Zero room for moral compromise

 "This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we do not live out the truth." (1 John 1:5-6 NIV)

St. John’s Cathedral’s Sunday 27 September 2026 "Pride Choral Evensong" sermon champions a dangerous cultural pivot, framing the church's embrace of secular intersectionality and LGBTIQA+ identity politics as a triumphant evolution. Preacher Allana Wales lauds the parish for replacing biblical boundaries with the "god of diversity and inclusion," celebrating how the institution has seemingly merged its identity with the progress pride flag.

Scripture, however, offers a scathing critique of this syncretism. 

1 John 1:5-6 declares that God is absolute light and truth, leaving zero room for moral compromise or spiritual darkness. By asserting that the church has "always comprised" these ideologies and needs to transform its theology around human constructs, the sermon walks squarely in darkness while claiming fellowship with light.

Instead of calling sinners to repentance and holiness, this sermon bows to cultural pressure, trading divine truth for human validation. The true church abandons God whenever it replaces the unchanging standard of His Word with the shifting, secular altar of inclusivity.

This sermon serves as a poetic and ideological bookend to Dean Peter Catt’s eighteen-year tenure, which abruptly concluded following heavy public backlash over allowing the Cathedral to be used for filming an OnlyFans-focused reality television series involving adult-content creators. The controversy—sparked by a segment featuring a faux-religious reaffirmation ceremony inside the sacred space— precipitated Catt's retirement after critics argued it crossed the line from radical inclusivity into the secular commodification of the church. 

Was this sermon - last preached of Catt's tenure - a defiant double-down on the exact theological trajectory that defined his departure?. When progressive secular values and identity politics are framed synonymously with divine work there is a blurring of the lines between institutional orthodoxy and modern cultural movements.

Weep Brisbane for your Cathedral. 

Mourn and lament. 

Shalom,

Ozhamada

The sermon is available in full text at this link to the Cathedral's website.

The church is playing games.

A tragedy of pride

Women preachers have featured in this blog; the scorecard is marked F. The one with the stray hermeneutics, the one who prepared a sermon in a shower the day before preaching in it, and the one who had four questions when there was to be one.

Then there was the recent sermon of Bishop Bonnie Perry.

The Bishop preached at a Dublin Pride Service as linked. A tragedy of “pride”.

 

I have summarised the sermon below. The summary – of a sermon which is absent of any direct exposition of Biblical text - concludes with: “The core message is that if it was right for Jesus's apostles to speak their truth with pride, it is equally right and necessary for the LGBTQIA+ community to do the same.”

And, it is in that summary that we see the failure of the sermon, that the apostle’s (Peter and John, [Acts 3]) were not speaking in pride, but in humility - indeed, the apostles were at threat of imprisonment [Acts 4]. They spoke filled with the Holy Spirit [Acts 2]. The apostles were not speaking in pride but instead in boldness and unapologetic first-person witness. They were humble men who had the un-measurable support and strength of Christ.

And speaking in boldness and unapologetic first-person witness, in the Spirit, and as representatives of Christ, is completely different from the LGBTQIA+ community's tendency to speak in pride. For that community's pride is regularly evidenced as arrogance, self-exaltation, and hubris.

Shalom,

Ozhamada 

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Summary of sermon

The speaker links the "pride" of Peter and John and the "pride" of the LGBTQIA+ community through the shared act of publicly speaking their truth and living authentically, even in the face of opposition from established authorities.

Here's how the link is made:

1.    Pride of Peter and John: The speaker describes Peter and John as being "too public in their preaching and healing in and around the temple," leading to a "movement fueled by love and filled with pride." When chastised by the religious authorities and told to "no longer speak their truth publicly," Peter and John refuse to be silenced. The speaker emphasizes, "But if you know who you are and how you are and you know that your life is changed that's not something you keep inside You have pride and you keep on telling your story." Their pride is their unwavering conviction and determination to share the Gospel despite threats.

 2.   Pride of the LGBTQIA+ Community: The speaker explicitly connects this to the experience of the queer community. They state that for decades, society and the church have told them "Stop speaking be silent Don't tell us Do not speak your truth." However, the speaker then directly counters this by urging, "I say to you speak your truth... as an out proud partnered lesbian I say to you speak your truth. We are made in God's image and likeness and fully embraced by Christ just as we are. We of the queer community are good enough. We are called to tell the stories of who and how we are and how God lives and moves and has God being in our lives."

The link is established by framing both instances as a courageous and divinely inspired refusal to be silent about a transformative truth. For Peter and John, it was the truth of Jesus's resurrection and love; for the LGBTQIA+ community, it is the truth of their God-given identity and the profound love they experience. Both are acts of defiant, faithful self-expression ("pride") against prevailing norms and oppressive religious or societal structures. 

The core message is that if it was right for Jesus's apostles to speak their truth with pride, it is equally right and necessary for the LGBTQIA+ community to do the same.

Four questions when there is to be one

This blog has a run of reporting bad preaching. Even the Sydney Anglicans can sadly fail (as linked). I contemplated writing a post on the Budde sermon to the newly elected President Trump yet another captured my thoughts entirely (as linked).

St John’s Anglican Cathedral in Brisbane serves up many sermons. The Rev’d Dr Ann Solari on the 5th January 2025 preached a sermon titled: “Giving the Gifts away: The Epiphany of the Lord”. As is a feature of many sermons of that church, Solari concluded the sermon with a question to her audience. Let’s examine that question from the published sermon on the church’s website:

“This story of the wise ones does however raise an interesting question.

If Jesus was given these valuable gifts as a small child how come he did he end up with nothing?

Did Jesus do what he asked the rich young man to do?

Did Jesus give all that he had to the poor?

What does this say to us?

Amen”

Screenshot from St John's Anglican Cathedral website

On 5 January 2025 many may have still been recovering from Christmas and New Year hangover. Simple mathematic calculations are often difficult with a cloudy head. Yet, the “interesting question” was not one question but instead “interesting questions”. Where the count should be one, it is four. Very Monty Pythonesque!

Putting aside the grammar of the first question one’s head spins at the connection within the sermon between that first question and the wonderful words that were included in respect to the gift of myrrh. For the preacher correctly identified the myrrh as a pointer to Christ’s early death. So, counter to the question's notion that has the listener pondering why Jesus ended up with nothing, the gifts indicated that Jesus would end up with nothing.

The second question is a puzzle in that rich young man is not previously mentioned in the sermon. Does the preacher assume her audience to be telepathic? If it is a reference to the story in Matthew 19:16-22 one wonders how Jesus is to follow himself :“If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.”

The sermon is a failure. It is a failure in that the preacher has asked questions that are either dubious or which will lead to ambiguous or inconsistent application by the listeners. It offers questions at a moment in the sermon where applications are expected. It is a failure of oratory form - awkward questions left hanging in the air - that cannot be concluded successfully away from the pulpit. The questions are absent solid answers and sound applications; they do not keep to the pattern of sound teaching (Paul's instruction to Timothy).

The only appropriate response of the discerning pewsitter is to robustly indicate that they had been short-changed; that they expect well-rounded sermons starting from the very next week.

Shalom,

Ozhamada

Ancient text

Many churches, with their babytalk modern services, Ladybird Bibles, trite preaching and kindergarten happy-clappy music, seem designed to drive away any thoughtful person. 

Peter Hitchens, in Daily Mail

Progressive Christians love nothing more than new exegesis and new hermeneutics. It serves them well to conclude that there have been thousands of years of penurious Biblical scholarship. “Only we can understand this ancient text” they say. It is a form of academic snobbery – that interpretations that come last, land best. As a result, none of the progressives have in recent years published anything that holds its worth against the poorest of writings of Tozer, Edwards, Spurgeon and C.S. Lewis.

Which brings us to the Perth Anglican Archbishop Kay Goldsworthy offering the novelty of interpretation of Exodus 15. Goldsworthy shared the novelty in Sydney. Goldsworthy was in Sydney to celebrate 40 years of Movement for the Ordination of Women. Where other visiting Archbishops may perhaps be given the pulpit of the Anglican Cathedral, Goldsworthy secured a spot at Christ Church St Laurence – a Anglo-Catholic parish church a cooee yell distant from the Cathedral.

Goldsworthy on Exodus 15 is proof alone of the need for continuity of male-only preaching. If Goldsworthy had introduced her Exodus 15 novelty into a formal debate on the “Worth of Women Preaching” the opposing side would rest their case. The Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, who gave permission for Goldsworthy to speak at Christ Church, perhaps slyly reckoned that he need only offer enough rope.

So, to Goldsworthy on Exodus 15. Here is the part of Goldsworthy’s sermon that requires attention. It is copied from the transcript that Youtube usefully offers. I’ve emphasised the part of the text that piqued my interest. You can view the whole sermon on this link.

“Our reading stopped at the end of chapter 14, so we missed the opening verses of chapter 15 which English Bibles head the “song of Moses” after God's people land on the other side of the Red Sea. It's worth noting, and it may not be surprising, that the song of Moses is placed ahead of a more ancient text the song of Miriam. The song of Miriam is one of the very ancient texts of the Hebrew scriptures and appears a few verses on in chapter 15 at verse 20. It has Miriam taking a tambourine in her hand and all the women going out after her with tambourines and with dancing.”

The novelty is in the suggestion that the song of Miriam is “a more ancient text” than the song of Moses. That is a novelty in that Biblical scholars find both songs to be ancient text – older than the chapters either side of it – as measured of the age of the Hebraic language. Plausibly, the author of Exodus chose to deposit the songs in their original form directly into the book. Miriam’s song – which is possibly truncated – is effectively a repeat of the first stanza of the song of Moses.

A sketch that was included on Sydney Morning Herald's letter page 17 September 2023,
titled: "Arch Rivalry", by Simon Ketch

Goldsworthy assigns Miriam’s song prominence that it does not have. Putting Miriam’s song ahead of the song of Moses (the feminine voice is put ahead of the male) may have tickled the day's audience yet would not survive scrutiny of Moore Theological College.

The new exegesis, the new hermeneutic, merits no attention in Sydney.

Shalom,

Ozhamada

Failure to lament

Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside.  But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s naked body. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father naked. Genesis 9:22-23 NIV

Rachel Gilson’s wayward theology and the nod that Sydney Anglicans offer such perversion was the subject of an earlier post. In addition to presenting to many Anglicans at an Undeceptions Conference, Gilson was interviewed at an inner city Anglican church (as linked).

The Sydney Anglican Diocese Doctrine Commission report would result in Gilson lamenting her state (paragraph 7.3 of this linked document). Lament is unnecessary of those who obey God. Private lament is best done in one's private chamber with those who are closest. Private lament is not best done on a public platform.

I long that two Sydney Anglicans had acted as Shem and Japheth. To have provided for Gilson (Isaiah 51:17-18). To have acted in charity (Proverbs 17:9) to bring privacy to Gilson's state. To have taken a cloak to cover Gilson as they guided her away from the stage. To offer Gilson rest. To weep with Gilson as she weeps. To comfort her and to direct her that she may be liberated.

 "[Shem and Japheth] not only would not see [Noah's nakedness] themselves, but provided that no one else might see it; herein setting an example of charity with reference to other men’s sin and shame." Benson Commentary

Noah’s Drunkeness by James Tissot, c. 1896-1902 

from https://isthatinthebible.wordpress.com/2015/12/02/the-curse-of-hamcanaan-a-mythological-mystery/

I long for action of the Sydney Anglicans as Shem and Japheth beget a Godly nation, but of Ham there sprung hostile nations; Babylonians, Egyptians and Canaanites.

Shalom,

Ozhamada