Worship - 30 August 2026

Summary Of This Week's Theme

There used to be a cynical joke about Canada’s national airline, Air Canada: its employees’ motto was supposedly, “This would be a great airline if it wasn’t for the passengers.” Air Canada has moved on, of course. But sometimes I wonder whether parts of the church have adopted a similar motto.

In Romans 12, Paul confronts one of the great barriers to contentment: other people. Most of his letters deal, in one way or another, with Christians falling out with other Christians. Two thousand years later, the church’s worst enemy is still itself. We have had centuries of practice at not making ourselves extinct, which might be encouraging. 

The trouble is that Jesus’ teaching about relationships can seem impossibly demanding. “Love your enemies” is a wonderful aphorism, but rather less satisfying when the person who annoys us is sitting on the other side of the church. Let’s admit that we struggle. Otherwise Christianity becomes a collection of toothless pleasantries concealing quite a lot of hurt and dysfunction.

Paul tells us not to take revenge. He means more than avoiding dramatic acts of vengeance. He is talking about the passive-aggressive, mean-spirited behaviour that quietly erodes trust. We all know it happens. And Paul’s advice to feed our enemies when they are hungry and give them drink when they are thirsty, “for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads,” sounds suspiciously like passive aggression itself. Maybe Paul was allowing himself a little humour.

Jesus knew the problem too. His twelve disciples were hardly a model of a harmonious community. Yet he stuck with them and called Peter the rock on which he would build his church.

There is an irony here. A few verses later, that rock proved remarkably flaky. Peter could not accept that Jesus’ Messiahship would involve suffering rather than power. Jesus heard in Peter’s words an echo of the tempter’s voice: be relevant, be dramatic, take control. But Jesus had already rejected those temptations in the wilderness. His way is not domination but solidarity; not imposition but example.

And that is unsettling for us, because we have our own versions of those temptations. We want to be useful, valued, recognised and in control. Yet Jesus tells us to put the accusations behind us. Our value is not something we have to prove; God has already given us dignity and worth.

And perhaps the most comforting thing is this: although Peter is flawed, he remains the rock. He is not rejected.

That is good news for us. We can be fallible. We can get things wrong. We can be thoroughly flaky at times. Yet if we stick with Jesus, we can still be building blocks in the kingdom of God.