Good News for Dysfunctional Families! (Genesis 37:1-28)

Posted on August 8, 2026 by Father Dave


“Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children because he was the son of his old age, and he made him an ornamented robe.” (Genesis 37:3)

I’m guessing that not all of us know this narrative about the teenage years of Joseph, son of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham. When I was a child in 1968 and Andrew Lloyd Webber brought out Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, everyone knew this story (or a version of it), but that was a long time ago. There’s been no Disney version since, and I think I know why. It’s a nasty story where most of the characters are either wicked or clueless. Moreover, there are no miracles in the story, and God doesn’t even get a mention! Even so, there is good news here — but let me fill out the story a bit first for those who have never heard it.

Joseph, great‑grandson of Abraham, carries God’s promises of descendants, of a land, and of a blessing to all nations, though he doesn’t seem aware of any of that at this stage. What he does know is that his father loves him more than any of his brothers and that he has been given a special dress.

I use the word ‘dress’ deliberately. The Hebrew term — ‘ketonet passim’ — appears at only one other point in our Scriptures, in 2 Samuel 13, where it refers to Princess Tamar’s dress – “the garment worn by the king’s daughters who were virgins.” (v.18)

Why would Jacob give his teenage son a princess’ dress? Some queer theorists and feminist theologians have suggested that Joseph may have been gender-nonconforming or that Jacob was projecting his own identity struggles onto his son.

It’s speculative, of course, but it’s worth remembering that Jacob himself is described as a “smooth man” who liked to “dwell in tents”, in contrast to his hyper‑masculine brother Esau, who loved to hunt and was covered in hair (Genesis 25:27, 27:11).

Having said that, Jacob also had eleven sons and at least one daughter by this stage — twelve children to four different women — which makes him look father macho himself, so perhaps we should be cautious speculating on the psychosexual struggles of these ancient people. What is clear is that both Jacob and Joseph were extraordinarily emotionally unaware, for neither of them seemed to realise that Joseph was despised by his ten older brothers.

In Genesis 37:13 Jacob says, “Are not your brothers pasturing the flock at Shechem? Come, I will send you to them.”

Both Jacob and Joseph seem to be oblivious to the danger. Didn’t they think it might have bothered the older boys that Joseph had been singled out for the princess dress? They might not have wanted the dress, but they might have appreciated something that suggested they too were special to their dad. And these older boys were only Joseph’s half‑brothers. Jacob had had seven children with Leah, his first wife; four more with his slave women, Zilpah and Bilhah; and only one with Rachel at that stage – the woman he apparently truly loved – and that was Joseph.

I don’t know what you think of polyamorous (multi-partner) relationships. Personally, I think that more flexible family structures may be a good option for any number of people today. Even so, there aren’t many examples in the Bible of functional multi‑partner households, and Jacob’s family was an archetypal disaster!

This is good news in a sense. Perhaps your family — like mine — is rather dysfunctional, full of broken relationships and old wounds. Well, compared to the families of the patriarchs, we are the ‘The Brady Bunch’! And if you’re too young for ‘The Brady Bunch’ (which debuted only one year after Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat), think ‘Modern Family’ or perhaps even ‘The Kardashians’.

My point is that however much shame or pain you carry over your family story, our forefathers and foremothers in the faith were worse! The Hebrew Bible is full of parents who can’t manage their children and siblings who hate each other — from Adam and Eve to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Samuel, and David; and don’t forget the prophet Hosea! Not many of our heroes in the faith had functional families.

If you’ve made mistakes, you’re in good company. More importantly, your mistakes do not disqualify you from being God’s beloved and chosen servant.

Of course, as I said, God doesn’t actually get a mention in this reading, and in the greater Joseph story, you don’t see any great miracles. Things simply go from bad to worse for Joseph until one day everything is turned upside down and he becomes one of the most powerful people in the world.

I won’t spoil the story if you don’t know the whole of it yet. Suffice it to say that God’s presence is never obvious in Joseph’s day‑to‑day life. Joseph connects with God in his dreams, but beyond that his life is extraordinarily unspectacular — right up until the day when all his dreams come true.

“Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites… for he is our brother, our own flesh.” And his brothers agreed. (Genesis 37:27)

That’s where I want to leave this saga for today, with the brothers graciously deciding to sell Joseph rather than kill him. The boy is in slavery, the father is grieving, the brothers are lying and the family is shattered, and if that feels like your family, keep in mind this is not the end of the story.

It is not obvious at this point in the story what God is doing in Joseph’s life, but God is at work in the background. Things seem impossibly bad, but soon enough everything will be turned on its head, and that is the heart of our good news today.

Joseph cannot see God at work. Jacob cannot see God at work. The brothers certainly cannot see God at work, but God is weaving redemption through the very threads of their dysfunction. The robe, the jealousy, the pit, the betrayal — none of these are positive, let alone holy, yet they are the beginning of a story of salvation!

We believe in a God who turns things upside down — who brings down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly. We believe in a God who can take a boy from the pit and make him a source of life for all nations.

Perhaps we are in the pit right now. Perhaps our world is in the pit. Our story is not over yet either, and the God who brings light out of darkness is already on the move!

Genesis 37
First published in Father Dave’s weekly newsletter – August 8th, 2026

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The Kingdom is in the Small Things! (Matthew 13:31-33)

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Father Dave

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field… The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour…” (Matthew 13:31–33)

My father used to refer to these short stories and the ones accompanying them as ‘the MacDonaldtown Parables’. MacDonaldtown Railway Station was the closest railway station to my childhood home – a tiny station, tucked in alongside some of Sydney’s major stations like Central and Town Hall. It was originally built to service the rail repair yards, which were relocated long ago. Few people get on or off there now. You blink and you’ve passed it.

This parallels our journey through Matthew’s gospel, where we’ve stopped off at some major parables – the Parable of the Sower, the Lost Sheep, the Prodigal Son. These tend to be major stopping points on any journey through the Gospels. Not so with the Parable of the Mustard Seed or the story of the Woman Making Bread. Not many pilgrims get on or off at these stops.

In all of my pastoral visits to the sick and dying, I am yet to have anyone say to me, “Father, before I die, read to me again the Parable of the Mustard Seed!” No. Few of us get on or off here, and I think that is to our detriment.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown, it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” (Matthew 13:31-32)

I’ve never planted a mustard seed, and I think part of the humour of this story is that, in Jesus’ day, no one ever did deliberately plant mustard seeds. Mustard bushes were noxious weeds. As Pliny the Elder complained, once a mustard bush takes root, “it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it.” (Natural History 19.170) Farmers didn’t cultivate mustard; they tried to keep it out.

Jesus says the kingdom is like this seed – something tiny, unimpressive, and frankly unwanted that suddenly erupts into a sprawling, disruptive shrub. Birds of the air come and build their nests in the branches of this overgrown bush – small birds, at any rate, and probably the birds you’d hoped your scarecrow would keep away. Even so, the mysterious way in which this tiny seed suddenly sprouts into an enormous disruptive shrub is quite bizarre, unruly, and strangely hopeful.

I do love mustard, of course, though last time I picked up a jar of Keen’s mustard I had a sudden case of Dijon Vu – that experience where you could have sworn you’d had that mustard before! (Jesus’ parables were intended to make us smile).

“The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.” (Matthew 13:33)

Unless you’re a baker, you’ll miss the joke here. Jesus is talking about an absurdly large amount of dough in this parable – the equivalent of 40 kilograms of flour!

Interestingly, it’s the same amount of flour Sarah apparently used when she baked for the divine visitors in the story in Genesis 18. This woman is baking enough bread to feed between fifty and one hundred people! We’re talking a lot of dough, a large woman, and an enormous amount of bread!

If you’ve ever made bread, you know how it works. You rub this small amount of slimy, flaky stuff into the dough and then you ignore it. You walk away, and somehow the whole thing transforms from a soggy lump into something enormous that feeds and sustains! The process is mysterious, and the magic ingredient – yeast – looks and smells and feels radically unimpressive in its raw form, but somehow it transforms itself and everything around it into the stuff of life!

If we had more time, we could journey through the rest of these MacDonaldtown Parables, but let’s pause our journey at this platform for the moment.

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed or like a woman making bread – Jesus gives us images of a force that is quiet but disruptive, small but unstoppable, hidden but transformative. A kingdom that works beneath the surface, overturning the natural order – bringing down the mighty and lifting up the lowly.

That doesn’t sound a lot like the church, does it? Since Constantine, the church has had power and wealth and visibility. Perhaps the kingdom Jesus describes is a force at work within the church and outside of it – challenging, disturbing, and generally causing holy mischief.

Certainly, the images Jesus gives us here resonate with my experience. You pour so much life and energy into something that you believe is worthwhile and that serves God and the community and, for the most part, all you have is a mustard seed, and then, suddenly … WHAM! A huge bush full of galas!

It’s a bit like a fighter who gets his shot at the title and takes nothing but punishment, round after round after round, until suddenly … his opponent slips and hits his head, and you’re the heavyweight champion of the world! If Jesus had boxed, I’m sure we’d have that parable too.

I think about the problems we confront in our lives and the problems we confront as a global community. How will the war against Iran and Lebanon end? Will the good guys win some glorious battle, or will God do what God so often does and work through relatively powerless and unknown people to disrupt the corridors of power and transform things in ways we can barely comprehend?

The seed will become a bush, and the dough will rise – that’s the promise! We don’t know exactly how or when this will happen. It’s all quite mysterious, even magical. Even so, we trust the process, and so we keep planting those little seeds and kneading that dough because we know that one day … when we least expect it, the Kingdom comes!

Matthew 13 - the MacDonaldtown ParablesFirst published in Father Dave’s weekly newsletter – July 25th, 2026

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Don’t Purge the Church!

Posted on July 17, 2026 by Father Dave


Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” (Matthew 13:36)

I can never read the ‘parable of the weeds in the field’ without remembering the battle we had in the Marrickville Minister’s Fellowship about twenty years ago – the battle over whether the Metropolitan Community Church should be invited to join us.

A ‘Ministers’ Fellowship’ (in case you don’t know) is a gathering of Christian clergy and church workers in a particular region – Catholic, Anglican, Uniting, Baptist, Pentecostal, and the Orthodox too if they’ll come. At the time of the great debate, our Ministers’ Fellowship had between 20 and 30 people regularly attending each month.

The Metropolitan Community Church (if you don’t know them) were at that time better known as the ‘gay church’. In the 1980’s they were also referred to as the ‘AIDS church’, and nowadays they are often referred to as ‘the queer church’. You get the idea. Our question was, ‘should we invite them to be one of our churches?’

It was another Anglican cleric who proposed inviting them, reasoning that our basis for inclusion was acceptance of the first three creeds of the church, and we assumed these people accepted those creeds. Another cleric suggested that we add a second criteria for inclusion: ‘that you accept the first three creeds and that you’re not gay!’

I’ll let you know how that debate resolved later but let me first connect it to this parable, as it’s a controversial parable, and one of only two where we’re told that the disciples had to ask Jesus what the parable meant (the other one being the ‘Parable of the Sower’ that occurs directly before this one).

“Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” (Matthew 13:36)

Jesus explains this and the previous parable to the disciples and, in both cases, He gives an allegorical interpretation, meaning that He makes sense of the parables by substituting key elements in the story with characters and elements found in real life.

Most parables don’t work this way. Jesus told about 38 different parables all together, and most of them make a single point and are not open to allegorical interpretation.

When Jesus says, “the Kingdom of God is like a woman who mixed yeast into three measures of flour” (Matthew 13:33), we don’t ask, ‘who does this woman represent?’

When Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed … which indeed is the least of all the seeds; but when it is grown it is greater than the shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches” (Matthew 13:31-32), we don’t need to ask, ‘who do the birds represent in this story?’

Parables don’t normally function like allegories with fixed meanings. They are ‘language events’ as Rudolph Bultmann called them, that defy simple explanations. They are like windows, says Daniel Via, through which we view the world differently, and then, all of a sudden, catch our reflection. Parables defy straightforward authoritative explanations. They’re flexible. We work with them and they work on us.

Not so, the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Jesus gives us a straightforward allegorical interpretation to this story and hence its meaning is fixed!

A farmer sows good seed in his field but an enemy also sows in weeds, so that when the plants grow, there are a mixture of wheat and weeds. Jesus explains:

“the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil;” (Matthew 13:38-39)

This provides the context for the question at the heart of this parable. The farmhands ask their master “Should we then go and gather up the weeds?” (Matthew 13:29) to which their master responds with a straightforward “No”. He says, “for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.” (Matthew 13:29)

The parable ends with the farmer solving the problem:

“At harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.” (Matthew 13:30)

The harvest and the reapers are also given allegorical meanings. Jesus says: ‘the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.’ (Matthew 13:39)

There is no room for misinterpretation here. It’s not our place to judge! We can’t tell the difference between wheat and weed. We must leave it to God (or to the angels in this case). Frankly, I think that message is pretty obvious with or without Jesus’ explanation, but is there are danger that we would misinterpret this parable if Jesus had’t made the meaning so unambiguous? The simple answer is ‘yes’! Indeed, if you look at our history of persecutions and inquisitions, we, the church, have never stopped trying to root out the weeds from the wheat!

I’m just finishing reading a history of the Crusades that took place in the between the 11th and 13th centuries, depicting Christian priests chanting ‘Christ have mercy’ as their armies burst into Jerusalem, murdering every man, woman and child in sight as yet another attempt to purge Christ’s field of its weeds,

I don’t doubt that if Jesus hadn’t given us a fixed interpretation of this parable, we would have identified ourselves, and not the angels, as ‘the reapers’, whose job it is to separate the wheat from the weeds, The real tragedy is that Jesus left us no room to interpret His teachings that way and yet we took up the role of reapers anyway.

Back to the great battle of the Marrickville Ministers Fellowship of he early 2000’s. The result of the debate was that it pretty much destroyed the Ministers Fellowship without leading to any real result. We went down from meetings of 20 to 30 per month to meeting of less than a dozen each month, and we never did get the pastor from the Metropolitan Community Church to join us as I think we met on his day off.

Yes, the church is a mess, and it always has been, and the clear and unambiguous message we get from the parable today is that it’s not our job to clean it up! Our job is to keep sowing the seed, spreading the word, and to keep the doors open.

Matthew 13:28-30

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The Legacy of Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei

Posted on July 17, 2026 by Father Dave

It is my privilege to have been asked a number of times now by my Iranian friends to offer my thoughts on the life of their late Ayatollah. In this case, my words were turned into an article in Taghrib News. Click here or anywhere on the graphic below to read the article in English on their website.

Taghrib News.

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God Asks for Faithfulness, Not Success! (Matthew 13:3-9)

Posted on July 11, 2026 by Father Dave

“Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. Whoever has ears, let them hear.”” (Matthew 13:3-9)

A sower went out to sow, and he threw his seed … everywhere! He threw it all over the place! Some went where they were supposed to go. Some fell into the bushes, and some went on the road. It’s not obvious that this sower had any idea where most of his seeds were going. He just wanted to get the stuff out there!

It reminds me of my time as a paperboy. We were paid around $20 for putting around 5,000 copies of the community newspaper into letterboxes. The trick, of course, was to go to the massive housing commission blocks near where I lived—hundreds of letterboxes in a row. After half a dozen of these blocks, my entire inventory was gone.

Does that sound shifty? Some of the boys just dumped their papers in a bin. I delivered mine. I just didn’t care whether anyone read them. If the letterbox already had piles of unopened mail sticking out of it, that wasn’t my concern. My job was to deliver the paper. I didn’t care if anyone read it!

Yes, I was young and stupid, and we would expect a little more of a decent farmer, wouldn’t we? Surely the goal of the farmer isn’t just to scatter seed, is it? The farmer wants to make things grow.

Even though I do (technically) run a farm, I am not a farmer, and the only seeds I can ever remember planting were for some school science project, where it was a meticulous process—turning the soil, everything in neat rows, careful watering. The sower in Jesus’ story clearly did not attend my school. He just reached into his bag and threw stuff all over the place

I often thought of this parable during my years running the youth drop-in center in Dulwich Hill. We sowed a lot of seed over those twenty‑five years, especially in the early days when working mainly with young people with substance abuse problems. And a lot of those seeds bounced along the path.

There was a young Vietnamese guy named Long. I had a real affection for him, though he was a rogue. He was both using drugs and selling drugs and involved in lots of petty crime, including shaking down the local high school kids for their lunch money as they arrived at school each day. Even so, we worked hard on Long because he was something of a gang leader, and we figured that if we could win him over, he’d bring the others with him.

I tried for ages to get Long into the boxing club. One night he finally came, and it was unforgettable as his mates kept barging into the church hall trying to drag him out. Eventually I locked all the doors and got about half an hour with him. Then one of his gang found a way in through a window, said something to him in Vietnamese, and Long looked at me and said, “I’ve got to go.”

The police later told me I should feel proud—that this was the longest time Long had ever been separated from his gang. I didn’t feel proud. And a couple of months later Long died in a stolen car. Not an overdose, as I’d feared, but a crash—though, of course, he may have been high at the time.

Sometimes you throw out your best seed and it just bounces off the road. The birds eat it. It goes nowhere.

Speaking at rallies feels like that sometimes. I’ve been speaking out for Palestine since 1986—forty years—and have things improved? They’ve never been worse. Countless rallies, countless articles, papers, videos. Seeds scattered everywhere, and most of them seem to have landed on the path.

“Some seeds fell on rocky ground… Others fell among thorns…” (Matthew 13:5, 7)

There are so many reasons people avoid the truth.

One of my most vivid memories from the youth center was in March 2013, wagging my finger at a young guy named Michael: “If you don’t change the way you’re going, you’ll be dead or in prison within a couple of years.”

I’d banned him from our youth center for selling drugs and for beating up on smaller kids. He kept trying to sneak back in because all his mates were still there. Whenever he did, I’d call the police and they’d remove him.

I can’t remember exactly what had me out on the street with him that day, trying to talk sense into him, but he wouldn’t have a bar of it. And that night—around 3 a.m.—he and two mates broke into our youth center, poured petrol over the floors of the old wooden church building, and set fire to it.

Yes, that was the great Dulwich Hill fire of March 2013, and it was a miracle of God that nobody died that night.

Sometimes you throw out the seed, and it lands on the path. Sometimes, someone picks up that seed and throws it back in your face, but the point is that it doesn’t matter. Our job is not to get results. Our job is to keep sowing!

Someone once said to me, “You priests are no different from prostitutes. You give yourself, body and soul, but you charge a price—and the price is change. No change, no love.”

That has stayed with me. Spiritual prostitution is not our calling, is it? Jesus calls us to spread the word, to do the work, and to live in love and to leave the results to God. Sometimes the soil is good. Sometimes it’s shallow. Sometimes the seed sprouts and looks promising. Sometimes it withers. This is not something we control. We just have to keep sowing.

And we do see results.

One of the most encouraging things for me in recent years has been adult men approaching me saying, “You won’t remember me, but I used to be part of your youth center. If it hadn’t been for that, I’d probably be in prison now.”

That’s not an exact quote but a compilation of many conversations. Either way, it’s deeply encouraging, but one thing I’ve learned is that it’s very hard to tell where the path ends and the good soil begins, and it’s a constant, glorious surprise to discover that the people who blossom are often the last people you’d expect.

“A sower went out to sow.” He threw seed far and wide. He didn’t wait for perfect conditions. He didn’t test the soil first. He just kept sowing.

“Those who have ears, let them hear.”

Matthew 11:13
First published in Father Dave’s weekly newsletter – July 11, 2026

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Purity of Heart is to will ONE thing!

Posted on July 4, 2026 by Father Dave

“For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15)

Well-known words from the Apostle Paul, but when I hear them, Paul is not the first person who comes to mind. They sound to me like the confession of an addict.

The face I see is a man I knew as Johnny Loco. I normally change names when I tell these sorts of stories, but in this case, I don’t think I ever knew his real name. ‘Johnny Loco’ was the name he gave me, and with addicted people, you never know.

Of course, Johnny insisted he was clean when we met. He said he’d been sober for months but couldn’t get work because everyone knew he’d done prison time and didn’t trust him. He was living on the street, which he said would likely drive him back to crime. He asked for a short stay in our ‘detox room’ that we’d set up at the back of the rectory. I said ‘yes’.

I also found Johnny a part-time job at a local carwash owned by a friend, but within a week he’d been sacked. He was late every day, left early and was always sick. “One hundred per cent he’s still got an addiction,” the manager told me. I should have listened. But Johnny always had a convincing explanation, and he was so profuse in his gratitude for every kindness we showed him. Then things started going missing.

Jewellery disappeared first, and then my wife’s camera, and we noticed the bars on one of our windows seemed to have been prized open with a crowbar. I confronted Johnny about it and he broke down crying – “How could I think I would do such a thing to you after all the kindness you have shown me?”

I believed him. I embraced him. I apologised. Then the police investigator came around, went into the detox room, lifted the mattress on Johnny’s bed, and found all the pawn shop receipts.

“For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15)

Was Saint Paul an addict?

I don’t think they had crack or heroin in Paul’s day, and despite his advice that “a little wine is good for the stomach” (1 Timothy 5:23), I doubt very much that he had a drinking problem.

Jesus and His disciples were accused of drunkenness (Matthew 11:19; Acts 2:13), and Paul had plenty of enemies who questioned his piety and mocked his appearance (2 Corinthians 10:10). If Paul had been known to overindulge, we would have heard about it.

No, I don’t think Paul was an addict. Conversely though, I do suspect that the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and the developers of the 12-step programme were students of Saint Paul.

If you’re not familiar with the 12-step programme that is foundational to AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) and NA (Narcotics Anonymous) and GA (Gamblers Anonymous) and all the ‘anonymous’ groups, the first steps are:

  1. We admit we are powerless and that our lives have become unmanageable
  2. We believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.
  3. We make a decision to turn our lives over to God as we understand God.

That sounds a lot like Saint Paul, so it shouldn’t surprise us that both Bill Wilson and Dr Robert Holbrook Smith, the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, grew up as devout Congregationalists in Vermont (USA) and were both influenced by ‘The Oxford Group’ that emphasised personal transformation through spiritual principles.

I should add here that most of my AA and NA friends are not members of any church. Indeed, a great many addicts feel they have been judged and damaged by the established church. Even so, I think they would find a friend in Saint Paul – a man who understood the war inside the human heart.

“For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15)

Whether or not we’ve ever lived with addiction, I suspect that Paul’s testimony to his internal struggle resonates with all of us to some extent.

Saint James refers to it as ‘double-mindedness’ (James 1:8, 4:8), where our minds are going back and forth between the thing we feel like doing and the thing we know we ought to be doing.

Kierkegaard framed it slightly differently. “Purity of heart”, he said, “is to will one thing”, because the only one thing we can will is the right thing, as any other thing leaves our hearts in a state of internal conflict (willing two things at the same time).

“For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self,” says Saint Paul, “but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. (Romans 7:22-23)

It was at least five years between when we found the receipts under Johnny’s mattress till the time I saw him again. I was in my office, and he turned up at my front door looking very nervous. He told me he’d been driving around the block multiple times, trying to summon up the courage to see me.

He didn’t ask for anything from me this time apart from forgiveness. Indeed, he said that it had been after that time with me that he had changed. He’d gone back to prison, but there he had struggled to come to terms with the love that had been shown to him and the betrayal he’d committed, and he’d reached that point where he admitted his powerlessness and handed himself over to God as he understood God.

“Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25)

Romans 7:15

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Would You Know If God Spoke to You?

Posted on June 27, 2026 by Father Dave


It was early morning; Abraham rose in good time, embraced Sarah, the bride of his old age, and Sarah kissed Isaac, who had taken her disgrace from her, was her pride and hope for all generations. So they rode on in silence, and Abraham’s eyes were fixed on the ground until the fourth day, when he looked up and saw afar the mountain in Moriah, but he turned his gaze once again to the ground. Silently he arranged the firewood, bound Isaac; silently he drew the knife.

Yes, we’re looking at that story from the book of Genesis, chapter 22, where God seems to want Abraham to make a human sacrifice of his son, Isaac, though the passage I just read isn’t from the book of Genesis at all. It’s from a book written by Søren Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher of the early nineteenth century, entitled “Fear and Trembling”, which was an extended reflection on that story about Abraham and Isaac.

Kierkegaard begins “Fear and Trembling” with a series of reflections on the Genesis 22 story where each reflection reconstructs the story in a slightly different way. In one, Abraham tells his son what he is about to do, and Isaac pleads for his life. In another, Abraham pretends to be a psychopath so that Isaac won’t blame God for what he is about to do. None of Kierkegaard’s versions of the story end well, but how do you give a happy ending to a story about a man who sets out to murder his son? And the problem here is not with the Great Dane’s retelling but with the Biblical narrative of Genesis 22 itself.

Kierkegaard is one of many philosophers and theologians who have reflected on this story, as they see it as raising one of the most fundamental of all religious questions, namely ‘how do we know when it is really God who is speaking to us?’

“There is no voice that cannot be misheard as the voice of God,” says the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (in “The Prophetic Faith”). How do we separate the ‘grain of inspiration from the gravel of human impulse?’ (Father Eugene Kennedy). Well … Kierkegaard says, however we do it, we do it ‘in fear and trembling’.

I first met Mordechai Vanunu in 1986. We stood at the back of St John’s Church building in Kings Cross, drinking coffee and talking into the early hours of the morning about life, philosophy, existentialism, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard.

If you’re not familiar with Morde, he’s the man who became Israel’s ‘nuclear whistle-blower’. He’d worked for some years in Israel’s secret nuclear weapons factory, hidden under the Negev desert, and he’d taken photographs of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

Morde had taken leave shortly after taking the photos and was travelling the world on a spiritual quest, trying to work out whether he should publish the photographs and share the truth about Israel’s nukes or whether he should just bin them.

Morde knew that if he published the truth, his family and his country would probably turn on him and the Mossad would probably kill him, and he did not want to destroy everything he loved and lived for. Even so, like Abraham, Morde felt the call of God upon him, and eventually he came to the front of our church building and said, “Now I give my life to Jesus. Now I do what I must do.”

‘Oh, to be a knight of faith,’ says Kierkegaard – to risk everything: not only your own life, but the lives of those you love, your family and your country, and to risk not just death but ignominy and shame for yourself and for your entire family. Who would have the courage to take up such a calling? Who indeed?

Notably, when Kierkegaard wrote ‘Fear and Trembling’, he was also working through his own existential crisis. He was engaged to Regina Olsen – a woman he genuinely loved – and he’d completed his doctoral studies in theology and was ready to be ordained into the Lutheran Church of Denmark. A large part of him yearned to take up priestly duties in a quiet country parish with Regina at his side, yet he felt God was calling him to a more prophetic role – to be a critic of the established church, working outside its comfortable structures; yet he knew that if he took this path, he could not take Regina with him.

Kierkegaard made his decision in 1843 and broke off his engagement, publicly spurning Regina so as to save her from any public embarrassment, after which he went on to pursue the work for which he became famous. Even so, he quietly hoped that, just as Abraham received Isaac back, he might one day receive Regina back, but he didn’t.

Morde Vanunu served eighteen years in Ashkelon prison for his act of faithfulness, including eleven and a half years in solitary (the longest any human being on record has spent in solitary). I was waiting for him outside Ashkelon prison on the day of his release in 2004, and our hope was to that he would come back to Australia with me. Even so, they wouldn’t let him leave, and they have indeed reimprisoned him since, and he’s still waiting for freedom.

There are no guarantees that knights of faith will not have to endure lifelong pain on account of the sacrifices they are required to make. Did Abraham ever regret his decision to follow what he believed was God’s call? Did Kierkegaard ever overcome his pain? In the case of dear Morde, did he ever regret his decision? Well … I kept every letter he sent me over those eighteen years in prison, and his response to that question has never varied:

“I had to overcome many personal barriers to do what I did. The chief barrier was the sacrifice of my private life to exposure and slander and of my plans for the future – all on this altar. But the action was worth it. By this action I pointed out the path in which I believe … about what must be done … [and I demonstrated] the way in which a man must be willing to sacrifice and risk his life for the sake of an act that is important and beneficial to all mankind.” (from a letter Morde sent me in 1985)

Abraham rose early in the morning. He saddled the ass himself and left early, before Sarah had awoken, not able to share with her where he was going or what he was preparing to do. He rode with Isaac by his side, but they rode mostly in silence. Then he saw the mountain of Moriah in the distance. He laid the alter. He lifted the knife. And so he became the father of faith.

Genesis 22:11
First published in Father Dave’s weekly newsletter – June 26th, 2026

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Living Your Best Life! (Romans 6:1-4)

Posted on June 20, 2026 by Father Dave


“What shall we say then? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?” (Romans 6:1)

As you may know, I’ve just moved house. I’m now in a quiet little place in Concord, tucked away at the end of a closed street. It’s peaceful, the neighbours are lovely, and in many ways, it feels like I’ve accidentally wandered into a holiday resort.

It’s a far cry from where I’ve lived most of my life.

When I first moved to Dulwich Hill in 1990, we were the heroin capital of the inner west, and it was never safe to walk the streets at night on your own. We had gangs like The Legends roaming the area, and there were lots of drugs, crime, violence, and desperation.

We lived in the rectory there for thirty years, and for much of that time we had what was known as the detox room at the back of our house – a small room, attached to the laundry, where parishioners could stay while trying to get clean.

Some genuinely detoxed there. Some tried. Some said they were detoxing but weren’t, and we usually discovered that when our belongings started disappearing.

I’ll spare you the colourful stories. Suffice it to say that for most of my adult life, my two primary questions about my living space have been:

  1. How do I make my house safe for my children?
  2. How do I make it hard for people to steal our stuff?

Now I find myself in a place where those questions simply aren’t relevant. I’ve moved house, and the whole framework has changed, and, believe it or not, I think, this parallels exactly what Paul is getting at in Romans 6.

“Should we continue in sin so that grace may abound?” (Romans 6:1)

Paul has been arguing passionately that we are reconciled to God not by our moral performance but by God’s sheer, unearned grace.

“Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Romans 5:1)

If God’s forgiveness is a free gift, if mercy triumphs over judgement, then the obvious question that arises is “Why bother trying to live a holy life in the first place?” If, in the end, God forgives anyway, why not enjoy ourselves in the meantime? Why not sin boldly and let grace do its job?

“Between the stirrup and the ground, mercy sought, mercy found.” It’s an old mediaeval saying my father used to quote. If forgiveness is always available — even in the last split second of life — then why not live life to the full now and worry about forgiveness later?

Paul’s response to this is not the one we might have expected. It’s not the one you received from your parents.

Do you remember that conversation you had with your dad when you were first caught smoking or drinking or flirting with the girls after Friday night youth group?

“Son, you might think that getting drunk and taking mind-altering drugs and sleeping with a variety of women will be lots of fun, but sin isn’t all it’s cracked up to be!”

Paul doesn’t respond with the parental line, and he doesn’t give the government response either. I’m thinking of the obscene images displayed on cigarette packs. I don’t think they actually say, “The wages of sin is death,” but the pictures of the consequences of cigarette smoking make death look like a merciful alternative.

This is how governments try to curb our sinful habits – smoking, drinking, gambling, speeding and one-punch knockouts. They don’t threaten us with eternal damnation but with the suffering we’ll experience in this life if we do wrong! Crime doesn’t pay!

Paul doesn’t say, “Sin isn’t as fun as it looks,” and he doesn’t appeal to karma either. Instead, he says something far deeper:

“How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death? Therefore, we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”  (Romans 6:2–4)

Paul’s answer is simple: you’ve moved house! You no longer live in the old neighbourhood — the one ruled by fear, shame, addiction, and self‑destruction. You’ve moved in with Christ, so why would you go back to the old address?

Yes, before Christ, we did the right thing because we feared the consequences of doing the wrong thing. We avoided sin because we were afraid of punishment or social fallout. But now we live differently because we are different. We have died with Christ. We have risen with Christ. We walk in the newness of His life.

We don’t avoid sin because we’re scared. We stay away from sin because it no longer fits the persons we have become. We’ve moved house!

I feel I can’t end this reflection without acknowledging that the Apostle Paul, after he found Christ, actually moved out of his good neighbourhood and became a homeless itinerant preacher. Paul was probably living in a place similar to where I’m living now before he met Christ, who moved him from comfort into danger — into the streets, the prisons, the shipwrecks, the beatings, and the uncertainty.

Of course, God knows where I’ll go next. God knows what the future holds for any of us, and it doesn’t really matter where we go or where we live so long as our travelling companion remains the same.

To quote Paul one more time:

“For I have learnt to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learnt the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength.” (Philippians 4:11-13)

May God give us grace to walk in that same strength and to enjoy contentment in that same newness of life. Amen.

Romans 6:4

First published in Father Dave’s weekly newsletter – June 20th, 2026

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We Boast in Our Struggles!

Posted on June 13, 2026 by Father Dave

“We boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and this hope does not disappoint us.” (Romans 5:3–5)

I suspect that this one‑liner from Saint Paul has been quoted by any number of motivational speakers, alongside other classics such as:

  • “Those things that do not kill us make us stronger” (Nietzsche)
  • “Where there is no struggle, there is no strength” (Oprah Winfrey)
  • “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” (1950s American football)

Would Saint Paul have succeeded on the motivational speaker circuit? I’m not sure. He has indeed inspired many of us, yet his message is a long way from anything we get from Oprah or Tony Robbins. Moreover, he didn’t present well.

“For some say, ‘His letters are weighty and forceful, but in person he is unimpressive and his speaking amounts to nothing.’” (2 Corinthians 10:10)

Those are Paul’s own words, reflecting on the feedback he received from the church in Corinth. People found him more impressive on paper than in person, and when you read the list of injuries he’d suffered by that stage, it’s little wonder:

“Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea… etc.” (2 Corinthians 11:24–25)

Even if we only consider the first item on that list — receiving the “forty lashes minus one” five times — that’s incredible. As I understand it, the reason the Romans limited their lashing to 40 minus one was because 40 lashes was enough to kill you. So 39 was something you were expected to survive… but only just. Paul experienced this five times, along with multiple other beatings, stonings, drownings, and more!

It is a miracle that Paul survived as long as he did, but he must have been deeply disfigured. After thirty years of apostolic ministry, I imagine Paul looking like one of those prize fighters who never knew when to quit. He’d turn up at your church on a Sunday to preach, and the kids would recoil when they saw him. And no, he wasn’t a great speaker, but how eloquent can you be when your jaw has been shattered multiple times and you have no teeth?

Paul’s opponents clearly got a lot of mileage out of this. The “super apostles”, as he sarcastically calls them (2 Corinthians 11:5; 12:11), probably did look and sound a lot more like Tony Robbins and Oprah – sophisticated, well-spoken, nicely dressed, and doing well, which is what we’d expect, for doesn’t the Good Book say, “Prosperity pursues the righteous”? (Proverbs 13:21)

Indeed, the Torah repeatedly tells us that godly, clean living leads to a quiet, happy, and prosperous life. Paul’s life as an apostle had never been quiet, and he certainly wasn’t prosperous. As to being happy, Paul claimed to be full of joy, but how joyful can you be when you’re constantly being stoned, flogged, drowned and beaten?

Paul wasn’t just controversial. He was notorious. Many of his beatings were official punishments. Others were mob violence. A lot of influential, sophisticated people really hated him. Looking back, it’s remarkable that the early church stuck with Paul when his opponents were better spoken, better looking, and were preaching a far more palatable message.

Can we imagine a debate between Tony Robbins — slick, sophisticated, the kind of man we all admire — and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, a spluttering wreck of a man, telling us that we have to share in Christ’s suffering if we want to share in His glory (Romans 8:17)?

“We boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope…” (Romans 5:3–5)

I think the key to grasping Paul’s message here is recognising that he’s not giving a motivational talk. He’s not offering us the keys to success. He’s not our business coach, helping us to get ahead. No. First and foremost, Paul is trying to come to terms with his own wounds and failures in the light of the sufferings of Christ.

Christ is the visible image of our invisible God, Paul believed (Colossians 1:15), yet Christ suffered. This means that suffering is not necessarily a sign of God’s displeasure. Indeed, for us it may signify alignment with the life of Christ. This changes everything, and it invites us to reassess our own history of pain.

I think of all the things that have gone wrong for me over the years – broken relationships, lost opportunities, financial hardships, and betrayals. Are these signs of my own human frailty, or could they be indicators that I’m sharing in the life of Christ?

I’ve been grieving having been deplatformed by YouTube recently. “Where did I go wrong?” Is that even the right question? Would a better question be, “How long would Saint Paul’s YouTube account have lasted?” “Would Jesus have been deplatformed?” Did I do something wrong, or am I sharing in the life of Christ?

I’m not suggesting that there’s a single, simple answer to every question like this — not in my life, nor in yours. Even so, what I see Paul doing is taking control of his own life narrative by taking himself off centre stage, and instead of seeing himself as the star of his own life story and trying to make sense of his relationship with God from that perspective, he sees himself as a supporting actor in Christ’s story.

Once he does that, his pain and sins and failures take on new meaning! They become a participation in the life of Christ, and weakness becomes not a failure but a portal through which Christ can mould our character and teach us endurance.

The world still admires the polished, the prosperous, and the well‑presented, but where God connects with us, now as then, is in our brokenness. Suffering is never the end of the story but the place where Christ meets us. So we do not lose heart. Rather, we boast in our sufferings because we recognise that this is how Christ is shaping us, strengthening us, and preparing us for glory.

If we suffer with Him, we will rise with Him. And that hope will not disappoint us!

Romans 5First published on Father Dave’s weekly newsletter – June 12th, 2026

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