Anglican Diocese of Perth

Northern Region

Bishop Farran's Sermons 2004

S. Christopher's City Beach, Pentecost 5 2004
(Based on Luke 10: 1-24)

Mission as basic as presence

The 9.46 accelerated out of Joondalup train station. I was on my way to Subiaco via Perth station. I was seated in a carriage that offered parallel seating along the length of the carriage. The carriage was not crowded, just pleasantly filled.

A middle-aged woman sitting beside me immediately launched into her knitting. The clicking of her needles matched the clicking of the train's almost silent wheels. She was knitting something boldly blue in a sheeny, fluffy wool.

Her knitting caught the eye of Vera opposite. Tom and Vera were sitting directly opposite the knitting lady, just askew from me. I know they were Tom and Vera for in the very public conversation that ensued they addressed each other with those names. Vera was very impressed with the kind of wool the lady along side me was knitting.

"Yes, it's beautiful wool", she beamed. "And it's so easy to care for too", she assured Vera. By now others in the carriage were showing discrete interest in the wool. The Asian lady opposite smiled politely, indicating her curiosity. I too smiled, although I am not a knitter, unlike some other clergy who wile away the boredom of Synod, knitting contentedly as yet another speaker berates us for our apathy.

"This is the second sweater I've knitted in this wool", we all heard. "The first one, the first time my daughter wore it, she spilt spaghetti bolognaise all over it". We all sympathetically shuddered at the thought of such a disaster. "But it just washed out, and it was as good as new". With that, she shook her knitting forward, as if to verify her story.

The stations were slipping by. We had passed Warwick, heading towards Stirling station when Tom and Vera indicated that Tom was still wearing a jumper Vera had knitted him some forty years ago. Of course, it's a fishing jumper now, but it wore well, didn't it?

I learned so much about that threesome. I thought I should send the script on to Barry Humphries - I'm sure Dame Edna could turn the train encounter into real theatre.

I learned that the knitting lady (whose name we never discovered) had three sons, each of whom played Sunday football. She had spent last Sunday from 9.00 a.m. to 2.30 p.m. watching her sons playing at different ovals. She admitted she had sat in the car knitting ("I always take my knitting with me", she emphasised), and of course didn't it sheet down about 11.15 last Sunday. Indeed it did, as those of us leaving church would remember!

Well, she had to wash the under 14 year old footie jumpers, and they were cacked with mud. But she had put them out on the line after a good soak (I didn't catch the soaking agent), and there was not a black mark on any jumper! She stated that with a flourish.

Well, there I was, sitting along side the knitting lady, listening to the public conversation that included so much more - trips to Kalgoorlie, how they camp now in friends' back yards when on holidays, how when they do Beach holidays at Esperance the boys are old enough to swim safely by them selves, whilst John (her husband) reads his books and she does her knitting!

But I did not say a word. I just listened in. Although when we left the train at Perth station we all smiled at each other.


As I ascended the escalator at Perth station, I thought that I might have told them about the washing I do most Sundays in adult baptisms, how I get these adults washed cleanly from sin, the blackest of all stains. And I could have detailed so much of the social issues of Kalgoorlie, after all I'd been the bishop there for seven years. And talk about wool - I could have talked about being a shepherd, about the crossed-matching of the flocks nowadays where sheep wander from their paddocks and lose sight of their shepherds!

But I just listened in. I remained silent. I did not gossip the gospel as they gossiped about wool, knitting, footie, Kalgoorlie, camping, and the rain. And my knitting friend didn't seem at all embarrassed when she detailed her Sunday football vigil of five and a half hours, despite my ominous clerical collar! Why she didn't even give it a thought! She probably assumed I was just another middle aged trendy dresser in a lovely purple shirt and high collar!

That was one of my Monday train rides. And now it's Sunday again with Luke's account of Jesus dispatching on mission a congregation (about 70people Luke says, the average Anglican congregation right throughout the Western world). Jesus sends them out, expecting a report upon their return, with very clear instructions that signal urgency, purposeful behaviour, and a succinct message on a take it or leave it basis. Jesus did not expect those seventy to compare knitting stories! But he did warn that they might feel that they were like lambs facing wolves!

I guess that's how we all feel when it comes to mission - like lambs facing wolves. We gulp ,we worry what we could say, we feel guilty that we don't seem to do mission, and we listen in on the life stories of others that seem light years away from our own stories, and yet...

The dominical command to be on mission is constantly and rigorously before us. Mission is not something that congregations can avoid, otherwise they bastardise themselves, they are not God's real children in faith. Indeed, the priority for mission is laid out before us in almost every document that the church develops. The most recent of such documents comes from the Church of England, mission shaped church.

This report is warmly endorsed by Archbishop Rowan Williams who said, "we can say that what's before us now is an opportunity to become in every way a more adult church. That is taking responsibility, exercising trust, living with some uncertainty and in every way therefore growing up into the Christ that we seek to serve as Church. So I very, very warmly commend the report to you. I look forward enormously to working with its recommendations and finding out how exactly we implement this exciting and deeply disturbing, properly disturbing vision."

The report bluntly states that, "the church needs to learn from the Holy Spirit to be more an anticipation of God's future than a society for the preservation of the past. Perhaps our greatest need is of a baptism of imagination about the forms of the Church."


Against this encouragement to bravery is set this observation of Paul "vis, a prolific writer about the church. Now Paul "vis is writing too of the English context of which he notes, Awe face the paradox that many people seem to want a church from which, with a fairly clear conscience, they can stay away. They choose to participate, if at all, at arm's length, as it were, in two ways: first, through the rites of passage (the church's occasional offices of baptism, marriage and funeral, and to a lesser extent, confirmation); and second, through special services that have overtones of family solidarity, such as Remembrance Sunday, Mothering Sunday and >Midnight Mass' on Christmas Eve -these are the liturgies that particularly have a bridging function."

Avis argues strongly from the English scene that the pastoral ministry of the church will be its most primary means of being missionary. He rues the invisibility of the clergy, most congregations' unimaginative engagement with local communities, and the need to appreciate what he terms >common religion', or >folk religion' as it is also known. Paul Avis is about building bridges from congregations towards >common religion', so that potential full-blooded Anglicans can cross the bridge without going through equivalents of airport security checks and migration and customs procedures!

Mission in pastoral forms is largely about presence. I think we should be exploring the depths of the notion of >presence'. For we take it for granted that we understand what it means to be present to others and present within a community. But what if we were actually practising a form of concealment rather than presence?

When you are present to others, how much of you do you want those others to know? When I think back to my Monday train trip, how present was I to the other passengers, especially to the conversationalists? I was sitting there certainly; in my purple clerical shirt, but that was a passive presence, a limited presence, an unengaged presence.

One of the chaplains at Cambridge University, Dr. Ben Quash, has written a helpful essay on the notion of >presence', especially in regard to the church's mission. Ben Quash writes, "we fail all the time to give due recognition to others - to allow them to be really present to us as themselves. But we also fail to make ourselves recognizable to them; to show the truth of ourselves in a way that makes us really knowable and genuinely present to them. I think of this as withholding, as a form of one-way looking. One-way looking is the attempt to avoid reciprocity: to look without being looked at; to have knowledge, even intimacy, without presence or self-offering.

Our calling is not to withhold our presence from those around us. Our calling, as imitators of Jesus Christ, is to bestow ourselves; to seek ever-new ways of being more fully present to our brothers and sisters, and the people God gives us to share our lives with."

I think we are struggling with how to be present in the fulsome form that Ben Quash celebrates. Yet, when a church is present within its community it is welcomed as a vital contributor, especially when it functions as a central networking station. This is one reason that the development of appropriate children's ministry is important here.

When Australian of the Year, Professor Fiona Stanley, appeared on Andrew Denton's Enough Rope in May last year, she brought a troubling message - about an unprecedented epidemic of behavioural and emotional problems in young children. Despite unparalleled material prosperity, our society is proving surprisingly harmful to many of our young.


On Monday, October 6th 2003 Fiona Stanley appeared again. This time she had a different group in her sights. Adolescents. About one in five teenagers, according to Fiona Stanley, suffers from some form of mental disorder. Since the 1970s suicide has increased fourfold among males aged 15 to 19.

Further, in 2003 the United States Commission for Children at Risk published its findings in a document Hardwired to Connect. The American researchers argue that the contemporary social and economic environment for young people is at best anaemic and at worst toxic. The chief cause is a profound loss of social connectedness. Authoritative communities - meaning intergenerational groups with a long-term commitment to children, who provide models of what it is to be a good person, who offer a secure base - are disappearing or disintegrating.

Commitment by the church to children is a major form of health. Not simply health for children in being part of an authoritative community, but health too for parents.

For out of care and nurture of children are forged other adult networks that enable effective, real presence. Friendships develop, loneliness is diminished, community emerges, and others are attracted into this vibrancy.

It begins with the practice of presence. And that is how mission happens now, I think, especially in suburbs that appear as if they are dormitories, but are quiet concealers of variegated presence that awaits attraction into multiple presences, networks, groups, that fulfil people and meet real needs.

Ben Quash warns that "if we cannot shape a church in which people are genuinely present to each other, we have nothing to offer the world." Mission begins with gentle extroversion, like conversations over coffee, and personal disclosure that is more than lamenting the weather.

Mission might be as simple as putting in a good word for the children's ministry here and for the special area that will be created for it. Mission might be your personal endorsement of your church as a meaningful place to be, and an interesting community to which to belong. Your endorsement is a fuller practice of your presence with others; you do not conceal your central belief structure.

So, who will join me for a Monday train conversation about what we did on Sunday at S. Christopher's? Why, we could have the whole carriage riveted to our account of that Big Shepherd who despite his broken wrist was out at City beach gathering the flock together. And yes, the flock does shine as people do with the after-glow of baptism!

That reminds me of this woman on a train who was knitting and telling a whole interested carriage about the wool, and her three footballer sons, and camping, and... She was really present, and now present to many more. She could be a great missionary, like those 70 Saint Luke recounted.