Threads of Love
I led a worship service on 21 July 2024 at Kippax Uniting Church. Here is my sermon, reflecting on threads of love.
Threads of Love: Weaving Christ’s Love across Cultures and BoundariesRobbie Tulip, Kippax Uniting Church, 21 July 2024
The Uniting Church has just completed its 19th National Assembly, held last week in Parramatta. Our incoming President, Rev Charissa Suli, chose as the theme for the next three years, Threads of Love, Weaving Christ’s Love Across Cultures and Boundaries. This theme is celebrated today across the Uniting Church for Intercultural Neighbouring Sunday, honouring the many different cultural traditions who contribute to the Uniting Church.
Rev Suli brings her Tongan heritage of the practice of weaving traditional fala mats in community to guide this shared vision of the church. Weaving is an activity of love, of cultural belonging, and of shared identity, nurturing our moral vision. The love of Christ enables us to weave together a future where unity is celebrated, where diversity is cherished and where every thread of our communal tapestry resonates with the boundless love of Christ. This metaphor of weaving as a way to see the divine action of God in the world describes how the church gathers together to recall and constantly rebuild the unity we have in Christ’s love. Each thread retains its distinct identity while joining with all the others to form a larger and stronger whole.
Just as the fala mat has its own identity, the church is more than the sum of the parts that form it. Whenever we build one another up in faith we are weaving invisible threads of love, rebinding and nourishing community. We create the ligaments of religion in our relationships, connecting one another in Christ, just as the ligaments of our skeleton hold our own body together. Love is the thread of the complex invisible tapestry of relationships in Christ, grounded in the ultimate truth of the grace of God as the source of all vital connections, creating universal order and shared purpose.
Our New Testament reading today is from the letter from Saint Paul to the young church in the Greek city of Ephesus. Ephesians 2:12-22 speaks to this vision of weaving the threads of love as the source of unity across cultural boundaries. Describing a time when the church was split by factions as it expanded from its Jewish origins into the wider Greek world, Paul found profound hope in the unifying love of God that Christ brought to the world. In Paul’s vision, the love of God enables us to openly discuss and reconcile our differences, to establish and maintain strong relationships, building communities of love and openness and forgiveness. Even where groups of people see themselves as entirely separate from each other, the spirit of peace in Christ, revealed in the story of the cross, has a reconciling power to overcome difference and create unity. As Paul says, “in his flesh Christ has made both into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” Part of the problem with reconciliation is that it requires mutual respect, honouring the truth in differing perspectives, requiring transparent and accountable negotiation to ensure the settlement is not an unfair victory of one side over the other.
Our world today sees steadily growing hostility and division between conflicting political views. A lack of respectful dialogue and conversation produces lack of understanding of differing perspectives, building walls of indifference and ignorance. Whether it is social media algorithms and echo chambers that tell people only what they want to hear, and so reinforce their prejudices, or the terrible wars in Gaza and Ukraine, or the extreme political polarisation between progressives and conservatives, the world is on a dangerous path toward worsening conflict. The social contempt that drives separation is opposed to the love of Christ, who always works to bring people together as one, weaving all our threads into a larger whole infused by the grace of God. Paul describes the mission of Jesus as to create in himself one new humanity in place of the two who disagree, thus making peace, reconciling both to God in one body through the cross, thus putting an end to hostility.
The reconciling power of the cross of Christ speaks of the great guilt of humanity, that when a perfect man appeared among us the public response was derision and murder. In the ancient world the story of the cross of Christ hung heavy on the consciences of both the Roman Empire and the Jewish authorities. They had colluded in the execution of a blameless man who sought to make the world a better place through the love of God. The reconciling meaning of the crucifixion of Jesus stood as symbol for the many thousands of crosses that the Romans used to execute their political opponents. Christ was one for all, enabling forgiveness of sin through the ministry of reconciliation. We can see a similar story in Australia as we consider the challenges of reconciliation surrounding the deep trauma of Indigenous people.
The passion story of Christ presents a stinging rebuke to the worldly values of psychological and political corruption and depravity. This rebuke remains as important today as it was two thousand years ago, calling us to an ethic of reconciling love, grounded in truth. When Paul tells the Ephesians that Jesus is our peace, he summarises the message of the incarnation of God, that real peace requires that our society is woven together in love. This message struck fear into the worldly authorities, who insisted instead that they were the only source of peace, defined as military and religious control, and had no interest in the saving transformative values of love proclaimed by Christ.
Our reading from Jeremiah 23:1-6, A righteous shepherd for Israel, foretells the problems of hypocrisy, error, incompetence, rejection and false prophecy that Jesus confronted in the Gospels, notably in his condemnation of the scribes and pharisees in Matthew 23. When shepherds destroy and scatter the flock, as Jeremiah describes here, they are not real shepherds. Operating under false pretenses, they were employed to protect the sheep but instead caused them harm. This was a parable for how Jeremiah saw the leaders of Israel in his day. They failed to fulfil their duty to protect the people through the wisdom and fairness and clarity that comes from authentic faith in God. Jeremiah’s prophecy of a righteous shepherd looks forward to the advent of Christ, as a wise and just king of love, weaving society together according to values of respect and dignity and truth.
These two readings from Jeremiah and Ephesians point toward two different approaches to Christianity that can be described as messianic and imperial. The idea of Messianic Christianity is highly controversial, focused on saving the world. A messianic approach seeks to follow the way of Christ in the spirit of truth, proclaiming the transformative and liberating message in the story of the cross, challenging the cross as a symbol of the repressive power of sin and death that is overcome in the resurrection. Imperial Christianity, by contrast, converts the cross from an instrument of oppression and control into a symbol of stability, and uses faith as a basis for worldly power, distorting the Gospel call to save the world into an endorsement of existing social structures.
The divine order of God is the fabric of the universe. We participate in this sacred fabric as we weave the threads of love and light in our community, growing our connection to God and to each other, deepening our spiritual identity and vision, honouring the mission of Christ as our true source of peace.
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