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Good morning and welcome to Saint Andrews on the terrace this morning, this transgender day of remembrance Morning. Our opening words are inside the order of service. All human beings are valuable simply because they are human. All human beings are worth loving simply because they are human. Whether we understand an other or not, [00:00:30] whether they are different, they are due respect and the expectation of life. All human beings are due unconditional love. All humankind, all orientations, all genders. All people are welcome here. So may it always be [00:01:00] [00:01:30] welcome everyone and welcome be phones. I see that you're tastefully arrived in a raid [00:02:00] and transgender colours. Very cool. Very cool. It's lovely to have you here, I. I kind of rushed by you a bit busily, uh, as you all came into church. But it's lovely to have you here. Thank you very much for coming and friends of yours, which I can see dotted through the congregation and regular ST Andrews people. Welcome. It's, um, good to have us together and to celebrate where we can celebrate. Let us pray. [00:02:30] We come with joy that we can celebrate an open and free space here in this place. We come with joy that everyone here is welcome, loved and accepted that everyone here is free to come free to be who they are. We give thanks for the privilege that we have living [00:03:00] in a country where we are making progress towards greater acceptance of all. But we remember the shadow side of today. And we think of those families and people for whom life is fearful and difficult, dangerous and risky just because of who they are. And so we remember them as we gather today keeping them close in our hearts. [00:03:30] So may it be And to join with that prayer we say together the Lord's Prayer or the Jesus prayer, which is on the laminated card in your order of service eternal spirit, life giver, pain bearer, love maker, source of all that is and that shall be father and mother of us all loving God [00:04:00] in whom is heaven The hallowing of your name echo through the universe. The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world. Your Heaney will be done by all creative beings. Your commonwealth of peace and freedom. Sustain our hope and come on Earth with the bread we need for today. Feed us in the hurts we absorb from one another. Forgive [00:04:30] us in times of temptation and test strengthen us from trials too great to endure. Spare us from the grip of all that is evil. Free us for your reign and the glory of the power that is love now and forever. Amen. Jim Cotter, who paraphrased the prayer for us is, uh, was a gay Anglican [00:05:00] priest who used to live on the border of Wales. Um, he died just a couple of years ago, but his prayers and paraphrases of psalms are much loved, Right. We have a rainbow candle here. It needs lighting. Who could do that? Right? One of these days, you're gonna knock the lighting candle flying. You might need to just run [00:05:30] a little bit slower, right? What are we gonna do? We need four jobs. Just if you hand the paper to kezia Kezia lights the taper and Emily lights the candle and then I get to blow it out. That's right. We've got it sorted. Yeah, well done. Very theatrical. So we like [00:06:00] the rainbow candle to show that everyone's included. And that includes your Children, too. Come on, we'll sit down. I think Alan's got the story. No, I'll have I'll have. I'll have those. Thank you. He's stealing my wax. Does Ellen here? Oh, OK. So do you want to sit down? Ale. What are all the candles? Well, that's a very good question. OK, [00:06:30] so today is a day called today, Is it? Well, not today. What's the date? Today is the 17th, but on the 20th of November, there is a day that's celebrated. Well, it's not celebrated. That's the wrong word. I think the word is commemorated, which is a bit of a sad word. It's called Transgender Day of Remembrance, and it's remembering a lot of people all over the world [00:07:00] who have a lot of trouble in their life because people don't like them and they don't like them because they're people who felt really not right in their bodies. And they were. They perhaps look to other people like they're a girl or they look to other people like they're a boy, but that doesn't really fit with them. And so after a lot of a lot of thought and a lot of talking to a lot of people. They decide that they need to change and it takes a lot of effort, a lot of effort, [00:07:30] and you don't do it just like that. You don't just decide I'll be a boy tomorrow. It's not that simple. And so a lot of people find that hard to take a lot of other people. And so in other places in the world, fortunately, not usually New Zealand people are really mean to them, and they beat them up, and sometimes they even kill them. That's awful, isn't it? The worst thing ever could have happened and guess what those people are killing those people need [00:08:00] no Well, once you start that, you just get on and on and on all the time. Well, that some people say that some people say you've got to fight fire with fire, but I don't think it always gets you into a good position. So it's a bit of a sad day today. I mean, one of the good things about today is that we've got the flags out because we were a rainbow church, and if you have a look at the morning tea table, you'll see special transgender um, table cloths and they've got pink [00:08:30] and blue and white. And if you have a look at the choir when it stands up, you'll see that they're wearing pink and blue and white and those are the transgender colours. OK, Yeah, that's right. So we've got now a real treat for you because the choir I especially arranged for the choir to sing while you were still here. So they're gonna sing two songs from West Side Story. They offered that, But I thought, Yeah, West Side Story. Leonard Bernstein, my hero when I was [00:09:00] a teenager and I was telling them that I heard him conduct a New York Philharmonic orchestra in Christchurch in New Zealand, and you know what he did? He sat in the middle at the grand piano with his back to the audience with the orchestra all around him, and he played the piano part of the Mozart Piano Concerto, and he conducted with one hand. When it was free, he conducted the orchestra and he played the piano at the same time. It was amazing, absolutely amazing. So [00:09:30] we're getting them to come up now and they're gonna sing two songs from West side story. Yes. [00:10:00] [00:10:30] [00:11:00] [00:11:30] [00:12:00] Yeah. [00:12:30] [00:13:00] [00:13:30] [00:14:00] So later we're going to light candles. Do you want to light a candle before you go? And when you do, you might like to think in your head Lovely thoughts for people who find that people are mean to them. OK, each take one. Right. So we might like to stand [00:14:30] And we are now going to send you to the Rainbow Room where you can hear stories, ask questions, have fun and we all say we bless you. Amen. And we pass the peace. The to the readings [00:15:00] the first one from the Hebrew Bible. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native born. Love them as yourself. For you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord Your God. The gospel reading is from Matthew [00:15:30] the greatest commandment. Hearing that Jesus had silenced the sauces, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law tested them with this question teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law. Jesus replied, Love the Lord your God, with all your heart and with all [00:16:00] your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment and The second is like it. Love your neighbour as yourself. All the law and the prophets hang on these Two Commandments. The contemporary reading violence towards the transgender community, [00:16:30] the 2014 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, Queer and HIV affected Hate violence Report from the National Coalition of Anti Violence Projects shows that of the victims murdered, 80% were people of colour, 55% were transgender women and 50% were transgender women of colour [00:17:00] transgender women. Survivors of hate violence were also more likely to experience police violence, physical violence, discrimination, harassment, sexual violence, threats and intimidation compared to those who are not transgender women. Findings from the Injustice at Every Turn report conducted [00:17:30] by the National Centre for Transgender Equality and the National LGBT Q Task Force showed alarming rates of violence and harassment experienced by the more than 6000 Chan transgender respondents across a variety of contexts, including educational settings at work in interactions with police and with family members [00:18:00] at homeless shelters, in accessing public accommodations and in jails and in prisons. As murders of transgender people often go unreported and the identity of transgender murder victims is often misreported, there is no way to know accurate numbers [00:18:30] for the word in Scripture for the word among us for the word within us, we give thanks. It's not really a reading to give thanks for is it? Let us pray as we ponder love in the light of that last reading May our [00:19:00] hearts be open and our ears ready to hear what we need to hear. So may it be I mean, greetings to you and greetings to those who are listening on the Pride website. Uh, service is being recorded for that website this morning. A crucial underpinning philosophy in our western society is dualistic thinking [00:19:30] things, and people are neatly categorised into either or you are. For instance, this kind of thinking says, either good or bad. You might be black or white. You might be fat or thin, tall or short, clever or dumb. You may already be protesting in your mind. They're very crude categories, certainly, and they're designed to stop us thinking, just apply the appropriate dualism, [00:20:00] and we know exactly where everyone is and what's more how they should be treated. These dualistic pairings not only sort people into different camps, a value judgement is placed on the different sides of the dualism. For instance, here's a short list that are usually put together. Good goes with bad law abiding with law breaking public and private are rated as good and bad. Logic is [00:20:30] obviously better than a motion rational, irrational white black, and you'll notice that the list on the left are all under the word good. And so they've been given a value that they're better than the things on the list on the right. Sometimes an exceptional circumstance will turn this around. For example, the All Blacks have made black a colour of honour. But looking at this list, you can see why it has been traditionally hard for people of colour to make it [00:21:00] to elected office or high positions in corporations. Because if you're on the right hand list, for some reason, it's difficult to be on the left hand list for another. It also explains why, when an all black sheds a tear, it especially mentioned that they are being emotional because it's a little bit difficult to deal with an emotional all black because emotion is a wrong thing, [00:21:30] according to Dualist of thinking, it's still a difficult concept to attach to these men, who in every other respect, tick all the boxes on the left because yes, on that good side is the word male. And on the bad side is the word female. And here is the crunch for transgender days of remembrance and for most of the homophobia that swirls around the gay community, even in the most enlightened of societies [00:22:00] Yeah, there they go, male on the good side and female on the right side and notice there's only male or female. No in betweens are offered. These dualisms I want to state this morning are not Christian ideas. Plato might be the first Westerner whose philosophy revolved around a dualistic view of the mind and the body. Aristotle took a different tack, [00:22:30] but he still used dualistic thinking later on in the Enlightenment period, the philosopher who said, I think therefore I am picked up dualism in his work. The Enlightenment has had a widely per per pervasive effect on our thinking in the Western world, and so the cars endorsement of this was pivotal to dualism becoming a bedrock of Western society. That is not to say that Christianity did not pick this [00:23:00] up and use it sometimes to devastating effect. As we well know, Thomas Aquinas and others who followed him in the mediaeval period made use of the dualistic concept so effectively that they have come in many places to be inextricably linked with Christian thought and practise. Yet Jesus is explicitly working against those dualisms in today's gospel reading, when he says that the greatest commandment has two inextricably [00:23:30] linked halves, the love of God and the love of self and neighbour, you'll recognise. However, some religious concepts in the list below added to the ones you've already seen sin. I'll put sin on the wrong side. Ya sin is good. Yes, we can all go home. [00:24:00] That's a real Freudian slip, isn't it? Just imagine virtue on the left and sit on the right. You'll never be able to from now on, heaven and hell and in a faithful and backslider backslider was a word used in the fundamentalist church I grew up in her. It caused the fear of hell to, um, tremble within you. It is important that we always consider our context, though we [00:24:30] may feel that we need to use philosophical tools to explain ourselves in the current climate, we need to be careful that the master's tools are not building a completely different house from the one we intended. So it has been with the use of Dualisms. Whenever we find in Scripture a dualistic approach, we may need to say to ourselves, What is this author trying to do here? Whom are they trying to convince? Are they speaking to the Greeks present in their contemporary audience? Is [00:25:00] this an accurate representation of the way Jesus taught and lived? Because Jesus was notorious for consorting with publicans and non kosher Jews, people who were usually on his contemporaries Bad list. His disciple group included women whom he obviously valued more than the average man of the time. He healed the Roman Centurion son as well as a Jewish girl. He advocated cooperating with the occupying Roman force. [00:25:30] At the time, he broke taboo after taboo, helping people on the sacred Sabbath, telling stories about the Samaritan helping one of their deadly enemies, the Jews. And he spoke to a Samaritan woman himself, alone by well, breaking several rules of engagement at the time, all at once. I often think that the various admonitions in the Bible and the rules devised by the church are safety nets for ordinary people who [00:26:00] don't have the wisdom and discernment and love or the courage that Jesus showed. Rules draw the lines for us. They tell us what to do. But as we increasingly find out once a line is drawn, people are left on the outside as well as included on the inside. Whenever you begin a group, you inevitably define yourself over and against another group. So has been the case with all religions, all political parties and probably to the rainbow [00:26:30] community. Each letter under the rainbow umbrella of LB LGBT, Q I and one of our congregation adds U for unknown has its parameters that are held dear by that group. I admire the rainbow community as it strives to hold all these diverse communities together. Sexual orientation, we have found, as we've educated ourselves here at Saint Andrews is very different from sexual identity, and the understandings [00:27:00] needed to talk and act intelligently about both are quite diverse. The rainbow umbrella is a marvellous thing, but even in ancient scripture, way back in Leviticus, written hundreds of years before Jesus arrived on the earth. The people are urged to welcome those different from them. The dualism represented here is the foreigner and the native born. The people of Israel who are being addressed here are reminded that they once [00:27:30] came from somewhere else from Egypt and the commander to love them as yourself. Some of us struggle to love ourselves. This is another unfortunate legacy of a corrupted gospel. We're each worthy of love simply because we are human beings. It doesn't matter if our nose turns up or down, whether we're of a different orientation from the majority, whether we're professional or a beneficiary or [00:28:00] a low wage earner or homeless, all of us are worthy of love and deserving of being treated with dignity and respect. This love should be truly unconditional, not delivered only if we have been good or if we go to church regularly or if we have worked hard at our job or got good grades. No, all of us are lovable and are loved [00:28:30] and deserve that love just because we breathe in and out about 12 to 20 times a minute. In fact, on a bad day, it's a good idea to sit quietly, just noticing your breath, going in and out and murmuring to yourself. Love and stress out as we live and breathe, we are loved. It embarrasses me that it's necessary to say this, but [00:29:00] it is so I probably don't say it often enough. The spiritual journey, essentially is a journey towards greater and greater awareness of love. Love within us, love for ourselves first, which is not selfish or greedy. If we do not pay respect and give dignity to ourselves, then it follows that we cannot truly love others. In both the Hebrew Bible and the Gospel, we are told that our love for our neighbour springs [00:29:30] out of our love for ourselves. If we think we're a little scummy, then we're gonna think that of other people, too. Unconditional love does away with the dualisms list, especially with the value distance between those two poles. Unconditional love loves the good and the bad, and all the flavours in between those two poles unconditional, loving people means that men and women [00:30:00] are the objects of our love, as well as those who find that the hard division between genders doesn't work for them anymore. Every letter of the rainbow continuum deserves respect and dignity, love and support, and even and straight. People need a little love now and again, irritating people need our love. So do annoying people and smelly people and people on the opposite end of the political spectrum from us. All of us, whether [00:30:30] we are inside the lines drawn by the church or outside them, need to be sceptical of some of the admonitions and warnings delivered by religious authorities and think more often like Jesus did and act more often like Jesus did out of love. He called people out for doing hurt for and hypocritical things out of love. He included the outcast and the maimed Out of love. He took the hit when it came, not backing down from his rule [00:31:00] breaking love, Let's live and work and act and love like he did unconditionally. I once told my mother that when I talked with Children in church, I wanted them to know that God loved them to bits. Hm, she said. We were in the car and after a few more miles down the road, she said. But you'd have to be careful. Let's not be careful. Let's [00:31:30] be loving. If we had love in the world like this description from the 13th chapter of the first letter to the church in Corinth, we would not need to have a transgender day of remembrance. Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It does not dishonour others. It is not self seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no [00:32:00] record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts always. Hopes always preserves. Love never fails the space of quiet. [00:32:30] So may it be I mean, gramophones are going to sing to us again. And, uh, where also going to offer you the opportunity to light a candle like the Children did before. So you can come up and light candles while they're singing, or you can sit and listen to them and then light candles. Um, it's [00:33:00] up to you, but we are now going to light candles for those people who haven't encountered unconditional love in their lives and who have found that life is mean, cruel, dangerous and risky. [00:33:30] [00:34:00] [00:34:30] [00:35:00] [00:35:30] [00:36:00] [00:36:30] [00:37:00] As the candles bring light into this room may light come into the lives of those who live in the darkness [00:37:30] of fear and hate. So may it be we pray in solidarity with the peoples of the world and for our communities. We reflect upon the many ways in which people envisage the greatest good, the myriad images and mythologies to give meaning to our existence, to affirm our authenticity for songs and stories [00:38:00] for novels and documentaries for posts and comic strips that offer insights into each other's experiences. We give thanks. We contemplate the many names and aspects of God that humans have evolved over millennia to explain the cycles of our lives and of the life around us, the spectrum of possibilities in humanity and nature. And in our abundant universe, [00:38:30] we hold in our hearts people already queuing outside the city mission to receive emergency Christmas food parcels. We think of defence force personnel and a crew from fire and emergency going to help battle bushfires in New South Wales of people left homeless, bereaved, injured of exhausted and injured firefighters of authorities [00:39:00] dealing with people who deliberately started some fires of communities destroyed and faith and others goodwill lost. We think, too, of bushfires that are putting a New Caledonia's biodiversity and fauna at risk and looking to transgender day of remembrance. On Wednesday, we remember the transgender people whose lives have been lost [00:39:30] to anti transgender violence this year and over many years we hold in our hearts all those struggling with misunderstanding, rejection and abuse for being the way they are, the way they were created for transitioning into the whole and beautiful Selves. They are meant to be in our circle of prayer. Today we think of the people of Switzerland and Liechtenstein [00:40:00] and the Council of Christian Churches in Switzerland. We remember the detainees of Manus and Nauru Islands yearning that their cases be resolved in New Zealand. Each week we remember members of Parliament, and today we name list MP S, David Carter and Liz Craig. And here in the Central Presbytery, we pray for the leaders and people of Knox Presbyterian Church in lower hut. [00:40:30] In the creation around us, we see signs of hope and flags of courage in the blooming pink of and in the brilliant white of bush, Cletus and mountain Robinwood, the clear blue Chatham Island. Forget me not and we rejoice in the rainbow, flourish of and and [00:41:00] lewd or and and the flourishing of rainbow sensitivity in our communities as we commit to creating a safer, nonviolent world for all of us. We give thanks for a creative spirit that cannot be contained by labels or limited by beliefs. And for the ways our lives and perceptions are constantly evolving, adapting, transitioning, [00:41:30] transforming and being reborn. And we bring together our affirmations and prayers with the prayer for Saint Andrews. It's on the laminated card in your, uh, order of service For those of you who are joining us as visitors today, we invite you to join in the prayer as an affirmation for your people and your place as well as for ours. And we say together, [00:42:00] renew your people God, and renew our life in this place. Give us a new spirit of unity with all who follow Christ and a new spirit of love towards all people. Bless the city in which we live that it may be a place where honest dealing, good government, the desire for beauty and the care for others flourish. Bless this church that what we know of your will may [00:42:30] become what we do and what we believe the strong impulse of our worship and workmen. [00:43:00] So go out into that world and love everybody to bits because God loves you to bits and know that as you [00:43:30] go, as I always say, every Sunday loves around you every moment of every day.
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