Not business as usual                     Ordinary Sunday 22A (30 August) 2026

Exodus 3:1-15, Romans 12:9-21, Matthew 16:21-28              CHB Combined Ōtāne

What does it mean to be called by God?  To follow Christ?  To be part of a Christian community?  For those who are faithful, there is no “business as usual.”  This life asks something of us – something that isn’t going to be easy.  Today sets out the challenges and reminds us what the cost might be – and don’t think this is just about Peter, Moses, or the community Paul was writing to.  This is about us too – if we let it.

Last week Peter gave a brilliant answer when asked who he thought Jesus was: Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God.  Now, in a bit of a hero to zero move, he’s unable to stand the thought of Jesus being arrested and killed so he takes him aside and begins to rebuke him.  Maybe Peter thinks it’s his role to ensure a successful outcome of Jesus’ mission, maybe he’s feeling protective and wanting to find a less painful way for Jesus to do things (and those are both things church people today try to do sometimes) but whatever was in his mind he gets told “Get behind me, Satan!”  Think back to the scene in the desert at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, and the temptations he faced there: get your own hunger satisfied, prove to everyone how much God loves you, gain all the kingdoms of the world by worshipping the wrong person.  All variations on what Peter wants here:  to find an easier path than the way of the cross.  And Jesus says: there is no easier path. 

Which is where we come in – only I suspect many of us find this talk of denying ourselves, and taking up our crosses and following Jesus, difficult.  I know I do – and I don’t think I’m the only one here.  Part of the problem is that in today’s instant society we want things to happen quickly, smoothly, and without pain.  We want an easy way to do things, and denying ourselves, and taking up our crosses doesn’t sound fun, or easy.   But there isn’t a “discipleship-lite” option – there really isn’t.  “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” 

It’s a tough ask, isn’t it – and yet, I think I get what Jesus is saying.  Because I can remember times when I haven’t denied myself, when I know I’ve been selfish and put myself first, and tried to hang onto things and get my own way at the expense of someone else – and what tends to happen then is that I feel miserable.  I may have gained the whole world (got my own way, won the argument, or claimed the last chocolate biscuit) but I don’t actually enjoy it.  Whereas when I do give up something for someone else, there can be a real satisfaction, a deeper sense of connection and belonging.  So when we are prepared to lose something, we find we gain much more.

We are those who are called to take up our cross, if we want to be followers of Jesus.  Now who else sees two problems here?  The first of course is that it’s not easy to do this.  Some days go well, and we can feel the love of God flowing through us to others, and then there are days which are just – hard.  I have days like that, we all do.  The other issue is that we’re not always sure what “take up your cross” actually means for us.  Jesus meant it literally – for himself and for many of those he was talking to.  Crucifixion was a painful, shameful death.  But today “taking up your cross” has mostly lost its literal connection with crucifixion, and as a metaphor it’s not that specific.  What does this life to which we are called look like in practice?  How do we describe discipleship?

That’s where it’s good to read Romans.  If the Gospel gives us the call, Romans gives us the shape of the response.  Paul is setting out here what following Jesus might be like.  He wants us to let ourselves be transformed by a whole new way of thinking, a way that originates in God’s grace, that comes from the love God has for us.  As always, Paul bases his ethical instructions, his “this is how you should live” on the fact of what God has already done for us.  God has done so much for us, God loves us so much, that this is how we’re invited to live in response. 

Paul wants us to let ourselves be transformed by the power of grace.  When we let God’s love and grace get hold of us we can become different: more able to know God’s will for our lives, better able to love each other and to live together as a community that reaches out to others and draws them towards God.  It’s letting grace shape how we are with one another.  Following Christ is loving one another, being willing to serve the Lord, in what ever way God wants to use us.  It’s staying hopeful even, especially, when things get fraught and angry words and bad news pile up in the media.  It’s helping fellow Christians, our sisters and brothers in Christ, and it’s being hospitable not just to friends but to people we don’t know that well – reaching out to strangers with the love that God gives us.   How are we doing at all that?

Taking up our cross, following Jesus, is letting grace shape how we are with people outside the Christian community.  It means living in peace, not trying to get even when someone hurts us, but reaching out to them and asking God to bless them.  That can be hard.  It means having empathy, rejoicing with those who are rejoicing and weeping with those who weep.  It means not being concerned for our own egos, and not trying to make ourselves look better or wiser than we are.  None of this is “business as usual” – it’s living in a different way to the rest of the world around us.  How might God be calling us to grow in that?

And yes, this isn’t easy.  We know this, Peter and Paul knew this, and Jesus also knows that we find it tough at times – and frankly, I don’t think Jesus found it easy either.  None of these things come naturally. Loving enemies, refusing revenge, choosing hospitality, and putting others first all involve dying to the self we would otherwise prefer to protect.  But living as part of a community, as Paul and Peter experienced, means that we can support and encourage each other, even as we do the work of taking up our crosses and carrying them.  That’s part of what makes the life of discipleship not only possible but joyful. 

And there’s something else.  Think of Moses.  He sees a bush burning and not consumed, and his curiosity leads to an encounter with God – and to being given a task for his life.  Faced with the call to go to Pharaoh to bring the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, Moses answers “who, me?”  Or to give the longer version, “Who am I?”  Actually, everyone who is called by God to do something responds in the same way: “Who am I?”  And God gives the same answer to all those “everyones” as God gave to Moses: “I will be with you.”

That’s what it means to be called by God, to follow Christ, to be part of a Christian community: it means loving and supporting one another on the good days and the tough days, and it means knowing that the God who calls us to this life is with us.  Always.

Ven Dr Deborah Broome, Archdeacon, Hawkes Bay Coast

Love changes everything     Easter Day (5 April) 2026

Acts 10:34-43; Psalm 118: 1-2, 14-24; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-18                                            

This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it!  This is a new day, a day that challenges everything we thought we knew, a day that gives to us new hope and new life.  Because of today, our lives can be different.  This is the day that changes everything.  This is the day that the Lord has made!

Psalm 118’s Easter refrain reminds me of another day that changed lives.  Years ago I attended a friend’s wedding, the beginning of a new life for her and her fiancé.  He was a violinist, and she walked up the aisle to him playing the song “Love changes everything” from the musical Aspects of Love. 

Love,

Love changes everything:

Hands and faces,

Earth and sky

If there was a sound-track to Easter, there in the garden outside the empty tomb, it could well be that.  Psalm 118’s refrain has that same idea, that love transforms everything.  Jesus’ self-giving love, his death on the cross, didn’t result in defeat but in his being raised to glorious, unstoppable new life.  The cross looked like the end of love’s power – the end of everything in fact – but it shows us that God’s love is stronger than violence, than worldly power, even stronger than death itself.  In Jesus’ resurrection God said Yes to life, to creation, to compassion, to hope, to new beginnings, and No to hopelessness, despair and evil.  Love changes everything.

But sometimes, love disrupts as much as it comforts, or before it comforts.  Sometimes there is chaos and uncertainty.  Before we meet the risen Christ, the story gives us the darkness of early morning, a lot of running back and forth, and an empty space that feels like a new loss.  Summoned to the tomb by the grieving Mary Magdalene, the Beloved Disciple – the one “whom Jesus loved” – runs and reaches the tomb first.  He sees the linen cloths, he realises something has happened – but he’s not exactly sure what.  He doesn’t fully understand yet, but he believes – believes what, exactly?   It’s comforting to know that faith often begins with fuzziness not certainty.  Sometimes resurrection nudges its way into our lives quietly, with clues, fragments of the story, the first hints of dawn.

Peter’s another one who rushes in: confused, impulsive.  He enters the tomb, but doesn’t really get it.  Maybe he’s a bit conflicted, very probably he’s remembering how only two days ago he denied even knowing Jesus.  It’s comforting to know that Easter is also for disciples who don’t have it all worked out.  That resurrection is big enough for the hesitant, the uncertain, the ones who don’t understand, and the ones who think they’ve made a mess of everything.  Maybe you feel like that sometimes.  Peter’s still drawn toward the possibility of hope, still waiting to see the risen Jesus and to feel his love – the love that would change everything for him. 

Love
Will turn your world around,
And that world
Will last for ever.

Fast forward several weeks, and Peter is sharing the good news boldly, assuring someone else – Cornelius, a Gentile, an outsider – that he belongs.  Resurrection overturns all the boundaries we humans put up between each other: it creates a community shaped by God’s inclusive love.  The love that makes people choose differently, act differently.  The love that can include us.

It was love that shaped Mary’s encounter at the empty tomb.  She came in grief and love, filled with confusion, fear, and that dreadful emptiness, the one when we feel everything’s over.  In that early morning light she sees someone she thinks is the gardener, someone who might know where Jesus’ body is.  And then he calls her by name, and everything changes.  Resurrection dawns with recognition – she hears her name and knows it’s Jesus, no longer dead, but gloriously alive.  For Mary, and for all of us, Easter faith is grounded in relationship.  Mary is known, called, and loved – and that changes her. 

For Mary and for us, love changes how we see ourselves.  It changes what we think is possible.  Love breaks through darkness and despair and calls us into a new story.  Easter doesn’t just bring Jesus from death to life – it changes us too, and opens to us a new sort of life.

Love changes everything:

Nothing in the

World will ever

Be the same.

The Pauline tradition captures this transformation in a different key, for that’s what the Colossian community were coming to realise. “You have been raised with Christ. … Your life is hidden with Christ in God.”  Because of this, you are secured, grounded, beloved.  Easter is happening in us – it reorients how we live now.  How we think about ourselves, how we act, how we treat others.  That’s what love does – God’s love, made visible on the cross, in the tomb, in the risen Jesus.  Because Christ is risen, the transforming power of love is let loose in the world – in us and through us – calling us by name, overturning our boundaries, reorienting our lives, and sending us as witnesses of hope.

Love,

Love changes everything:

How you live and

How you die

This Easter, let the resurrecting love of God touch your heart, and let it change you  – because love changes everything.  Alleluia, Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia.

The Rev’d Dr Deborah Broome

Priest-in-Charge, CHB Anglican Parish