It Takes a Village
Sermon Preached by The Very Reverend Chris Chataway – Dean of Perth, on Sunday, 27 April, 2025.
Baptism of Millie Kate Chataway
Acts 5:27-32, Revelation 1:4-8, John 20:19-31
It is wonderful to be with you this morning, and I thank Reverend Tracey for her kind invitation to preach this morning and to be ‘invaded’ by the Chataway family and the Davies clan from around the world. It is good to be back in the Town of Walkerville. I cannot forget how proud Walkerville is, that it is still a ‘Town’ and not a City; the only local council to remain a Town in SA. There is great pride here in being small and independent, even though the business case is pretty challenging. The noble intention is to maintain this Town as a village. Former parishioner of the parish and former Headmistress of Wilderness, Marjorie Scales, wrote an excellent history of Walkerville, (well-known to all the locals!)
She named it John Walker’s Village and it is the word village that is important and remains to this day. Much suburban and urban living can be soulless and isolating. There is a pandemic of loneliness in cities and metropolises around the world. A village, on the other hand, is a place where people can be known and know each other at the human level and on a human scale, it is a centre for building community. A thriving City, will be made up of thriving villages. We crave the connection that a village can provide, a place where we are known and where everyday human encounter reminds us we are alive. A village gives us opportunity to engage with others and help each other, and provides a sense that we belong. Of course, a village can sometimes be claustrophobic and stifling of individuality, but this is just not the problem we have in the world at the moment, it is too much the other way round.
Last year, at St George’s Cathedral, in partnership with AnglicareWA, we began a social enterprise that offers people an experience of coffee and community, where you aren’t moved on as quickly as possible in order to sell the next cup or cake to the next customer.
We called it Holy Grounds. It provides a place where people come and have a coffee or cinnamon bun, and sit and talk, in the company of others. It is not an outreach to the homeless or those in severe need in our City. We already have lots of services for that. We knew there were people who worked in the offices around us who, except for when they were at work, did not engage with another human being. We knew there were elderly and retired people, who would use the cheap public transport during the day, to come into the City and wander around, trying to find something to connect with, before returning home for the night without connecting with anyone.
This problem of large urban centres has been around for a long time. I remember hearing the story of a young woman living in Sydney. It was over thirty years ago, before electronic tolls on the Sydney Harbor Bridge had fully taken over.
There was still one lane that had a person not a machine. She would always choose that lane. She said she would choose that lane, just so that twice a day, she could have the brief contact of another human being as she placed the cash in the outstretched palm of the toll collector. It was the only physical contact she had with anyone month by month.
In our reading from John’s Gospel today, we heard Thomas insist on human touch. The human connection Thomas had with Jesus, his relationship with Jesus as disciple, friend and collaborator, was a relationship in the flesh, a human friendship. Jesus the Messiah wasn’t an abstract idea for Thomas. Jesus wasn’t an ideology or political party or an emperor. Jesus was another human being, just like Thomas. Thomas had just been traumatised when he saw Jesus cruelly, illegally, and tragically crucified. And all Thomas’ hopes and dreams had been crucified at the same time as he watched the tortured humanity of his leader and
mentor. Unable to accept the claims of his friends that Jesus had appeared, Thomas demanded a human connection, a connection that could only be proved through touch. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Touch is our most primitive means of communication which we humans crave and require. A baby will not survive without the constant touch and reassuring physical
connection with mother or father or caregiver. We know how desirable it is to place a child in contact with the new mother’s skin immediately the baby is born, desirable for both mother and baby.
What Thomas receives, however, is more than touch. For in his encounter with Christ, a connection is forged for ever. But it is a connection not just with God, but with God’s new community of people Jesus had called together. They weren’t a highly skilled group. They had a bit of knowledge from what Jesus had taught them, though they had had some training. They were not perfect or ideal, but they were committed and…changed—from the inside. They were not alone, and that was everything. The risen Jesus had made that so. It was this new community of
faith, this new village, that forged a connection with God and with each other, that helped them understand their purpose: and that is, to be a community helping God transform human loneliness and sinfulness and selfishness. This community was not without tensions, they were not perfect, and they never would be. Who wants to live in a perfect community? Nobody—because no one is perfect. But they did enough because of their extraordinary encounter with Christ.
There is a saying, ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ It is a great honour to be here today to baptise Millie Kate. She is adorable and a star of the show. Her baptism today, is a physical moment: washed in sacred water, held and cherished and signed with the sign of the cross on her forehead. These are powerful physical things to do. But this is far more than a physical moment, just as Thomas’ encounter with the risen Jesus was far more than a physical moment. In the sacrament of baptism, Millie is this day baptised with the Holy Spirit, joined with Christ, and in so doing, reminds each of us here today, that our connection with God is forever, that our being bathed in God’s love will never end. But it will take
a village to help her come to know that for herself. Millie is being baptised here…in the middle of the people of God. And we are privileged to be Millie’s village this day, and to commit to praying for her, teaching her, helping her flourish into the full humanity God is calling her into. So it is our hope that Millie will do just that, will flourish, in ways that will lead to transforming the world’s loneliness and selfishness and greed, not to do it on her own, but with God, not to do it on her own but with God’s village, and with her village to play her part however great or small in this great commission. It will take a village to do that.
Let us be that village…in Christ’s name. Amen.
Scales, Marjorie. John Walker’s Village : A History of Walkerville. Adelaide: Rigby, 1974.