Light in the Darkness...

When prosperity and despair live side by side A sermon for Australia Day weekend 10 min read In the late 80s, as Australia prepared to mark 200 years of British colonization, a book appeared with a pointed title: Advance Australia Where? It was a play on the national anthem, and the author, Reverend John Smith, wasn't interested in easy answers. Smith was the founder of God Squad, a motorcycle club of Christians who rode into the places most people avoid. Bikie gangs. Drug dens. Homes marked by violence. Schools where kids were slipping through the cracks. They went looking for people who needed help, who were drowning in darkness, and they tried to bring some light. In his book, Smith asked searching questions about the soul of Australia. Where are we heading? What's the point of all this? He'd grown up through the post-war boom, watched the hippie movement rise and fall, seen Australia get wealthier and wealthier. But he also saw the greed that came with it — the belief that more stuff equals more happiness. And he saw the other side: the despair, the depression, the epidemic of people falling apart in the wealthiest time the country had ever known. Twenty years later, social researcher Hugh Mackay wrote a book with the same title, asking many of the same questions. He named the same tensions: wealth and poverty living side by side, indigenous people still alienated, the gap between those who have and those who don't getting wider. And now, another twenty years on, here we are in 2026. Where is Australia heading now? The cost of living is crushing people. Housing is out of reach for more and more families. Racial tensions are flaring — anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim sentiment, anti-immigration movements. World events land here and fracture communities. There's friction everywhere. And there's violence. Some of it is rhetorical, dressed up as political debate or defended as free speech. Some of it happens in parliament. Some of it happens online, where people say whatever they want, no matter how much harm it does, no matter how untrue it is. Some of it happens in homes. Domestic violence kills more people than we want to admit. The massacre at Bondi Beach a few weeks ago — fifteen innocent people dead — that horror gets amplified ten or twelve times over when you look at the number of women killed in their own homes each year. And that doesn't even count the violence that doesn't end in death. There's violence on the streets. There's violence in the way we talk to each other. John Smith said we'd lost the soul of the nation. That we'd lost our spirit, our sense of God. He knew what he was talking about. He'd been through it himself — deep doubts, questions about whether God was even real. He'd flirted with atheism. But he realized, listening to a few people who knew better, that the question wasn't really about God. It was about himself. About ethics, meaning, purpose. Where am I headed? What am I doing? So he went back to the gospels. He read the Hebrew prophets again. And he saw something he'd missed before: the radical, uncomfortable nature of what Jesus actually did. Jesus went into the darkness. He went to the broken people, the ones cracked open by poverty and despair, by grief and guilt, by sickness and exclusion. He went to the people the powerful had pushed to the margins. And he lifted them up. He pulled them into a bigger story, a community of grace and love. He offered them life and hope. That's what God Squad tried to do. Go into the deepest, darkest places with the light of Christ. The gospel of Mark opens with Jesus coming into the world, light breaking into darkness. And the first thing he says is: Repent. God's reign is at hand. Then he goes to some fishermen and says: Follow me. I'll show you another way. That's what John Smith discovered. Follow me and I'll show you another way. It will take courage. It will take commitment. It will take faith. Psalm 27 says: "The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? If an army surrounds me, if my enemies surround me, I won't be afraid." I read that and I think about the world we live in. How much of what we do is driven by fear? How many of us could honestly say, "If an army surrounded me, I wouldn't be afraid"? But that's what the psalmist was saying. That's what John Smith and others like him understood. That's what Jesus was on about. The fear we feel — fear of what others might do to us, fear of death, fear of losing something, fear of not having enough, fear of being left behind, fear of not being good enough — all of it feeds the anxiety and despair and depression we see around us and feel inside ourselves. Fear controls so much of our lives. Fear of what might be. Many of us don't live in the present moment. We're either living in the future, worrying about what might happen, or living in the past, trying to hold on to what was. Jesus invites us into this present moment. The Lord is my light and my salvation. Of whom shall I be afraid? That's a profound statement. And I think it's exactly what modern Australian society needs to hear. This weekend, there will be celebrations and there will be mourning. Some people will celebrate Australia Day, wrap themselves in flags, talk about nationalism and patriotism. And let's be honest, there are many good things to celebrate. There is beauty in this land. We've just travelled through southern New South Wales and into Victoria — the Snowy Mountains, the Grampians, parts of Melbourne. Intense, wondrous beauty. There are stories of good people doing good things. The man who stopped the gunman at Bondi Beach — an act of bravery and courage. A Muslim man who saw evil people shooting innocent Jewish people and saved them. There's much to celebrate. But there's also mourning. Mourning for a culture that's been left behind, lost. Cultural genocide in parts of Australia. Aboriginal languages that are gone or pushed aside. Indigenous people not recognized for the wisdom they carry. There's mourning. And there are the social, ecological, environmental problems we're facing. Climate change. We need to do more to save this earth, to help it be renewed and restored, to look after it. But we also need to reach out to one another. To live with love. To embrace those who are different. To reach across the divides that have been built up in our land. To reach out in friendship and reconciliation. To listen to one another, to listen to each other's stories. And for us to go into those dark places — places that are scary and fearful and uncertain — and be people of light and hope. People who reflect the grace and love of God. People who can say, "The Lord is my salvation, my light, my hope." To go into the darkness with the light of Christ. That's our calling. That's what we're invited into this year. May God be with us. Amen. Based on a sermon by an unknown speaker