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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Mercy Knows No Limits!

Posted on June 6, 2026 by Father Dave

And as He sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Jesus and His disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to His disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” (Matthew 9:10-11)

I’m with the Pharisees on this one!

I know many of us were brought up believing that Nazis, Communists and Pharisees are always the bad guys. Even so, I look at this scene where Jesus is having a party with a group of ‘tax collectors and sinners’, and I find myself asking the exact same question the Pharisees were asking: “Why does Jesus eat with these people?”

This party scene follows immediately on the story of the calling of Matthew, who was himself a tax collector, and so the party is taking place in Matthew’s house with Matthew’s friends, and it makes complete sense to me that the local spiritual leaders found this offensive, as tax collectors were despicable people!

If we were living in Gaza now, watching our country being systematically destroyed – our homes demolished, members of our family being killed, and with us facing the real and imminent threat of starvation – who would we be most angry with?

We would hate the enemy, of course – those with guns and bombs doing all the damage. Even more than them, though, we would despise the collaborators – members of our own community who had turned against us and who were on the payroll of the enemy.

No, the Romans were not carrying out a genocide in Judea at the time of Jesus. Even so, theirs was a violent and ruthless occupation, and when the Jewish people did eventually have their own October 7 moment – rising up against their occupiers and attempting to throw off the Roman yoke in the year 70 AD – the imperial response was brutal and merciless!

First-century Jewish people hated the Romans with a passion, of course, but the one group they hated more was the collaborators: people like Matthew, the tax collector.

When the Romans conquered a new town, they would auction off the job of chief tax collector for that area. Zaccheus, whom we meet in Luke, chapter 19, was the chief tax collector for the city of Jericho. The role would have cost him a lot of money. Why would anyone pay a large sum for the right to collect taxes for Rome? Because it could make you an even larger sum! It was a way to get very wealthy, very quickly.

Chief tax collectors then subcontracted their work to smaller tax agents who sat at toll booths on the roads and city gates. Matthew was one of these smaller toll collectors. He was expected to charge people 2% to 5% of the goods they brought into the city, on top of which he added his own commission – an amount that was whatever he said it was, and if you didn’t like his calculations, he had the Roman army to back him up!

Tax collectors were crooks, and they were collaborators, and they were very wealthy. There were lots of reasons to avoid them, and zero good reasons for pious and patriotic people to party with them, so … “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?

Some will say at this point, ‘Well, we are all sinners, so this is us’, but it’s not us. The crowd Jesus is partying with here are people we don’t want to party with.

Of course, we don’t know exactly who was there. When Jesus dines with Zacchaeus, he is like a Mafiosi boss, and we might expect other leading gangsters and, of course, their lawyers. Matthew isn’t at that level, so it’s probably mainly drug dealers and sex workers (or their equivalent). Were there known paedophiles hanging out at Matthew’s house that night?

I saw an alleged Truth Social post from Donald Trump, saying, “Nobody knows God better than me.” I believe it’s a fake post, but the genuine quotes aren’t much better:

  • “I have a great relationship with God.” — CNN interview, 2016
  • The Bible is my favorite book. Nothing beats the Bible.” — Campaign video, 2015

If Jesus were to somehow reappear in the flesh, and if I saw him make a beeline for Donald Trump, lunching with him and his friends, I would have an issue with that.

If Jesus were to come back and, instead of lunching with me and my mates, He chose to attend social events put on by those supporting the war against Iran or with those opposing all forms of immigration, or if He turned up at a social gathering of the Ku Klux Klan, I would have an issue with that!

Yes, Jesus explains why He does what He does: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” (Matthew 9:12) Even so, how sick do sick people have to be before the godliest thing we can do is to avoid these people?  Isn’t partying with people like this giving them the wrong message? Isn’t there a point where, if we’re going to maintain some level of moral decency, we simply need to stay away from people like this?

If we look at our larger Gospel reading from Matthew, chapter 9, it covers a series of encounters. There’s this meeting with Matthew, the tax collector, and his friends. Then there’s Jesus’ encounter with the woman who is haemorrhaging (Matthew 9:20-22), and finally, we see Jesus resurrect a young girl who has died! The common denominator in each of these encounters is that all these people are considered ‘unclean’.

The haemorrhaging woman is unclean because she is haemorrhaging. The dead girl is unclean because she is dead. Matthew and his friends are unclean because they are dirtbags, and because they worked for the Romans, mixed with gentiles, etc.

Jesus crosses the boundary between clean and unclean in a way that I find unnerving. If He had restricted Himself to preaching to the unclean, I wouldn’t have a problem, but Jesus touches the unclean. sits with the unclean. raises the unclean, and He parties with the unclean!

I remember once watching a news report on the trial of a notorious paedophile, and I remember the cameras catching the image of a Salvation Army officer who was acting as a support person for the accused. I remember thinking then, ‘Is this really what the Gospel requires – that we reach out in compassion to people like that?’

“Go and learn what this means,” says Jesus, “’I desire mercy, not sacrifice. ‘ For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners. (Matthew 9:13)

First published in Father Dave’s newsletter, June 5th, 2026

Matthew 9:13

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A God Who Refuses to Stay Far Away

Posted on May 31, 2026 by Father Dave

“The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the whole thing incomprehensible.”

Yes, it’s Trinity Sunday again — the only Sunday in the Christian year dedicated not to a story, not to a feast, not to a person, but to a doctrine. And the quote I just gave you is not, of course, a part of the doctrine itself. It’s Dorothy Sayers’ satirical summary of the doctrine as presented in the Athanasian Creed.

The creed itself is far more solemn — and far longer:

“Such as the Father is, such is the Son: and such is the Holy Ghost.
The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate: and the Holy Ghost uncreate.
The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible: and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible…”

And so it goes on — and on — and on. What I just read is only a small sample. The full creed is more than ten times that length!

Earlier this year at Concord Uniting Church, we recited almost the entire thing on Good Friday. I’m fairly sure most people had never heard of it before, let alone recited it aloud. And the real question, of course, was: did any of us understand it?

Years ago my friend Sheikh Mansour told me that a Christian friend of his in Iran once begged him to explain the Trinity. Mansour said, “It doesn’t make any more sense to me than it does to you”, and then he asked me the question many have asked: Why do we stick with this craziness?

Now, I’m actually a big fan of the doctrine of the Trinity — not because it is simple, but because I see it as the Church’s honest attempt to speak about God as based on our Scriptures. For years, though, I did see the whole debate as largely academic — the domain of philosophers and theologians — but this year something struck me afresh: Athanasius — the man most responsible for formulating the doctrine — was not just an armchair academic. He was a legend!

I’ve been reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which includes a surprisingly detailed biography of Athanasius. I confess: I had no idea. I had pictured Athanasius as a brilliant but bookish old professor — the sort who can explain metaphysics but can’t change a tyre. I couldn’t have been more wrong!

Athanasius was a thinker, yes — but he was also a doer. He was a pastor, a preacher, and a strategist. He could hold his own in the council chamber as well as in the desert. At the Council of Nicaea in 325, he helped hammer out the Church’s confession of the faith. After Nicaea he became the bishop of Alexandria — and a great warrior for truth.

You might have thought that winning the debate at Nicaea, with the emperor’s backing, would have secured him a peaceful and prosperous future. In truth, though, it was after they made him bishop that his troubles really began!

Athanasius had enemies — men he had done battle with in the Trinitarian controversy who didn’t disappear when the council ended. They regrouped. They whispered in the emperor’s ear, and ten years after Nicaea, in 335, Athanasius was deposed by the Council of Tyre and exiled by Constantine — the very emperor who had been his biggest fan!

Two years after that, though, Constantine died, and his sons reversed the decision. Athanasius returned in triumph to Alexandria, but within another two years an enemy bishop was installed in his place, and he had to flee again, this time to Rome!

Athanasius spent ten years in Rome, ministering to the people and winning their love, but in 356, Emperor Constantius II ordered his arrest. Athanasius escaped by night and hid among the monks of the Egyptian desert.

In total, Athanasius was exiled five times, and the charges against him were wild: murder, sorcery, treason, and — wait for it — tax evasion!

The most colourful accusation was his alleged murder of Bishop Arsenius. His enemies claimed that Athanasius had killed Arsenius and cut off his hand for use in magic rituals. The prosecution’s case collapsed spectacularly, though, when Athanasius produced Arsenius alive at the trial — with both hands intact!

“Athanasius contra mundum”, they said of him — ‘Athanasius against the world’.

Interestingly, he was never charged with heresy. No one dared take him on where it mattered. They couldn’t defeat him on the Scriptures, so they attacked his character. They couldn’t silence his theology, so they tried to destroy his reputation.

This all sounds very familiar. As many of you know, Google recently accused me of supporting terrorism and permanently deleted my YouTube account. What was the real issue? Well … I’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with me supporting terrorism.

For Athanasius, the real issue was never academic. The doctrine of the Trinity may be complex in its formulation and incomprehensible in its fullness, but for Athanasius it expressed a simple, central truth that he refused to surrender:

We will never get more of God than what we get in Jesus Christ. And when God gives us the Spirit, God gives us God’s self — not simply some spiritual assistant.

This, Athanasius believed, is as faithful to the Scriptures as it is to our experience. It is God who comes to us in Jesus. He is, as Saint Paul says, “the visible image of the invisible God.” (Colossians 1:15)

Athanasius didn’t cling to a doctrine. He clung to God, and the God he clung to was the God he met in Jesus — the God who comes close, who takes flesh, who breathes His Spirit into us.

That is the Trinity: God above us, God with us, God within us – not three gods, not a maths problem, but one God who refuses to stay distant.

And that is something worth standing for, even if the whole world stands against you.

First published in Father Dave’s weekly newsletter – May 29, 2026

Colossians 1:15

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