An Indigenous Response to the Emerging World Order

An Indigenous Response to the Emerging World Order

Pastor Ray Minniecon Indigenous Peoples Organisation Sydney

In the heart of Sydney on the corner Hunter and Bligh Streets, stands an obelisk most people walk past without noticing. It commemorates a sermon. Carved into its stone are words from Psalm 116:12:

“What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits toward me?”

 The preacher was Reverend Richard Johnson. The date was 3rd February 1788. The location: Warrang, what would soon be called Sydney Cove.

 This was the first Christian sermon preached on this continent. This was the first time that the Bible was heard on this soil. And from the beginning, that question was already challenging and problematical. Johnson’s meaning was straightforward. The First Fleet had survived a brutal journey: 11 ships, 1,400 people, 252 days at sea, 48 dead before arrival. They believed God had saved them from death.

The sermon was thanksgiving. A colony celebrating survival. A people grateful for protection. But history is never told from only one shoreline. Because gathered before Johnson were not just sailors and officers. There were 700 convicts. Men and women and children transported for stealing bread, cloth, tools, or simply being poor. Exiled for 7 years. 14 years. Sometimes life. So, we must ask: Were they rescued, or were they discarded? Was it banishment form one’s country of origin? What form of punishment is this?  Was this deliverance, or displacement? Or punishment imposed on their own citizens, ordered by their own judges and their own Courts of justice?

The Audience Outside the Church

And beyond the sermon, beyond the neat circle of English prayer and ceremony, stood another gathering entirely. Watching from the tree line. The Gadigal people. No translation was offered. No explanation was given. No invitation offered. No treaty discussed. No consent was given.

 They heard unfamiliar sounds from a foreign tongue, spoken from a foreign book, inside a foreign ritual performed on their land. They were not participants in the service. They were witnesses to its consequences. The first church service in Australia took place with one people gathered around the Bible and another people pushed outside the story.

The Problem with Psalm 116

Psalm 116 is a beautiful psalm of survival: “You, Lord, have delivered me from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling.” But the psalm asks a question that cannot belong to only one group: What shall I give back to God for all his benefits toward me? Because if one people thanks God for arrival while another experiences invasion and exclusion, then the question is no longer personal. It becomes moral.

 Gratitude without justice becomes theology that is serving empire and power. Faith becomes empire speaking God’s name over its own ambitions. And history shows what followed. Land was taken by force, without any agreement. Foreign Law was imposed without permission understanding or recognition. And Scripture was used again as authority rather than invitation. God is conscripted as witness to possession and dispossession. The Bible became not always intentionally, but effectively a document that justified our dispossession.

If It Happened to You

Imagine this: A government ship or bus parks outside your home. Soldiers escort hundreds of prisoners into your living room. They do not ask permission. They declare it legal. They hold a prayer service and thank God for the property. They call it civilisation. They call it providence. You call it invasion or something else. That is the moral tension carved into the first sermon of this nation. Richard Johnson likely preached sincerely. He was not a cruel man. He was a man inside an empire he could not see beyond. But sincerity does not sanctify harm. We cannot thank God for what contradicts God’s justice. We cannot baptise history after the fact. We cannot make God agree with us by carving scripture into stone. The bigger question is; Can We Thank God for Injustice?

The Question is still standing. Australia still returns every year to the same date. The same shore. The same words.The same debates and discussions. January 26 holds two realities: Arrival and Invasion. Both true. Both unfinished.Psalm 116 was never meant to justify power. It was meant to transform the one who survived.The psalmist’s answer was not celebration but commitment. The next phrase in the text says; “I will fulfil my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people.” Is this a call to public repentance? Public responsibility?  Perhaps it’s not about memory but change.

What Shall We Render?

The first sermon in Australia asked a question the nation has never yet answered: If God preserved us then what do we owe each other? It’s not sentiment. It’s not more ceremony. It’s not more monuments. We seek truth and justice. The real rendering to God is not gratitude for survival but true justice. A transformation of relationship. An attitudinal change. Until the outsider becomes neighbour, and the neighbour becomes relatives, the sermon is still unfinished. Justice still stands outside the door and knocks.

 The stone inscription stands in the city. But the real inscription waits to be written. Not on monuments, but in our hearts, in how we choose to live together, in truth, in mercy and justice on this our land we now call Australia.