A sermon on Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Jeremiah 2:4-13; & Luke 14:1, 7-14 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.

As you may have heard, there have been a series of rallies in major Australian cities today under the banner of “March for Australia”. There’s evidence that many of the organisers of these marches are people with a proven history of engagement with ultra-nationalist and white supremacist ideologies and groups. But actually, for most of us, those connections are not that important. The advertised agenda of the rallies speaks for itself. They’re calling for an end to mass immigration in the name of taking our country back, defending our heritage, and defending our culture. And although it has since been removed from their advertising, initially they were calling for “remigration”, that is sending migrants back to their countries of origin.

This sort of thing is not new. Australia has a long history of racism and being inhospitable to migrants and refugees. Not only were there genocidal policies towards Indigenous Australians, but there was an official White Australia policy for most of the 20th century that was specifically designed to limit non-British migration to Australia. But since the final dismantling of the White Australia policy in the 1970’s and the Fraser government’s ground-breaking welcome of Vietnamese refugees, it has felt like we’ve been progressively becoming more inclusive and hospitable.

But all that progress is feeling under threat again, isn’t it? We are hearing more and more reports of white supremacist and neo-nazi groups gaining members and gaining influence. Intimidating marches by groups of angry young men in balaclavas and dressed in black take place in cities and regional centres, and the impact of one of their gatherings is still tearing apart the Victorian Liberal Party with a leader lost and members suing each other. Whether the neo-nazis appeared as an identifiable group in today’s marches, I haven’t yet heard, but there is no doubt their agendas are closely related.

And then there its the usual counter-protest to these kind of marches, which once again resulted in violent brawls in Melbourne today. The so-called anti-fascist groups that usually turn up to protest against these kind of anti-immigration protest marches often seem to me to be almost as scary as what they are protesting against. Both sides often seem equally eager to use violence against the other, and you sure don’t want to get caught in the middle.

How did we get here? And what sort of response might it call forth from those of us who are seeking to be followers of the way of Jesus?

One of the biggest factors in how we got here is fear. The March for Australia organisers would probably say, “Yes, fear of losing our country, losing our heritage, losing our culture,” but I think that that is a very superficial reading of it. What we have seen, over and over through history, is that when people start trying to aggressively assert the rights of an “us” over against the rights of an alien “them”, what generally underlies it is a bigger fear that things are getting frightening, that we have little or no control over them, and that someone must be to blame.

Actually, I think it would be fair to make the same observation about the rise of sovereign citizen groups and other conspiracy theorists. The more life seems to be going badly, and the more powerless we feel to do anything about it, the more susceptible we become to simplistic theories that offer an explanation and someone to blame. For the March for Australia crowd, it is blame the migrants. For the Sovereign Citizen crowd, it is blame the police, the legal system and the government. Maybe even the anti-fascist counter-protestors are dealing with the same fears by blaming racists. Thinking that we know who to blame gives us a feeling of taking back some control, of being able to do something.

And yet, for the rest of us who haven’t gone down these rabbit holes, witnessing angry protestors facing off against angry counter-protestors in our streets, or seeing the shocking reports from Porepunkah of the murderous extremes some of these Sovereign Citizen types can go to, are precisely the kind of things that are making our world feel so unsafe. Sometimes the biggest threats like wars and climate crisis can feel far enough away to push them out of our consciousness, but these things are in our neighbourhoods and confront us with a feeling that civil society is breaking down, that the basic agreements about mutual respect and trusting our social institutions are falling apart and turning us against one another. 

The prophet Jeremiah also lived in times of social breakdown and the looming threat of national disaster. In the passage we heard tonight, he attributes this to the nation abandoning God’s ways and adopting worthless and ruinous alternatives. The picture he describes is more complex that the overly simplistic commentary you hear sometimes today from Christians who just say, “We’ve abandoned God’s ways, we’ve abandoned God’s ways.” 

Jeremiah uses this metaphor with two parts. God is like a fountain of living water which the people have given up drinking from, and instead, determined to make their own way and do things for themselves, they have dug their own water holes which are completely substandard, constantly leaking and holding nothing but sludge. The problem is not just what they have abandoned, but what they have latched onto to instead.

I wonder if that is just as true of our world today, or perhaps of this country? It’s too easy to point to plummeting rates of church attendance and Christian belief, and say that’s the problem. But it is never the whole problem. The question is not so much what we have stopped believing in, but what have we started believing in instead. When we decided to do things for ourselves, what did we switch our allegiance to? What are we putting our trust in now to provide us with life and meaning and identity and social cohesion? And how is that going?

Of course, as society fragments into competing tribal identities, there is no one new thing that everyone has adopted as their chosen water hole. For those who took to the streets in the March for Australia today, it is an aggressive monocultural Australianness, an ethno-nationalist vision of Australia for the white man (and I say ‘man’ deliberately because it almost always seems to go hand in hand with a nostalgia for a bygone patriarchal era). 

How do we, as followers of Jesus, respond to all this? I think our readings from the letter to the Hebrews and from Luke’s gospel give us some helpful pointers, but I want to introduce them with a concept that comes from my friend Bishop Malkhaz at the Baptist church in Tbilisi, Georgia, where I preached three weeks ago.

Malkhaz speaks of what he calls a “theology of beauty”. He describes it as a stance that says, “Whenever we come across ugliness, we respond to the ugliness with a project of beauty.” And his number one example of this approach is very closely related to our question of how to respond to things like the anti-immigration March for Australia today. Malkhaz says, that in Georgia, when “we saw the rise of antisemitism and Islamophobia… we saw that we had to respond to it with a project of beauty, and this is how the Peace Project came into being.” The Peace Project is what they have done in creating a mosque, a synagogue, and a church all under the one roof in partnership with one another.

I learned a lot during my time with the Baptists in Georgia, but I think this concept of responding to ugliness with a project of beauty is probably the thing that is going to most occupy my imagination for some time to come. You see, it is so wonderfully different from seeing the ugliness of the anti-immigration marches today and just responding by protesting against their protest, and perhaps risking becoming an equally ugly counter-protest. Instead of protesting against the ugly protest, Malkhaz would challenge us to search for a project we could undertake that creates a witness to a beautiful alternative. 

In truth, this is what churches are supposed to be, creative beautiful alternatives to the fragmentation, hostility and despair we see around us. Of course, we have no monopoly on this. There are other examples of beautiful alternatives too, many of them not Christian, and wherever we see beautiful alternatives, there we see partners with whom we can share and learn and build beauty together. 

Which brings me to the guidance offered in tonight’s reading from the letter to the Hebrews, starting as it does with, “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers.” Like quite a few of the New Testament letters, the letter to the Hebrews has spent much of its time unpacking some solid theology before turning to some practical application. This is the start of the practical application: “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers.” 

Our world has much in common with the world into which this letter was written. The dominant empire is spiralling into decadence, division, and political chaos, and hostile empires are massing on the borders, waiting their chance. People are increasingly afraid of what is coming and, in a desire to find someone to blame, are protesting against minority races, minority religions, anyone who they might safely point the finger at. 

And in the face of that, the writer says, “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers.” That would be the same strangers that others are pointing the finger at and gathering angry mobs in the streets to oppose. “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers.” It is not a call to get out and protest against the angry protestors. It is a call to create a sign of beauty, a sign of hospitality in action. When you bay for their blood in the street, we will not draw attention to your angry protest, but we will set about offering beautiful hospitality to the “strangers” you want to reject.

The writer continues: “Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.” 

The reference to torture should perhaps alert us to the need to think of this more widely than just those who have been legally sentenced to serve time for their crimes. The use of torture is usually associated with contexts of war or oppression. It happens where there is a desire to crush an idea or an identity or a culture. So the writer of the letter is calling us to recognise that where torture is being used, it could just as easily be us whose faith or identity was being targeted, and to pray accordingly for those who are currently the victims. Tomorrow it might be us needing their prayers of solidarity.

“And let marriage be held in honour by all,” the writer continues, “and let the marriage bed be kept undefiled.” It would be easy to hear this as a random insertion of some old-fashioned conservative sexual moralism, because that is how it is so often preached, but I think that would be a mistake. Rather, I think it is a recognition that when society is descending into chaos and division, our most intimate relationships come under pressure too. Part of that pressure is that committed intimate relationships are treated with less and less respect and sexual betrayal is almost normalised. In such a climate, we have to work even harder to make healthy intimate relationships work well, and the writer of the letter is urging us to do that. Slide into chaos here, and you’ll be contributing to the slide into chaos everywhere. But don’t just protest angrily against perceived immorality. Instead, set about creating beautiful communities in which one another’s relationships are treated with respect and honour.

Before I finish, I want to glance too at something Jesus said in tonight’s gospel reading. He suggested that when holding a banquet, we might intentionally invite those who are usually the least likely to be invited. Now most of us are seldom banquet holders, so if taken too literally, this might not seem very relevant to us, but there is no need to think about it only in relation to banquets. It can connect straight back to this thing about showing hospitality to strangers. Who are the least likely to be welcomed into our communities, our circles of friends, our group gatherings? There have been people in the streets today urging that certain people not be welcomed into our country. In what ways might we respond to that by modelling the opposite – going out of our way to welcome and befriend those very people? 

I’m not here with a bunch of ready-made answers to these questions, or with any concrete proposal for some “project of beauty” we could embark on. I’ve only been home for a couple of weeks, and these ideas are still unpacking themselves in my head. More importantly, finding our answers, our projects, is a task for all of us together, not something I should be driving. I might be introducing the questions, but we have to find the answers together. 

What I can say for sure though, is that finding ways of doing good in the midst of whatever is going on in our world is every bit as important as what we are doing here in worship, and is closely tied to it. Our reading from the letter to the Hebrews finished by urging us to worship, “continually offering a sacrifice of praise to God”, and then saying, “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.” Worship and putting love and care into action. Such offerings are pleasing to God.