emperor in Roman society was the head. In fact, by the time of Jesus, the Roman Emperors (the Caesars) had decided that they were so valuable that they were actually gods incarnate. So Caesar Augustus was deferred to as a god. That was a useful political control mechanism, as you could imagine.

Saint Paul subverted the Roman understanding of the body as he transposed this notion to interpret the nature of the church. Saint Paul used the social analogy of the body to help new Christians at Corinth appreciate their new identity, and to assist them to change their behaviour and their outlook on life. The fact that Saint Paul used the image of the body to describe the church would not have in itself been surprising to the Corinthian Christians, whatever their social class was. After all, if you were a slave who had become a Christian, you were familiar with the organization of Corinthian society as a body, and you knew that you were its feet - running hither and yon at the beck and call of your owner!

Saint Paul's subversion was to introduce the notion of equality among the body parts, and further, to give honour to those parts of the body that were thought to be less honourable, and even to accord greater respect to our less respectable members. Saint Paul clinches his argument by concluding that but God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. (vv.24 & 25)

In other words, no member of the church is more important than any other. At least, that is our theory, if not our practice. When I was ordained a priest in 1968 at S. Thomas' church Narrandera in New South Wales on a stinking hot mid December morning at 8.00a.m. a bush choir struggled to sing, in that small country church as the bishop entered, Ecce Sacerdos Magnus, Behold a great prelate, who in his days was pleasing unto God. That was an indication that the church had chosen to ignore Saint Paul and to continue hierarchy, which it still, sadly, continues.

Saint Paul developed an understanding of our corporate life that subverted the hierarchy of the ancient world, and threatened the power of Caesar, and the institutions, such as slavery, that supported Caesar. The church with its radical equality of membership, at least in principle in the New Testament, is still subversive, and is still an alternative to our own hierarchically driven society where brute power, or money, or beauty create their own hierarchies.

The highpoint of Saint Paul's redevelopment of the concept of body is his statement to the diverse group of Corinthians who constituted the church at Corinth, a very secular, multi-racial, prosperous, tourist destination city, now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. (v27).

These very words are true of the congregations here in Mundaring parish: now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. This means that each member of the Anglican church here, in whatever centre of the parish, is significant for the church's mission and ministry. Indeed, it means further that the body is incapacitated if any one member is not exercising their particular gift of ministry in the mission of this church.

At times our church in some settings appears as if it is paralysed on one side, or has a dislocated hip, or has an arm in a sling. Whenever the members of the church refuse to exercise for the common good their particular ministry gift, such members incapacitate the church! The outcome of thinking yourself as a consumer of ministry rather than appreciating that because of your baptism you have been authorised for ministry, is to incapacitate the very church that you love!

Saint Paul made it clear to the Corinthian Church (and thus to all churches of all times) that the Holy Spirit gifts each member for ministry, and that such gifting is to be exercised for the building up of the church, so that all people through the church's outreach, attain the maturity that Christ wills for all people. It is the combination of our ministry gifts that enable the church to be effective in its mission to signal to the wider community the presence of the Reign of God within our society.

Throughout the history of the church over the last one thousand years, the ministry of the church has been quarantined to the clergy or to religious orders or even to missionaries who left their own culture to go to a foreign place to proclaim the gospel. This contraction of ministry to what were virtually classes of members of the church reintroduced the practice of hierarchy, and clearly went against the teaching of Saint Paul. It is astounding that this anomaly of practice was not critiqued until as recently as the 1980s, when the church found that in its remote areas like Alaska or the outback of Australia or the United States, the state of Nevada -the testing area for the United States Atomic weapons programme- the mediaeval parish version of being church could not be sustained in such settings.

Now we have begun to embrace, haltingly, what is known as Total Ministry, that is, the version of ministry that Saint Paul taught and which the New Testament churches practised. These churches relied on local leadership from within the congregation with the support of itinerant leaders (apostles or their delegates) who visited and mentored these churches and their local leadership. We are developing in this Region a version of Total Ministry that we call Ministering Communities in mission. This practice seeks to change the self-understanding of congregations from being consumers of religious experience, just coming to church, to being ministers, that is being the church. This is a huge cultural shift that demands commitment, vision, energy and perseverance. This ideal based on New Testament ecclesial principles is the target of sabotage and resistance for various reasons, sometimes because those who have benefited from hierarchical organization feel threatened by a loss of hierarchy.

The church as the body of Christ has been out of shape for some considerable time. You know that if you are unfit, if your body is not in shape, it takes time, effort, exercise and perseverance to regain fitness and shape. I cannot get fit simply by observing my neighbour take his early morning fitness walks - I have to walk too! Similarly, we will not help to get the church into its proper shape, if we simply watch one other do ministry. And that has generally been our practice for most of our lives as members of the church. Oh, we help out, but in so helping out, we unconsciously think that we are giving the priest a hand in doing his ministry, rather than appreciating that we ought to be exercising our own particular gift of ministry. At least, that was the practice Saint Paul was exhorting those fractious and difficult Corinthian Christians to instigate.

What we most need at this moment is a vital vision of the church to which we can commit ourselves enthusiastically. Such a vision is our being the body of Christ in our own time and place. There is no other greater vision, nor any other vision that accords each of us such honour. For God entrusts God's mission to us!

Therefore, we need to be able to identify the particular gift for ministry that the Holy Spirit has bestowed on us through the combination of our birth and our baptism. There are helpful processes of identifying such gifts, mostly based on our detecting what is our deepest desire for God. This is a particular ministry responsibility of your new priest who has the special task of emulating the Holy Spirit by co-ordinating the variety of gifts for ministry in the several congregations of this parish to undertake the mission of the church.

Then once your gift for ministry has been discerned, you need to practise that gift, to gain skill in using it, and to exercise that gift within the corporate dimension of a co-ordinated mission by this church. Again, the priest's leadership of co-ordination in conjunction with the ministry leaders of this parish will be vital.

And then you need to diet! For that Greek word 'diet' means 'way of life'. So you need to commit yourself to a way of living that allows you to be an effective, practising member of the ministry of this parish. This may mean ensuring you learn more about Scripture than just through the Sunday sermon. Do not be a paralysed arm or a lost tongue!

When this parish does practise and embody the principles of being a ministering community in mission this church will become a more effective sign of God's compassion, a compassion distinctly revealed through our Lord Jesus Christ. This compassion of God is vital for the very many Australians who feel left behind by our society, or pushed to our society's edges, or forgotten and abandoned by our society. Indeed, such people feel that they are the amputated limbs of this society!

There are plenty of people for whom life is drudgery, who do not have hope about their lives, and who literally are no-hopers, that is, they no longer hope. Such folk especially are the church's province to embrace with Christlike compassion that restores their dignity, gives them hope and allows them sustainable change of life.

All this is the reason that we are the body of Christ and individually members one of another.

Tonight is not just the commissioning of one minister, Chris Hind (a priest), no matter how talented and energetic for God Chris obviously is. Tonight is the commissioning of a community of ministers whose primary task together is to be the body of Christ for the human flourishing of the people of this district. To each of you is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.(v7)

For the sake of this church, and the people who need its mission, you had better believe it!