Some churches made Aboriginal Sunday the focus of their services today. Here are excerpts from sermons at two of them. Please feel free to send in other links.
Ray Minniecon at St John’s Glebe talked about the Aboriginal church.
:Some of the Bible readings that we chose this morning are quite deliberate in the sense that we know that many of the prophets, the Old Testament prophets, lived under the domination of other nations. So they were colonised either by the Assyrians, or the Persians, or the Babylonians. And in Jesus’ time, even he was under a very brutal regime. So, he was a colonised Jew, also. We know what he feels like and what it feels like to be colonised…
“In my growing up years under our regime of the Aboriginal Protection Act, all we knew was church in the home. One of the big blessings that we had this [last] Christmas, when we went back to Cairns, was these home churches, the young people in the homes studying the word, enjoying the fellowship in their own little community.
“I was so thrilled by that because that’s what we did, back in my time. And then, also .in my wife’s time, we would go into homes and have church or in the backyard or in a rented hall. And that’s where church happened for many of our people in those days and in many, many instances throughout Australia.
“It still happens like that today. And so I was so thrilled when we encountered these young people here, even though they’re my nephews and nieces and extended family, they were carrying out what their ancestors had taught them in terms of a church in a home.
“And it was such a blessing to see. And so there was no reverend or pastor, it was just them and the word and the spirit of the Lord moving amongst them. Actually while we were up there, I had the honour with my brother to baptise ten of those young people and a little creek called Harvey’s Creek. And it was such a blessing to be a part of that particular move amongst our young people and God’s spirit…
“I can tell you many, many stories, but for many of the denominations, regardless of what name they had over their churches, for us, it was like a foreign country, and you needed a passport and a visa to get into it.
“And, then, if the visa ran out, you were told with the doors.
“And so we didn’t have this kind of access like we have here at St. John’s. It just didn’t exist. And lots of our people, even to this day, still see the church as some kind of foreign country that you need a passport and the visa to get into and then to find out how Jesus works within them.
“It’s a huge, big challenge for me. I started my ministry here in Sydney, in this little church out of La Perouse. When you look at this church – this is the first and only aboriginal church building in Sydney. Just imagine. We’re on Aboriginal Sunday, 1788 to 2025. How many years is that? Only 230 odd years. And, still we don’t have a building, only that one in La Perouse, to show the grace of God and the power of God and the love of God in our own space, in our own building.
“This is the first one. This is where I started my Ministry here at La Perouse back in the church. It’s standing there, but there’s no aboriginal Christianity.
[Editors note: The La Perouse Mission Church, a heritage-listed former church building is now vacant.. La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council is restoring the building under the advice local elders want to see it operating again.}
Ed Vaughan at St Paul’s, Canterbury
“Those who join the kingdom by following King Jesus will do the same things that Jesus did. They will also preach good news to the poor. They will offer freedom to those imprisoned. They will heal the sick. Whatever resources or opportunities they have, they’ll use them to do the same sorts of things that our Lord did. And I think you can say that the followers of Jesus have been at their best over the last 2000 years when you could draw that straight line from the prophets through to Jesus, through to them when they were using their power and their resources to do the free best that they could for poor and oppressed people. And often at their worst when the people of Jesus thought their constituency was mainly rich people, or they thought that power was for their own benefit, or they laid burdens on people rather than set them free…
“Now, a little shifting gear, we’re marking Aboriginal Sunday today. And so what is that and why? You might have just, even as you heard the title Aboriginal Sunday, not quite the way that we speak, [asked] why is it Aboriginal Sunday? Why isn’t it Black Sunday or Indigenous Sunday or something like that? And what is it? Anyway, “some trendy new example of lefty wokes.” Why virtue signalling? Why are we doing this kind of stuff? Well, let me tell you about this guy, William Cooper, born in 1860, an indigenous man. He was a Yorta Yorta man, which meant that he lived on the Murray River.
“He learned to read and write, and become a Christian on a mission down there and became a pastor. And in 1838, which was the hundred and 50th anniversary of white settlement in Australia, he called together a whole group of Indigenous leaders. He observed January 26th as a day of mourning, which got a lot of headlines and generated a lot of public debate around what we now call Australia Day…
[Quoting Cooper} “
“It is unfair to treat us as a people of low mentality with treacherous tendencies. We cannot be taught anything in the sight of God. We are as valuable as other men and we feel sure that we could be taught. We are merely asking for an opportunity to prove that we can. Are you prepared to admit that since the creator said in his word that all men are of one blood, we are humans with feelings like yourselves in the eyes of Almighty God, that we can have joys and our sorrows, our likes, our dislikes, that we can feel pain, degradation and humiliation just as you do if you admit that will like true men, do your bit to see great injustice, at least modified by agitating for us to get a fair deal before it’s too late.”
“One blood: and that phrase is really, really significant in Australian Christian history and our interactions with indigenous people. It comes from the King James version. The old version of Acts chapter 17 verse 24-26. God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; Neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth,
That phrase of one blood is incredibly important. It’s what [missionary and bible translator ] Lancelot Threlkeld … had been saying previously, indigenous people are human beings.
“That’s so obvious, isn’t it? Who would ever possibly question that? Why would that ever be up for debate? Would anyone ever think that Indigenous people were subhuman? Well, people like Thread Keld and William Cooper lived in a world that was shaped by what historically is called the Enlightenment. Thinkers like Marx, Freud, and Darwin are all about the survival of the fittest, the fit, the strong, the superior, as opposed to the weak, the contemptible, the inferior. Well, the strong will survive, and the inferior people will be wiped out. Guess who the superior people are?
…
“Threlkeld noted that after attending an aboriginal girl’s funeral, he was approached by the girl’s mother who begged him to keep the location of the grave secret; he inquired for the reason for this request. She made reply that the white fellow would come and take away her head. Threlkeld explained that the Aboriginal people had known this happening in other grave sites in the area. Money was being paid as aboriginal skulls became prized editions for museum curators and collectors. Graves were robbed, and heads were taken so that they could be studied, and science could be proved. What museums do you think they ended up in?
“Well, Sydney University [has been] quietly returning the remains of Aboriginal people – they held at least 250 Aboriginal bodies, in some part –over the last couple of decades. My understanding is they still hold some, and they have been very quiet and very slow around that. This is a newspaper photo of a protest of indigenous people outside the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. And even in the last 12 months, they have returned Aboriginal remains. There are still museums all over the UK and all over Australia, including in this city, that still hold Aboriginal remains.
“I feel quite ashamed. I’m a graduate of Sydney University. I feel quite ashamed about the role of the university in this. The educated elite of Europe believed that science proved white superiority and it was inevitable that aboriginal people would just die out. Only the fittest, the superior race, would survive. And people like Threlkeld, and Cooper said, no, no, ‘we are one blood. We are made in the image of God.’ And they were outspoken about that. And let me tell you, not everyone rose up and called them blessed for that, including other Christians.”