TRANSFORMATION!

17th February 2008 : Lent 2 : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Genesis 12:1-4a : Romans 4:1-17 : Matthew 17:1-9

Today we get a second dig at Matthew’s version of the Transfiguration story. It gives me an opportunity to reflect on something that struck me after our celebration of the Transfiguration on the last Sunday before Lent – the notion of transformation as a third dominical sacrament.

I had better explain that the Anglican Church recognizes seven sacraments, the standard definition of which is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”. In other words, the Church does something that is plain and visible for all to see but the internal changes are God’s action and business. For instance, in Holy Baptism we use water and oil and candle light as the outward and visible signs of what we believe is a divine action that bestows both the Holy Spirit and gifts of the Spirit upon the person who is baptized. We see the water but we don’t see the Spirit …

Of these sacraments, two are specifically labeled Dominical – Holy Eucharist and Holy Baptism – because the Church believes that Jesus himself took part in them. We know, for instance, that Jesus celebrated a so-called Last Supper and commanded us to “do this in remembrance of me”; we know that John the baptiser baptised Jesus at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.

So, what about this “third dominical sacrament”?

It seems to me that Jesus invites us all into sharing the same experience of transformation that he underwent, though we will change far more slowly and over a far longer period than did Jesus!

I should point out here that transfigure and transform are the same word in the Greek text. The authors of the Christian scriptures obviously didn’t feel the need to distinguish between the two.

As with Baptism the Christian scriptures do not record a direct statement from Jesus commanding us to embark on this journey of transformation. However, other passages, in the Letters, do counsel transformation or becoming Christ-like.

That said, the whole idea of undertaking a spiritual journey at the command of the Living God finds several obvious examples in the Hebrew scriptures. The Abraham Saga, so-called, is perhaps the greatest of these – and we happily get a glimpse of this seminal journey’s beginning this morning.

Abram and his wife Sarai and their extended family set out from Ur in what is modern-day Iraq at God’s command, with the promise of blessing and growth ringing in Abram’s ears. Abram has no real idea where he is going but he places his life and that of his family into God’s hands and sets off on what will become a great adventure that eventually leads to the foundation of the Hebrew people and their settlement in Canaan.

Abram himself never sees the fulfillment of any of God’s promises but he journeys on nevertheless. Centuries later, Abram’s remarkable act of faith cause Paul to uphold him as the great example of faith – a faith that led to the Living God considering him to be in relationship with God.

Abram learns much about the Living God during the course of his journey – but, again, he never sees the end that God apparently promised.

But that’s not the point of a spiritual. It’s not about getting somewhere or achieving something. It’s about traveling and learning about God along the way.

I’m reminded of the words of a song Art Garfunkel sang several decades ago called Wo-ya-ya:

We are going, heaven-knows where we are going;
We’ll know we’re there.
We will get there, heaven-knows how we will get there;
We know we will
…

It will be hard, we know,
And the road will be muddy and rough
But we’ll get there –
Heaven-knows how we will get there:
We know we will …

Our journey following Jesus into transformation is like that, as was Abram’s journey. We don’t know where we are going but we will know when and if we arrive; we don’t really know how we’ll get to where we are going but if we continue in faith, returning again and again and again to the Living God despite the pot holes and detours and avalanches and quicksand and whatever else, then we know we will arrive.

And in the process of journeying, Jesus will transform us. The transformation will happen inwardly but the fruit of that transformation will be apparent in our lives. It – we - will be an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. A sacrament.
But how will Jesus transform us?

The best clue is in the words of the Living God on the Mount of transfiguration:

"This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!"

Immediately we have a reminder of Jesus’ baptism when the voice spoke almost exactly the same words – “this is my beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased.” Here, however, we have the all-significant additional imperative – Listen to him!

And that’s the clue – Jesus transforms those who take the time to listen to him. Jesus will transform those who listen to him because they will form a relationship with Jesus.

Just as our own human relationships crucially depend upon our willingness and ability to listen to another, whether a friend or husband or wife or anyone else with whom we seek a relationship, so too our relationship with the Living God, with Jesus the Son, requires the same attitude of attentiveness, and desire and willingness to listen.

We do our very best, most effective listening by coming into God’s presence in silence, putting aside our almost natural desire to regale God with our wants and needs – or even the world’s wants and needs. This silence is never easy. But the out-working of our faith is our returning again and again and again to God despite the extraneous material that surfaces while we are doing our darnedest just to listen.

Silence isn’t something we’re used to or comfortable with at the beginning. That’s okay. We do it a bit at a time. You’ll have noticed the silence following the sermon and after Communion. It’s a small but important opportunity to absorb what we have just received, to be conscious of God’s presence.

In that small moment, are we listening to God? Are we willing to create some space and time in the daily round of activity to sit similarly at home and just be silent with God?

Perhaps we even need to ask ourselves a very serious prior question – do we want Jesus to transform us? If the answer is, Yes, then we need to start listening. If it’s, No, or we’re not sure, that’s okay. Maybe it isn’t the right time. But if not, then we need to think about what will make the time right, knowing that we will never enjoy the depth of relationship with God, through Jesus, if we cannot begin to listen to what God has to say to us.

We are going, heaven-knows where we are going;
We’ll know we’re there.
We will get there, heaven-knows how we will get there;
We know we will …

But we won’t find those answers on the back of the proverbial Weeties packet. We’ll only know if we’re listening. Silently, faithfully listening. Silently being transformed in the continuing journey of the third dominical sacrament.

INSECUIRTY

Sunday, 10th February 2008 : Lent 1 : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 : Romans 5:12-21 : Matthew 4:1-11

A man was granted three wishes. Because his wife was nagging him mercilessly he
said in a moment of frustration, “I wish my wife was gone!” Poof! She was gone.
After a week or so the man realised he missed his wife and so he said, “I wish I
had my wife back again.” Poof! She was back. He now realised that he had only
one wish left and that he had better use it wisely.

So he consulted
a friend, who told him to wish for money. “You can buy almost anything if you
have the money,” said the friend. But another friend said, “What good is money
if you haven’t got your health? I’d wish for good health if I were
you.”

Confused, the man went to see the Enlightened One, who said,
“Ask to be contented no matter what you have …”

This story could illustrate several themes but the pertinent one for today is security and insecurity. We live in a society that constantly bombards us with the hissed whisper that we can never be secure enough. We need to plan for the future. We need more “super” – and we get enough advice on television alone to thoroughly confuse us.

We’re told we can’t be content or secure unless we have the biggest or the bestest or the rightest. If our cars don’t rate enough stars we risk serious injury or death, one advert implies. Or if we don’t ask for and insist on ESC then we might skid into a bus because our car won’t be able to re-adjust immediately.

All over the place we covet security. All over the place the disembodied voices tell us we don’t have enough of this, that or the other. We need more. And we are definitely NOT content with what we have. We know we are not content because the voice on the TV or radio told us. Or we read it in the newspaper or any number of magazines.

What a contrast, then, to hear Jesus calmly knocking back the first-Century ad-guy, popularly known as The Devil, among other names. I have long-imagined that Jesus, after forty days of fasting, had something of a struggle, especially when tempted to do magic tricks with the rocks and hoe into some freshly-baked bread. No doubt modern cinema has helped with that!

But reading this now we see a Jesus who is assured and in control of his desires and needs. His first – and apparently only – thought is about the Living God. Clearly those forty days were not wasted!

So even after extreme physical deprivation Jesus shows that relationship with God remains possible. Mark’s gospel is rather light on details but Luke reflects Matthew in showing an assured Jesus dealing with the Devil’s temptations with apparent ease.

What underlies Jesus’ assurance is his security in the Living God. Though he might be hungry he won’t damage the natural order simply to satisfy a human need, however understandable it would be if he did. Far more significantly, Jesus does not bite – he does not even nibble – when the Devil insinuates that he is not the Son of God. Jesus knows exactly who he is and does not have to prove anything to anyone. I reckon most of us would just about kill or do some pretty serious damage to share that equanimity and personal security – I know I might!

So the Devil tries it on again, upping the ante by inviting Jesus to play loose and fast with his life and God’s forbearance. Maybe Jesus just wasn’t into bungee-jumping without a bungee but it’s far more likely that, as before, he simply didn’t need to prove to anyone, let alone the Devil – whatever that might be – who or what he was.

At this point yon Devil sounds uncomfortably like our ego playing one of the thousands of miles of negative tape we all have going through our heads. You’re not good enough. You need to prove yourself. Who do you think you are? Show us, then! Go on – do something to prove it!

But Jesus doesn’t take the bait. Nor does he snap at the offer to rule the world. Nowadays we tend to scoff at such notions and we satirise the notion as insane, emanating from the twisted minds of characters like Dr Evil. But in Jesus’ time it was a real aspiration. They weren’t that far in history from Alexander the Great, the legend who “wept because there were no more worlds to conquer”. It was a great age of empires and empire-building – and here was Jesus declining the opportunity to rule the world.

We don’t know for certain what Jesus knew or believed about God but we can say that he seems to have drawn his security from his relationship with the Living God because that was not only far more important but far more stabilising. When we imagine the good Jesus could have done as ruler of the world, the global justice he could have introduced, feeding the hungry, curing the sick of every land – when we imagine that and more, it’s quite a thing he refuses.

But that’s always the way it is with insecurity. In the words of John Kabat-Zinn, founder of the University of Massachusetts Mind-Based Stress-Reduction clinic, “The mind likes to hang out in the future.”[1] If our minds are not constantly making plans to shore up our fundamental dis-ease and secure the mythical future, then they’re wading woefully through the past, filled with regret and guilt and anger and bitterness over opportunities squandered, tasks unaccomplished, injustices perpetrated against us …

Jesus advises us: Give us today our daily bread. Live in the present moment. Here and now is the only place we can live, here and now is the only place we can find everything we need to get us through to the next moment. And as Laurence Freeman, a Benedictine priest and Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation, puts it: “God is here and now. I am here and now …” Can any of us have a better chance of connecting with the Living God than in each present moment of our lives?

The Genesis story offers one explanation for how the “lie” of the future came into being, via the duplicity of a talking snake – not identified as the Devil, by the way – and the insecurity-fuelled gullibility of humankind. And suddenly the two child-like adults, Adam and Eve, become street-wise earth-people, literally disconnected from the Creator.

But Paul reminds us that Jesus restored the connection. All that talk about justification and righteousness is relationship talk. Though we use two different words in English – justify and righteous – they have the same root in Greek and convey a totally related meaning.

That meanings is relationship – restored relationship. What righteousness and justification mean is being back on speaking terms with God. After centuries of living in fear of God, regretting the stupidity of listening to talking snakes, or planning for a future that never seems to arrive, this Jesus comes along and shows that our security is here and now, and that God-with-us, here and now, STILL yearns to hold us, cuddle us and share the security that only the Living God can provide.

So we think that what we’ve done in the past is too awful even for God to deal with? Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. Jesus is God’s gracious – free-given, no-strings-attached – love and welcome every day of our lives. As far as we who follow Jesus are concerned, Jesus is the only security we can know or need. And it’s a daily gift.

But we have to be in a place, mentally and spiritually, where we can receive this gift. This means focusing on God, and focusing on God means spending time in the kind of prayer that does not make demands of God – demands that too often emerge from our insecurities rather than an authentic desire to commune with God.

We need to spend these crucial moments in silence, in God’s presence, asking for nothing, while past and future fly through our minds, letting go the “stuff” and returning faithfully, again and again and again, to God. Whether we call it “meditation” or “contemplation” or “silent prayer” or some other name doesn’t matter. What does matter is spending the time with God, entering the Mystery that is God, into which God invites us.

Out of this silence we find our moment of security. And it is only a moment. But it is a God-given moment. And God’s moment will always seem to last a lifetime.

May our prayer this Lent be deepened immeasurably as we draw closer to God through focused prayer that seeks to listen rather than tell or demand, that is content with the security of God’s presence allowing us simply to be.

[1] Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness meditation. CD.

27th January 2008 : Epiphany 3 : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 9:1-4 : Matthew 4:12-25

I must confess I like candles. I’m not exactly sure what it is about them that I like but I do know that I’m not alone in my fascination. Perhaps it’s their utter simplicity as a means of providing light – and maybe in an age that has not slowed down its discovery and development of technological miracles candles remind us that simplicity remains a powerful and yet vulnerable force in our world.

I suspect also that people who lived in the ages before electricity understood things like fire and light and candles and torches far better than most of us do today. Nevertheless we still know that what the part-time wise person sez is true – that in a pitch-black room the striking and lighting of a single flame floods every corner with light, to some degree at least.

It’s perhaps a minor miracle that in the 21st century we still understand the simplicity of flame and out of that understanding can recognise the power of Isaiah’s imagery when the prophet speaks of a light that shines in darkness and deep darkness. Maybe we’ve all had more than a few doses of night-time power-cuts and know the inexpressible gratitude we feel when we lay hands on matches and a batch of humble household candles!

Over the centuries many have insisted that Isaiah is talking about Jesus as this light that shines in the land of Zebulun and Naphtali. That’s not very likely even thought Matthew’s gospel also wants to point us in that direction.

What’s more likely is that Isaiah is using a powerful counter-pointing image. The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali were not well-regarded. If location, location, location is the key to getting a good price for your dwelling then a mansion in Zebulun or Naphtali would sell for considerably less than the exact same mansion in Jerusalem. Fast-forward to century 21 Western Australia and we’re talking the difference between Balga and Lockridge on the one hand, and Peppermint Grove on the other.

So this is a deep deep darkness Isaiah is drawing to our attention – so deep that the introduction of light is not just welcome but completely life-changing, mind-altering, hope-bringing.

By the time Jesus came along the social and spiritual power-cut in Israel had lasted a long, long time. Foreign troops occupied and controlled the land and religion had gone to pot. This was deep darkness.

So what does God do? Send in a brigade of gig watt-bearing rescue-teams from Jerusalem? I don’t think so. Would you believe a hundred Synergy technicians with authority to reconnect the main grid? No? How about a boy scout with a battery-powered torch?

No, of course not. God doesn’t send rescuers from the centre of power but instead has a child born in an obscure village, part-raised in non-Jewish enemy territory and brought up in a place that the rich and famous despise, a place that as far as they are concerned is the heart of darkness.

This guy is Jesus and he becomes the match struck in the pitch-black room. He becomes the prime and leading example of how God operates in our world, using the simple and unlikely, the weak and vulnerable and powerless to do mighty deeds.

We know that Jesus had a few unfair advantages that we don’t seem to have – like being Son of God. But here’s the thing. Jesus sed back then and he continues to say it right now, here, today – You guys and gals, you go and live like me, you go and do what I did. Heal the sick and stuff like that. But above all be light in deep darkness. Bring hope where people have forgotten what hope is.

It’s been going on for centuries now. People following Jesus, doing what he did, bringing hope. And all the while the deep darkness has followed, trying to smother the light at every turn, sometimes with remarkable effect.

But again and again the Living God calls people to follow Jesus and bring that light into the pitch-black rooms of the world. And that’s precisely what we’ll see in a short while as S, G and L are baptised.

They become in this small ritual that uses very ordinary stuff like water and olive oil and candle light signs of God’s continuing presence and above all the continuing light illuminating the deep darkness of our world with hope.

That’s a big ask for a toddler and a couple of young children. But they don’t have to make it happen immediately. They will have the Holy Spirit to guide them and equally importantly their parents and godparents – and the members of this congregation. In the words of Sean Connery in Entrapment “it’sh imposshible – but doable - ” so let’s do it!

20th January 2008 : Epiphany 2 : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 49:1-7 : 1 Corinthians 1:1-9 : John 1:29-42

One of the questions that frequently excites my curiosity is this: If Jesus were to appear today or tomorrow or any time walking down Lake Road, or Westfield or Ypres Road, or any one of the labyrinthine streets and thoroughfares of our Parish – would I recognise him? Would I, as does John the Baptiser in this day’s gospel, be able to announce with the same certainty, Look! The lamb of God!?

I don’t know that I could do that. I could claim in my defence that John had a huge advantage that I don’t have – namely an explicit statement from the Living God describing, not the physical details of the man who would come, but his special and particular spiritual character.

These spiritual characteristics are so important that they take precedence over Jesus’ actual name. We learn that the descending and remaining dove-like Holy Spirit will identify him. We learn that Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, recognises him as the Messiah, the Christ. This gospel implies that in common with John the Baptiser and his disciples, Andrew and Simon are expecting him, looking, watching, waiting, maybe even actively seeking him.

But John accords Jesus another title – lamb of God. And he says it twice. First it’s, Look! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And then simply, Look! The Lamb of God …

It’s no mere honorific because towards the conclusion of John’s gospel Jesus becomes the sacrificial lamb of Passover, crucified, in John’s gospel only, on the day of preparation, that is, the day the lambs “without spot or blemish” were slaughtered. In other words, John does not have Jesus sharing a final Passover, as do Matthew, Mark and Luke. Instead, the Romans execute the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world and they remove his body before Passover begins.

What John’s gospel achieves in that one phrase – the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world – is to bring together succinctly and brilliantly two different pieces of biblical anthropology.

Taking the second one first, we have the notion of the scapegoat. The scapegoat was an animal – a goat, duh! – that, once a year, had symbolically laid upon it the sins of the Hebrew nation. They then drove the goat out into the wilderness to fend for itself. But the point was that the goat took away the nation’s sins in what was paradoxically both a symbolic and literal manner. It was a moment of catharsis in which the Hebrew people freed themselves of their sense of guilt, individual and communal, for another year, until the next year. The scapegoat was – nor could it ever be anything but – an imperfect and limited solution to corporate and individual sin.

When John’s gospel gives us the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world we finally have a permanent answer. But John tweaks the scapegoat anthropology very significantly.

First it’s no longer “sins” – acts of sinning – but sin. Singular. This is like the main pod from which all the other minute spores of sinfulness spew forth. Jesus the Lamb of God provides a definitive answer to the whole question of sin and sinfulness by cutting out the middle goat and dealing directly with the source. And second it’s no longer about a single and particular people but extends now to the whole world and every people. The Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world, not just the sins of Israel.

But the divine solution isn’t the removal of sin as such from the world, or individual sins. It’s more elegant than that. It allows us humans to retain our free will to choose God or not-God but in the event that we choose not-God and therefore sin we now have recourse to an ever-present solution when we change our minds and return to the Living God.

That solution, quite simply, is grace. Gone is the delusion that we ourselves can deal with the sin thing – because we can’t. Instead God devises a way through that Jesus mediates through the Holy Spirit: every time we wander away from and then return to God, God simply forgets whatever it is we feel guilty about. And that’s grace.

And it’s worldwide. It’s nation-wide and people-wide and religion-wide. You heard me. It’s not restricted to Christians. If it was, then it wouldn’t be grace. It would be some kind of client-centered favour doled out to particular people, to some but not others. It would mock and make a foul lie of Paul’s assertion that God has no favourites. So let no one live with the cruel delusion that Christians are better or more favoured than anyone else in God’s universe. We aren’t. Because if we were then grace would not be grace!

Jesus the Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world.

And that’s the second part of John’s exquisite conflation. As the Passover Lamb, Jesus becomes the living symbol of God’s salvation. The Passover is about liberation from bondage to the promise of freedom – a freedom not exactly handed to anyone on a platter, silver or otherwise. Rather, it’s a freedom we have to work for, if only to that extent that we consciously choose to seek it and accept it.

But the point is that for each one of us Passover through Jesus now becomes a global phenomenon also. Liberation is available to all who choose it, through exactly the same mechanism of grace.

But wait! Let’s remember that the lamb is generally a gentle creature. Jesus isn’t the Lion of God who takes away the sin of the world. He’s the Lamb. And the Lamb not only refuses but actively negates the violence implicit in the whole scapegoat thing by absorbing that violence on the cross and showing us how possible it is.

We see the shift from a single people – Israel – to a universal plan as early as Second Isaiah:

He made my mouth like a sharp sword,
in the shadow of his hand he hid me;
he made me a polished arrow,
in his quiver he hid me away.

Perhaps God toyed with the idea of allowing Israel to meet violence with violence. But even in that intermediate phase God puts the sharp sword and polished arrow on the back burner and then decides that the way to go is global:

"It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth."

God decides to give Israel a shot at being the agents of a new, redemptive, non-violent approach.

Ultimately the new approach failed. Israel simply could not do it. No nation could have done it. So, in Johannine theology, the Living God sends the Son, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

It’s still universal. But this time it succeeds. This time we have a lamb of freedom instead of a violence-smothered goat. This time the solution to sin is ongoing and timeless. Through the grace and, as Paul rightly adds, peace of Christ, the Lamb who absorbs the violence in every human heart.

And maybe that’s the answer to my question. Maybe we should all, as we leave here today, be truly attentive to those people casually strolling about out there on Lake Road or St George’s Terrace or wherever we happen to be during the week. Maybe what we’re looking for is someone who exudes grace and peace, someone whose demeanour speaks of love and invitation and welcome, no matter who we are or what the colour of our flesh or the manner of our encounter with the divine.

Who knows? maybe someone out there might see one of us and quietly and hopefully think to themselves, That person reminds me of someone … the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world …

Grace and peace be with you all -

25th December 2007 : CHRSTMASS Morning : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 62:6-12 : Titus 3:4-8a : Luke 2:1-20

To love is not just to do something for others, but to reveal to them their own
uniqueness, to tell them that they are special and worthy of attention. We can
express this through our open and gentle presence.
Jean Vanier

Jean Vanier was the founder of the L’Arche communities, which are faith-based communities centered on people with learning or developmental disabilities. Now an international phenomenon, the first Western Australian L’Arche – the French for “Ark”, as in Noah’s Ark – is due to open in the near future.

Vanier’s words speak eloquently of the rationale and guiding principles of L’Arche. That the profound, abiding basis for their actions comes from the Living God is clear because Vanier could just as easily be speaking about God’s love for humankind and in particular God’s basis for deciding on the Incarnation as the means for bringing salvation to the earth.

Hear the words again:

To love is not just to do something for others, but to reveal to them their own
uniqueness, to tell them that they are special and worthy of attention. We can
express this through our open and gentle presence.

I don’t know whether Vanier had such thoughts in mind or whether the Incarnation – the birth of Jesus – held any inspiration for them but we truly see in his words the action of the Living God in engineering and executing Jesus’ coming to be among us.

First, God’s loving initiative in sending Jesus is not “doing something for us”, as if it were some kind of über-magnanimous gesture on the part of the Being who wrote the manual on generosity. God is not doing us a favour, a superior being rescuing a bunch of hopeless losers – yet again.

Rather, God is using the divine generosity to extend the riskiest invitation of all time – an invitation into relationship, as equals. Remember the last supper in John’s gospel? Jesus sez, “I do not call you servants any longer … but I have called you friends …”

What Jesus comes to do is to lead us back to God. Again, this is not some kind of physical journey, but a journey of the spirit, towards a discovery of the kingdom within and among us.
That discovery is one we have to move towards ourselves. God cannot do it for us while we continue to possess the grace of free will. Out of the same self-imposed constraint, God encourages us to recover a lost confidence in our ability to tap into the inner resources that will enable us to advance in this journey.

To do otherwise would be to treat us with contempt and, at the very least, disrespect. God knows that we are capable of embarking on this journey – because God gave us those inner resources in the first place.

The second point would be that the birth of Jesus is itself a powerful sign of God’s deep love and respect for humanity. The Word – Jesus – did not become a single-cell organism, an amoeba, and insinuate itself into our bodies via our nasal passages as we went for a dip in Lake Galilee. The Word did not become a dolphin or a chimpanzee even though they are among the most intelligent creatures on the planet.

No, the Word became FLESH. A human being, an act that shows us how valued and esteemed and worthy we are in God’s sight. Jesus then shows us what humans are capable of doing – and better, being. He shows us that we CAN be human AND have a valuable and authentic spiritual life, one that enjoys a close relationship with the Living God.

This why the Christian scriptures exhort us to become Christ-like. Not so that we can impress the gullible, win friends or influence our uncles, but in order to experience the fullness of relationship with the Living God. If only we realised that the only qualification for such an experience is one we already possess – being human!

And so the incarnation tells us this: that precisely because we are human, which in biblical terms means created in the image and likeness of the Living God – precisely because we are human, we are “special and worthy of attention”.

Again, we need no extraordinary qualifications for being, in God’s eyes, special and worthy of attention. We ALREADY have everything it could possibly take, simply by being human.

The third thing is the unobtrusive manner in which incarnation unfolds. Maybe with twenty-twenty hindsight, we might think or ordinarily expect that momentous events should attract a great deal of publicity and attention.

But it doesn’t happen that way. At least, the publicity machine is a bunch of shepherds, in those days considered ratbags and unreliable. Hardly the sort of respected dignitaries to convey news of an event so momentous.

Instead God and scripture treat us to the open and gentle presence of a baby born in a stable. The paradox is that God’s power resides in such a vulnerable being – a baby who is defenceless, unable to repel an aggressor, totally dependent on the love and good will of others, primarily his mother.

It’s as if God wants us to know that from the very beginning this is what it’s about – openness and gentleness, presence, quietly “being there”. No self-serving, self-seeking fuss. Just being, attentive to what’s around us.

The good news is that this open and gentle presence doesn’t have to leave us when, as or just because we happen to grow up! For what I suspect is the majority of us, though, by the time we’re physically and emotionally adults, we’ve receive so many blows, experienced such trauma, become so wounded and scarred that we have a huge task ahead of us to return to life as an open and gentle presence.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t recover or heal. It’s difficult work. Fortunately, “difficult” isn’t “impossible”. And as we heal and recover, we find ourselves drawing closer once again to the open and gentle presence of the baby born in Bethlehem so many centuries ago.

So here we are again, making time to spend with God, expressing the desire to allow God to shape, re-shape and transform us into open and gentle people whose presence speaks again of God’s love and respect.

This is where the submerged meaning of the incarnation speaks with the Spirit within us. This perhaps is the inner work Mary was doing when Luke tells us she twice “pondered” the meaning of the great events of which she had allowed herself to be a part.

Her head had all sorts of logical or seemingly-logical answers thrust into it. But her heart needed more. And wisely she permitted the process to claim her attention. We see the fruit of that work when she stands at the foot of her son’s cross, open and gentle, a presence of love bearing witness to the worst of human actions at the same time as she exemplifies the Christ-like qualities that emerge in the incarnation, available to all of us, simply because we are human beings.

LIFE FINDS A WAY

9th December 2007 : Advent 2 : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 11:1-10 : Romans 15:4-13 : Matthew 3:1-12

In the film Jurassic Park the chaos theoretician, Dr Ian Malcolm, delivers some of the most pointed and insightful lines. Horrified at the thought of theme park scientists reproducing dinosaurs, Malcolm is also sceptical about the long-term effectiveness of the apparent safeguard of genetically engineering the beasts’ DNA so that every dinosaur born at Jurassic Park is female, thus ensuring that they cannot breed.

At one point an exchange between the chief scientist and Malcolm goes like this:

Henry Wu: You're implying that a group composed entirely of
female animals will... breed?
Dr. Ian Malcolm: No, I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way.

Life … finds a way.

That’s eventually what happens in Jurassic Park: some of the dinosaurs begin to breed.

But long before Jurassic Park our scriptures were running this theme in various ways. We can think of Sarah in Genesis, Elizabeth in Luke, and the all-surpassing example of Mary the Mother of Jesus, who apparently conceives without human intervention.

Life finds a way.

Except of course that life here means the Living God and we might prefer to say that God finds a way – a way to ensure humankind’s movement from circularity and despair to forward movement and ultimate hope.

The story of John the Baptiser – the one known as the Forerunner in Eastern Orthodox tradition – is another example of God finding a way to bring life and hope to a humanity digging itself into a deeper and deeper hole as it wanders aimlessly in circles substituting rules, methodology and religious formulae for a living relationship with the Living God.

John stations himself on the outskirts and in doing so he forces the people of “Jerusalem and all Judaea” to leave the familiarity of their current life-nullifying homes and workplaces and religious institutions to journey to the borders of the wilderness.

In that sense these people come to meet John where things are pared back. They’re returning to some kind of starting point in order to discover a new beginning – a place where God can encourage them to receive the gift of new life, a place where life, paradoxically in the environment of wilderness, bare natural elements and essentials, finds a way.

And this is exactly what Matthew tells us –

"The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
'Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.' "

At least, that’s what Isaiah sez in the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures. In the actual Hebrew version the quote is

The voice of one crying out:
In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord …

I used to think the misplaced comma didn’t appreciably alter the meaning of the text. But now I’m not so sure.

I think it IS especially significant that God has John preparing the way of the Lord in the wilderness. I think it IS especially significant that God causes life to find a way in a place where life is hard, dangerous, unpredictable – and even unlikely.

And as we know a little later on the dude from Nazareth rocks up, gets done in the Jordan and then, instead of heading straight to the Big Smoke to enact his reforms, the Holy Spirit drives him right into the wilderness. And it’s from the wilderness that Jesus emerges. And he emerges from the wilderness preaching exactly the same message as his cousin, John the Forerunner.

Now this may surprise us. Shouldn’t Jesus have a new message? Isn’t he the New Thing? Doesn’t he have a New Take on the Old Story?

Yes and no. Because the Story doesn’t change. The Story is about getting back to God.

As Joni Mitchell archetypally wrote and sang in early 70’s

We got to get ourselves back to the garden …

The garden – the place where humankind first meets and forms a relationship with the Living God. A garden that becomes blasted and withered and barren – a wilderness where God continues, in a sense, to reside.

Human searching for the garden is humanity searching for God – the God who causes life to find a way.

And so we have the same message from both John and Jesus:

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!

That one word - repent – encapsulates everything that Jesus was about.

And it’s NOT, as we so commonly suppose, a moral demand. It’s bigger – far more outrageously humungous than that. Repentance is not about moral sins but about spiritual redirection and return to the Living God in a way that gives life.

Again, it’s about life finding a way through the distractions and distortions of rules and religious red tape. It’s so easy to reduce Jesus’ message to a set of moral imperatives. The rational mind copes best with these neat niceties: good, evil; right, wrong; black, white.

But the call to life and the call of life – life finding a way under the loving prompting of the Living God – is a call to the spirit within us. As Paul reminds us, the good news is for all people, for Gentiles as well as Jews.

This is the merging, in one sense. It is the end of the dualism that the human mind enjoys so much. It is the unifying and reconciling of opposites. This is the ultimate goal of life finding a way.

Repentance, then, is not at all about sorrowing about moral transgressions. How much simpler and easier it would be if that was what it was all about and nothing else!

Repentance, however, is about this return to God. In its English form it means re-make. God calls us into the new life, the life that finds a way in Jesus, by allowing us to accept a total spiritual makeover. This is not easy and it’s not painless.

How much more straightforward it is simply to take the moral and dualistic path! I do wrong. I say, Sorry. I do right. Here’s the thing. I can do all that, all the time, my entire life, without ever changing, without ever coming even one tenth of a millimeter closer to God. Even hardened criminals know the difference between right and wrong.

So don’t imagine for second that hardened Christians are truly closer to God just because they know a few moral imperatives.

Remember, the message is repent. Change. Come back. Return. One-on-one. If we’re thinking Greek it comes out as “change your mind”, or as we might say today, “change your mindset”, change your way of thinking about God. See God, not as a terrifying school principal with an unbreakable cane, ready to give you six of the best every time you break one of the rules – but as the welcoming, inviting, loving Creator who yearns for reunion.

In other words, change your thinking about the moral tyrant so that you understand the loving giver of life, the One who causes life to find a way into our hearts and converse softly and gently with our own spirit.

It’s by no means an easy task. But, as ever, we don’t have to do it alone. So are we prepared to take that risk? Will we – can we move from the safety of the known world of dualisms and set out for the border country, the outskirts of both civilised religion and the wilderness where the Living God dwells? Can we set out to meet the Forerunner – and ultimately find Jesus, in whom life finds a way?

ADVENT SUNDAY A 2007

2nd December 2007 : Advent Sunday : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 2:1-5 : Romans 13:9-21 : Matthew 24:36-44

Many of us have seen the movie Home alone, possibly even the two sequels. For those who haven’t, Home alone is the highly-unlikely story of a precocious young boy, something of a misfit in his large, unruly family, who is accidentally left behind when sed family goes on vacation. This sets the scene for a series of slapstick antics as the kid proceeds to outwit a couple of would-be robbers, ingeniously using only the materials he has at hand.

The first movie worked well. We didn’t know the outcome. The kid was very cute despite his precociousness. We had tension, we had sympathy. Durn-it-all, we were rootin for the kid from the get-go and his triumph over evil and disaster was OUR triumph over evil and disaster.

Home alone was a masterful piece of cinema manipulation that drew us into acute identification with the poor abandoned brat, ultimately playing on our own deep fears – maybe fears of abandonment also; fear of attack; fear of threats of one kind or another; fear of an assault on whatever it is we delude ourselves into believing fundamentally holds us together as human beings.

Before I continue let me say that I am indebted for much of what follows to the website Girardian reflections on the lectionary[1] The site’s name comes from the anthropologist René Girard, whose study of society and religion led him to conclude that what drives us is desire, which may lead either to cooperation or conflict. It’s far more complex than that so that will have to do for the moment – or until we find someone who understands it well enough to explain it clearly!

Meanwhile, back at the sermon …

The Church has long, though I suspect not “always” played on people’s fears of rejection and abandonment in order to gain adherents and keep captive the fearful faithful. We all want to belong, to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to feel in some way accepted. Such is our desire for belonging and acceptance that we willingly abandon our most fundamental principles and sense of personal integrity – at least in the short-term – in order to achieve it.

As one particular kind of example, this is how extremist groups of every colour, religion and political persuasion gain and retain followers. From the outside these groups may seem obviously dodgy – but offer someone who feels rejected a sense of home, a sense of belonging, a sense of likemindedness – and they willingly become yours. Once that happens it’s relatively easy to manipulate them and keep them for long periods of time.

It’s exactly this dynamic that operates in the conservative dogma of the so-called Rapture, a non-biblical term that has many different shades of interpretation based on selective and sometimes twisted interpretations of a handful of biblical texts. The basis of Rapture theology is that at some point before, during or after the last days – a time of terror known as the Tribulation – Jesus will descend from heaven and lift up the “saved” from earth and meet them in the sky, ushering them into eternity. Those who remain on earth still have a shot at salvation but they will have to suffer some or all of the horrors of Tribulation.

Well … who wouldn’t want to belong to the select group of the “saved”? And who, believing they were “in”, wouldn’t want to do everything they could to ensure they stayed “in”?

As far as that basic scenario goes anyone and any group can play the game – and who hasn’t? The Church is a past master at it. The Church has for centuries set up and demanded adherence on the basis of what Richard Rohr calls “questions of belonging, membership questions; who’s in – and who’s out”.

Part of the problem is that this was never Jesus’ message. He didn’t offer “membership” based on strict and coded principles. One of the reasons the established religion feared him was because he threw out their rule book. He not so much re-wrote their cosy constitution as tore the whole thing to pieces.

How? By allowing anyone and everyone to be members of his organisation! He threw wide the doors. He sed even the blind, the lame, the deaf, the mute – even SINNERS for goodness’ sake!! – could come in and receive God’s welcome and forgiveness. For those of us who like churchy words, it’s called GRACE.

Grace flows freely from a loving God and it sez to anyone who can hear the offer, Come on down!

It’s a totally different – and liberating – attitude from the one that sez These are the rules; you can stay as long as you obey them. If you don’t obey, we kick you out and abandon you to your fate.

Who among us really wants to be “abandoned to our fate”? I know I don’t!

No wonder people likewise are terrified at the prospect of being among those who are “left behind”. It’s what ancient and not-so-ancient peoples did to the elderly and infirm: left them behind under a bush or on an ice-floe or in a C-class hospital (read “nursing home”). No thank you!

One of the problems is that we don’t have to translate the text the way we actually find it. For instance, the word for “taken” could validly be translated as “swept away” or “kidnapped” or “taken by force”. The Latin translation gives us the English word rape and the French version – ravissement – sounds enough like its English equivalent to need no translation.

Is this REALLY what God is going to do to those who belong to the right club, the Salvation Club?

On the other hand, the word that translates as “left behind” occurs commonly in the Christian scriptures, has several different meanings also, and could be rendered forgive. It’s actually the same word sitting ingenuously behind Father, forgive them for they know not what they do; and Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

And when we consider that Noah was “left behind” while the rest of the world was “swept away” in evil and violence we start to get a different picture. And do we really need to guess how topsy-turvy the view is when we look at the most well-known of all people ever to be “left behind” – a certain Jesus of Nazareth, abandoned on the cross, soaked in the violence of humanity, refusing to abandon his faith, innocent victim of the world’s evil – and raised from the dead on the third day by the Living God!

The point is we do not need to fear being left behind. Being left behind may actually be the true sign that we are people of faith, people who maybe do not “belong” according to the rulebook, but people who have accepted God’s grace – the only thing we need to do.

It is exactly the same grace operating as Mary of Nazareth enters the final month of her third trimester. Humankind does nothing – can do nothing – to deserve or warrant the coming of Jesus into the world. God sends Jesus in an act of faith as an act of grace.

We who are left behind to meet him need only ask one question – will we truly receive God’s offered grace this Advent Season and understand it at the Christ Mass?

[1] http://girardianlectionary.net/index.html and http://girardianlectionary.net/year_a/advent1a.htm

HONOURING OUR PLEDGES - MATTERS OF FAITH AND TRUST

Sunday, 4th November 2007 : Pentecost 23 : Year C
9:30am Westfield
Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4 : 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12 : Luke 19:1-10

Alistair and Parish Council,

To the Westfield Anglican Parish of the Holy Spirit in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of everyone of you for one another is increasing. Therefore we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith during all your persecutions and the afflictions that you are enduring.

We might recognise that as a complete rip-off of the opening to the second letter to the Christian community in Thessalonika …

But the reason I lifted it is because it fits perfectly with our Parish. Among the many blessings the Living God has showered upon us is a growing faith and genuine, observable love for one another, as well as a remarkable steadfastness that sees us continuing God’s work into our twenty-third year.

Perhaps our afflictions and persecutions are not quite as physically life-threatening as those the Thessalonians likely encountered and endured.

But they are real nevertheless – afflictions of financial shortfall and struggle; persecutions or perceived persecutions from ecclesiastical bureaucracy demanding financial compensations or reasons or both.

Those bureaucratic demands are not gratuitous – nor is Westfield alone in facing them: other parishes have similar – and greater – issues with which to contend.

Nevertheless, we, as God’s people in this particular part of Westfield, need to reckon up the balance sheet of faith and blessings and address the issue raised in the pewsheet – namely the shortfall in pledges.

Pledges are the amount of weekly, monthly or annual offering we promised when we received our envelopes. We need to remember that we promised this offering to God – not primarily to a parish or institution or priest – but to the Living God.

And we made the promises based on prayerful reflection and consideration of God’s own blessings to us individually.

A moment ago we heard Zacchaeus promise to give half his income to the poor and to recompense anyone he’d defrauded fourfold. The Greek text is actually written in the present tense so it is likely Zacchaeus was already do what he promised.

Either way, what if he went back on that promise? What would that imply about him or his faith or his trustworthiness?

These are the same sorts of questions we need to ask ourselves as well. What we promise to offer for God’s work in our Parish represents first a thank offering that recognises God’s blessings to us. We are saying, Thank you, Lord, for your blessings. I now return those blessings so that my Parish may be a blessing to others.

And as part of our responsible economy of God’s blessings we prayerfully decide what is enough and make sure it is not too much. While God and Parish Treasurers may desire a certain sacrificial generosity in our offerings, God at least doesn’t want anyone to starve or have their electricity or phone disconnected! (I should hasten to add that our own Treasurer doesn’t want that to happen either.)

So if we promise to offer God, say, $10 a week, then our faith tells us clearly and unambiguously that this is the amount we need to set aside for God before anything else. When that doesn’t happen – when we promise God $10 a week and only hand over $5 – then we have a few problems to wrestle with.

First is the question of faith and trust in God. We all know what it’s like when someone promises to do something and then doesn’t follow through. We feel hurt, maybe even betrayed or angry. It becomes an indication that the person who broke their promise really doesn’t hold us in any esteem.

God, fortunately, is infinitely forgiving and handles these matters far better than most of us seem to. But God’s sadness at broken promises of any kind arises from what it actually sez about our faith and trust in God.

At the entirely mundane level we need to understand that among the Treasurer’s many responsibilities is that of making budgets and forecasts. The Treasurer does that on the basis of what we tell him we are intending to offer to God.

If, however, our offering is less than what we promised then something happens that Treasurers in every time and place abhor – their books don’t balance! And when a Treasurer’s books don’t balance Treasurer’s start weeping, groaning and gnashing their teeth – and I can assure you this is not a pretty sight!

Fortunately, even Treasurers know that circumstances change for the worse. That’s okay – provided we let the Treasurer know that because of those changed circumstances we can’t offer as much as we originally promised.

I’ve recently resigned my chaplaincy at the Mount Hospital. My stipend won’t be as much as it was. I will be writing a note to the Treasurer explaining that because of my reduced stipend my offering to God will also be reduced. I will slip that note into my envelope in a week or two, or maybe put it in an envelope with my envelope number on it. Either way the Treasurer will know that the offering from the holder of envelope number XX is going to be reduced.

The Treasurer can then recalculate his budget and forecasts. He won’t necessarily sing Alleluia! at having to do so – but at least he won’t have unbalanced books …

Likewise, when I secure another position and my stipend or income increases I will revise my offering to God accordingly. I will let the Treasurer know that envelope number XX’s offering to God will increase. And this time the Treasurer may well sing Alleluia!

This is one the great virtues and values of having our envelope system. It’s completely anonymous and it allows us to communicate with the Treasurer when things do change.

It also allows us to put aside our offering to God in advance, so that if we go away for a while we can still ensure that what we promised God is always offered exactly according to our promise.

At the last Parish Council meeting the Treasurer wept, groaned and gnashed his teeth because what we had promised to offer to God was more than we were ACTUALLY offering to God. I doubt if God’s blessings have decreased – but it may be that our circumstances have changed for the worse. If that’s the case, let the poor man know!

If it’s complexly a matter of trust and faith, that’s slightly more difficult – but not insurmountable. Perhaps it is only a matter of remembering that if we have promised to offer to God a thank offering for God’s blessings then of course we expect ourselves to honour that promise – just as we would expect anyone else to honour any other promise they made to us.

Let’s pray.

Loving and generous God

Your blessings fill our lives to overflowing.
Help us always to use those blessings
so that we in turn may be a blessing to others.
Help us to remember also that what we offer to you
we offer in faith, trusting your promise
to look after us in every single circumstance.

We ask this in the name of Jesus, your Son our Lord. Amen.

HEAVEN, HELL, THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES

30th September 2007 : Pentecost 18 : Year C
8:00am and 9:30am High Wycombe-Maida Vale
Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15 : 1 Timothy 6:6-19 : Luke 16:19-31

An Anglican priest dies and goes to heaven. S. Peter greets him at the pearly gates and tells him that he’s lived a good and faithful life and he’s now welcome to enjoy all the fruits of heaven. “Why don’t you have a look around?” sez Pete. “We’ve given you this lovely new VW. Have fun!” The priest is of course so overwhelmed he can hardly stutter Thank you but he gets into the VW and off he goes.

He heads north and is amazed at what he sees: perfect weather; people blissfully happy and enjoying every moment. He turns east, reveling in the breathtakingly beautiful scenery. And so it is when he drives west and south.

But as he’s driving along he sees a car coming in the opposite direction. It’s a long, lean, open-topped chauffeur-driven limousine, and in the back seat is a man he recognises. He’s sitting back, Hawaiian shirt, a huge Havana cigar between his lips, two drop-dead gorgeous women next to him. It’s none other than the local Rabbi! “Good to see you, Reverend!” sez the Rabbi on his way past.

The good Reverend slams on the breaks, turns round and drives at break-neck speed back to the pearly gates. He rushes up to S. Peter. “How was your trip?” S. Pete asks. “Fine,” sez the Rev, “Apart from one thing.” “Oh?” sez Pete. “I just saw the local Rabbi. He was in a magnificent limousine with every conceivable luxury, and here I am driving around in VW. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I lived a good life, faithful, loyal, read my bible every day, gave to poor, etc etc etc. How come I get the Vee-Dub and the Rabbi gets the limo?”

“Ah,” sez S. Peter, “he’s related to the Management …”

In the world of comedy Pearly Gates jokes have their own weighty section. The thing is that even in Jesus’ time they told stories about heaven and hell, maybe even jokes.

Here we have one such story that scholars believe Jesus may have adapted to illustrate the extreme, devastating poverty of human life in the absence of the one person who can bridge the gap between what our soul experiences as hell and heaven. That person of course is Jesus.

We need to be very clear: this is not a factual, encyclopaedic treatise on heaven and hell. It’s a story. It speaks to our souls far more than our heads. It’s told because Jesus knows our soul will recognise and understand the deeper meaning. It’s told despite the huge risk of it being interpreted as doctrine and dogma.

Many of us of course like to believe in a literal hell because it’s a handy place to assign our enemies. It helps us feel good about ourselves – we’re going to heaven because we’ve been good; they’re going to hell, where our good, loving God will make sure they suffer unspeakable agonies for eternity! Yay, God!

Not a nice picture. And not very Christ-like.

Want to know what IS Christ-like? Paul tells us something worth hearing again and again:

pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. 12 Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made n the good confession
in the presence of many witnesses. 13 In the presence of God, who gives
life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius
Pilate made the good confession

Or consider the story in Jeremiah. What is that telling us? It’s saying that despite the very worst of situations, the Living God will always provide hope. Here’s Jerry in Jerusalem. It’s besieged by the Babylonians. The walls are about to come down and the Babylonians are going to send the Jewish people into exile for a long time.

What does Jeremiah do? He does something – buys a field – that speaks of the future. He does something that suggests there WILL be a future for the Jewish people in Jerusalem. He makes plans. While all around him is chaos and terror, he’s buying dirt for his retirement!

No wonder he got the land! They must have thought he was crazy. Well, they did think he was crazy. It must have looked like the deal of the century.

But again, that’s what our heads tell us. Our souls understand that this is saying that it will not always be chaos and terror, God is still present, God will remain present and God will guide us through the worst of times.

We may well remember that because we likely all have had or will have our own times of terror and chaos. For some of us experiencing it now, it may seem never-ending and without the proverbial light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel.

A terrifying place to be.

But Jesus reminds us that he is the one who bridges that particular abyss between the hell of terror – be it sudden unemployment, cancer, the death of loved-ones, divorce, whatever – and whatever heaven might look like by comparison.

And Paul? What he sez is “doable” no matter what our circumstances. We don’t, for instance, have to be one hundred per cent fit, healthy, wealthy, wise, wonderful and full of beans to be kind or gentle or righteous or loving or faithful or enduring. We can actually do those things in the worst of times.

That’s the point. And that’s what marks our faith. That’s what makes us people who are on that exciting and yes, sometimes traumatic journey towards Christ-likeness.

May we always remember this same Jesus, even in the worst of calamity – and especially during the BEST times of our lives!

The Lord be with you!

Alistair P D Bain
Rector, Anglican Parish of the Holy Spirit
Westfield -:- Western Australia

sermon preached as guest presider

GOD: THE GOOD COP?

16th September 2007 : Pentecost 16 : Year C
9:30am Westfield
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28 : 1 Timothy 1:1-2, 12-19a : Luke 15:1-10

It doesn’t matter which TV channel we watch – every one of them has some sort of “cops n robbers” show. The ABC has excellent programs like The Bill and Cracker, among others; the commercials serve an unending platter of American and, occasionally, Australian fare. We can even tune into SBS and see the marvelous Inspector Montalbano capturing crooks in smooth Italian.

As expressions of the heresy of dualism – good versus bad, right versus wrong – these shows continue the trend we can witness even in holy scripture. Not, of course, cop shows as such; rather, the good guy triumphing over the bad guy – the more blood and violence the better!

Little wonder that we cast God in the role of the Avenger, the Super Cop, the Great Police Commissioner in the Sky, with Chief Inspector Jesus on the ground to hunt down the remaining bad guys and train up a crack squad of Sinner-Seekers.

And boy does this seem to be the case first-up when Jeremiah smacks us in the chops with a divine soliloquy outlining God’s anger at Judah’s faithlessness. This is God Super-Cop in action, the Punisher, the Revenger – the One who visits pain and suffering upon all who fail to conform to the divine design.

They say the devil is in the detail. In this case it’s the divine in the detail, in one small clause that signals hope and something of the true nature of the Living God:

yet I will not make a full end

Yet I will not make a full end, sez God. In other words, God will not eradicate Judah, not wipe them off the face of the earth, erasing every record and social security number as if they never even existed.

Yet I will not make a full end signals God’s intention to find a peaceful and merciful resolution. Judah has chosen a particular course of action and, as I suggested a week or so ago, God ensures divine control over the situation by accepting full responsibility for what will happen.

Over the centuries and still today Christians have gleefully purloined passages in the Hebrew scriptures as somehow being predictive of future events, especially Christ-events. Yet I will not make a full end could become one of those chrystal ball phrases even though it refers only to the ultimate restoration of the Jewish people centuries before Jesus.

Even so, when we DO encounter the times of Jesus we find a truer, far more accurate picture of the God of mercy, love and compassion than the projections of the Hebrew scriptures. Paul gives us these straightforward statements to ponder:

I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me,
because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, even though I
was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I
received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of
our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.
The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came
into the world to save sinners--of whom I am the foremost. But for that very
reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might
display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to
believe in him for eternal life.

Paul contrasts his human behaviour – his violence – with that of the Living God, who displays qualities of mercy, love, grace and faithfulness, doing so with “utmost patience”. Here suddenly is the true nature of our God, the One who “will not make a full end” but will wait patiently for the opportune moment, when the people are ready to understand and receive God’s mercy.

This is very important. While we continue to act out of fear – while our behaviour and attitudes and endlessly-rewound tapes reinforce again and again and again and again that fear – we will continue to conceive of and portray the Living God as a ruthless persecutor who is out for revenge. Needless to say, being otherwise rational creatures, we will also continue to run away from such a God.

And rightly so. Because that ISN’T our God.

The fear we’re talking about is sheer terror. Fear as in the Dave Allen sketch: “Admiral! There’s fifty French froggy frigates on the horizon!” “Thank you, Mr Hardy. Would you kindly fetch me my brown corduroy trousers …”

We shouldn’t confuse this fear with the very appropriate awe and speechless amazement that the word fear indicates in many biblical passages. That’s entirely different.

This fear of the God of revenge keeps us running, keeps us hiding – and it’s often the final barrier God gently removes before we come to an understanding of God’s true nature.

What does Paul say? “Christ came into the world to SAVE sinners …” Jesus is not a bounty hunter. He’s the full human expression of the divine love, mercy, compassion and yearning for relationship.

And as the gospel confirms and emphasises, Jesus isn’t out there looking for sinners. He’s searching, patiently, for those who are lost.

Yes, the stories in this chapter of Luke do equate “the lost” with sinners and sin and sinful behaviour. But as the third story in the series – the lost son and the prodigal father – indicates, God isn’t hunting us down in order to punish us.

God is painstakingly searching for us in order to LOVE us fully. And such is God’s joy when we return, when we come out of our fear-based hovels and chuck out our warped, perverted fear-based distortions of God, that full-blooded celebration is the only option.

God sez, I’ve found Big Al – let’s PAR-TAY! Whoo-hoo!! And God becomes the divine DJ at the divine disco, out-boogey-ing the best of them.

Where does that leave us in the Parish of the Holy Spirit, Westfield? First, let’s do a reality check of our picture of the Living God. Are we terrified this disturbed deity is gonna get us and get us good? Or are we secure in God’s love – secure enough to speak about it and share it with confidence and authority?

Second, we have to remember that the Jesus business isn’t just about warm-fuzzies. It’s also about sharing this good news with everyone else who is lost, wounded, damaged, broken. If we’re still fear-based then we don’t have no good news to share. If we’ve come to trust the faithful love, mercy and compassion of the Living God, then boy do we have a good news story to tell and share!

And that’s the question –do we have bad news of a vengeful punisher? or good news of the ever-loving, ever-living Living God? And if we do – then who’s hearing it? Who heard it yesterday? Who’s gonna hear it today? Who’ll hear it tomorrow and the day after and the week after that and next month and next year and … You get the picture …

Alistair P D Bain

Rector, Anglican Parish of the Holy Spirit

Westfield -:- Western Australia

THE CROSS: BEYOND NARCISSISM

9th September 2007 : Pentecost 15 : Year C
9:30am Westfield
Jeremiah 18:1-11 Philemon 1-25 : Luke 14:25-35

Narcissism is a term first used in relation to human thought and behavior by the
Austrian physician and psychiatrist Sigmund Freud.

Narcissism is a set of character traits concerned with self-admiration, self-centeredness and self-regard. Everyone has some narcissistic traits. However, narcissism can also manifest in an extreme pathological form in some personality disorders such as Narcissistic Personality Disorder wherein the patient overestimates his abilities and has an excessive need for admiration and affirmation. This may be present to such a degree that it severely damages the person's ability to live a productive or happy life because the traits manifest as severe selfishness and disregard for the needs and feelings of others.[†]

That’s a quotation from Wikipedia[‡‡] , the “free online encyclopaedia”, and the reason I’ve begun with the topic of narcissism is because I suspect it’s one of the factors that contribute to my discomfort at this gospel passage.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a confession that I have Narcissistic Personal Disorder. At least, I don’t think I have it! But part of my discomfort here does come from taking this passage at an entirely personal level.

Again, don’t get me wrong. We ARE meant to take this very personally indeed. This IS about the personal cost of following Jesus and Jesus wants us to be absolutely clear about the implications of being one of his followers.

It requires commitment – wholehearted, full-bodied, lifetime commitment. It’s not something we might decide to do as a whim, thinking we’ll just pull out, drift away, fade into the sunset of the next appealing spiritual fancy that comes along.

We know Jesus is serious about this because he uses some pretty uncompromising language, talking for instance about hating our families. As Jesus did earlier in Luke, he boldly assaults one of the foundations of Judaism in telling us to HATE our father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters.

These days we might retreat to the perverse comfort of some throwaway line about how “dysfunctional” our family is but back then it was mighty challenging stuff. Because Jesus actually does say HATE. Not “dislike” or “feel mildly ticked-off every now and then” – but HATE.

As in “Nazis hate Jews, among others”. As in “most people who live with the delusion of normality hate paedophiles”. As in that disastrously unchristian Christian web site, “God hates fags”.

It’s a pretty good attention-grabber. …Talk about getting you round the throat in a vice-like grip!

And no, Jesus isn’t advising us to respond literally. But he is making a crucial – pardon the pun – point. He does want us to be clear that becoming one of his followers is the most serious commitment we will ever make and that it lasts a lifetime.

So he’s saying, Be absolutely sure what you’re doing. In the gospel words: “count the cost”. Yes, I AM asking you to choose between family and me; I AM demanding your undivided attention AND commitment; I AM telling you that this isn’t just a pastime, a phase, something to do when you feel bored or terrified or there’s nothing worth watching on the telly.

And all of that fundamentally disturbs the wee narcissist lurking, I suspect, in all of us. It certainly challenges me at two narcissistic levels: first because it demands that I think clearly, concisely and consciously about someone other than moi (despite today’s continuing obsession with the “most important person in the world – [ME]”); and second, because Jesus’ challenge makes me think that “taking up the cross” is something that ONLY affects me.

I’ve begun reading a book by Kent Ira Groff, Active spirituality: a guide for seekers and ministers. In the introduction Groff tells a story about a parishioner and his pastor, both of whom felt spiritual dry. So dry that they were unable to see the possibility of helping each other through that terrifying experience.

Groff makes the comment, sadly but without judgement, that neither was able to bring their burdens to the cross and lay them down for healing.

It got me thinking. It began to remind me of one of the late scenes in the movie Kingdom of heaven, in which the most arrogant of the Crusaders march to their doom. They leave Jerusalem boldly parading what was historically regarded as the True Cross, garishly decorated in plated gold, glinting at the desert sun, the symbol, ultimately of their folly and greed. Cut to the aftermath of the battle and we see the same cross, in the background, surrounded by the dead bodies of its erstwhile defenders, stripped of its finery but still standing – standing in the midst of pain and suffering, human misery piled high around it.

The irony and the paradox of that scene remains. The cross that stands in the midst of pain and suffering – the very symbol in our faith of pain and suffering – is EXACTLY where it should be. It is EXACTLY what it should be – the place where all who suffer come for hope and healing.

And when Jesus tells us to take up the cross he is doing so in the knowledge that if we truly hold HIS cross then those who suffer, those who are lost, the weak, the impoverished, the oppressed – will come to it sooner or later. It is and will continue to be, for them, the hope they need, the hope they crave, the hope for which they might not even know they yearn.

Are we who claim to be Jesus’ followers, cross-carriers, prepared to encounter and assist those kind of people? The lost, the broken, the damaged … Are we prepared to recognise and admit that we ourselves are among them? Are we willing to love the kind of people – society’s flotsam and jetsam – who inhabit places like the caravan park across the road?

Because that is what will happen if we really ARE carrying Jesus’ cross. That is what will happen if we really ARE being Jesus.

So the challenge is only partly about me and my response to the cross and the demands such a personal response might make. It’s also about being prepared to stand in the midst of suffering because THAT is the place where the cross of Jesus stands.

Let’s continue, then, to reflect on these twin challenges. Are we in the Parish of the Holy Spirit, Westfield, prepared to make a wholehearted – body, mind, soul and strength – commitment to Jesus? and are we willing to receive and accept those who come to his cross seeking hope and healing?

Alistair Bain, Priest-in-Charge, Westfield

[†] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_disorder.
[‡‡] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

GOD'S GRACIOUS PARTY INVITATION!

PENTECOST 14 02-09-07
Jeremiah 2:4-13
Psalm 81:2, 10-16
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Luke 14:1-14

I like parties. I like dinner parties, dancing parties, fancy dress parties, scruffy BBQ parties; I like meeting-new-friends parties, formal parties, impromptu backyard parties- if there’s a party, I’ll be in it. If we have a party, we’ll plan and shop and cook and re-arrange furniture and wear ourselves out; but thoroughly enjoy offering hospitality to our friends and family. Today we have family coming over for lunch to celebrate Father’s Day.

So when I was reading Luke this week, I had a few niggles of guilt. When I give a banquet- well, maybe a BBQ- do I invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind? Or do I invite my family and friends? I don’t invite my rich neighbours because I haven’t got any.

I thought back to all the parties we’ve given over the years and the people we’ve entertained, and couldn’t really think of any particularly disabled guests. (A few slightly odd ones, perhaps)

Of course, in Jesus’ time people who were disabled would most likely be in desperate straits, because if you couldn’t work, you didn’t eat: no disability pension in those days. So he was referring to those in society who were helpless and possibly starving.

OK then, I thought: but I haven’t entertained anyone who was starving either: I don’t personally know anyone who is so poor they don’t have enough to eat.

So are we wrong to have parties for our friends and families? I came to the conclusion that Jesus wasn’t saying that, because it would contradict his own lifestyle: the gospels present him as quite a party animal. Luke’s gospel has around eight different stories of Jesus at dinner with various people.

Surely then Jesus didn’t mean that we shouldn’t ever have a party for our friends: that isn’t the point of what he was saying.

The point is that we should give help to people who cannot possibly give anything back to us. The social scene in Jesus’ day was very different to ours, but perhaps similar in that if someone invited a guest to dinner, that guest would be expected to return the favour.

This principle of reciprocity was widely current and accepted in the ancient world, and to a large extent it still is today. We expect people to reciprocate. If I give you a Christmas present, I expect you will give me a Christmas present. If I invite you to my birthday party, I would be a bit miffed if you didn’t invite me to yours!

In business it can be the same: quid pro quo, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. This appeals to our sense of fairness and justice: if I help you, I expect you to help me.

That’s all well and good, but does that mean that if I know you couldn’t possibly return the favour I won’t help you?

I think Jesus is telling us that we should seek to give to those who are so needy they cannot give anything in return. I may not be able to invite a hungry refugee to dinner but I can send money to an organisation that will feed her.

Jesus said ‘you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.’ This still sounds like we’d be doing a good deed in the hope of a reward, even if the reward isn’t collected until after you die.

Perhaps Jesus is simply saying don’t worry about it, don’t think about rewards because God has it all in hand. And after all, think about how God acts: God gives to us without hope of recompense or reward, because what could we possibly do for God? The Creator of the Universe loves us but doesn’t need or want us to pay back all that we are given.

This passage is about an attitude that leads to action. My attitude should be one of humility: I am no better or worse than anybody else, so it doesn’t matter where I sit at the table. My attitude should be that God has given me everything I have, and I am free to give to those who are struggling without expecting anything in return.

How did the people at the leader of the Pharisee’s dinner respond to what Jesus said? We’re not told, but we can guess that they were not too thrilled. What Jesus said probably sounded quite strange; in those days, the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind were thought to be those from whom God had withheld blessing. Their afflictions were believed to have resulted from sin. They were excluded from the Temple and considered unclean, so why would any good Jew invite them to dinner?

Today, we don’t tend to believe that people are poor, sick or disabled as a result of sin, although sin may be a direct or indirect cause of affliction. A family may be living in poverty because of a corrupt government; a person could be crippled after being hit by a drunk driver. But we don’t look at a disabled person and say he or she must have sinned to be in that condition, as people seem to have done in ancient times. So is there an application of this for us today?

Who do we exclude from our hospitality? Are we truly an inclusive, welcoming church, parish, community, or family? Do we make the good news of the kingdom easily accessible to everyone? We need, as a parish, to take up the challenge of giving away the gospel to all who need to hear it. That includes people who would never darken a church door as well as those who might join us here.

May we go from here encouraged to think about how we can be like Jesus, ready to turn the values of society upside-down if they would have us limit our generosity to people like ourselves.

God’s grace is without limit: God’s parties are open to everyone. Let’s make sure we tell people.

Let us pray.
Loving God,
Thank you for everything, for it is all your gift.
Encourage us to share, to give, and to demand nothing in return.
Encourage us to have attitudes that lead to action.
Encourage us to see that, although our lives may seem small and insignificant, we can make a difference in the world.
When we are tempted to give in to the culture of greed that permeates our world, remind us of Jesus, whose life demonstrated self-giving at its greatest.
For it is in his name that we pray. Amen.

Lorna Green, Assistant Curate, Westfield

JESUS - MEEK, MILD OR MUSCULAR?

PENTECOST 12 19-08-07
Isa 5:1-7
Ps 80:1-2, 8-19
Heb 11:29 – 12:2
Luke 12:49-59

‘Jesus loves me, this I know
For the Bible tells me so
Little ones to him belong;
we are weak, but he is strong.

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon this little child.
Pity my simplicity
Suffer me to come to thee.

How many of us learnt such things in Sunday school or at our mother’s knee? Do you remember the pictures of Jesus, illustrating Sunday school material, which depicted him as blonde and blue-eyed, always smiling, looking- well, a bit wet, really! When you were a child, did you ever see a picture of a Jesus who was dark-skinned and semitic-looking? I certainly didn’t!

We all have a sort of picture or image in our minds of Jesus: we imagine him to be a certain way, depending on a number of things, including what we have been taught and what we have read. We might imagine him to be like a big brother or a favourite uncle. Our personal images of Jesus fulfil our own need for someone greater, better, stronger than ourselves who cares about us.

The trouble is, our images of Jesus can get stuck and become unhelpful. If, as adults, we cling to a child-like image of Jesus, we are in danger of worshipping someone who only exists in our imagination.

The real Jesus was not meek and mild; yes, he was gentle with people but he also got angry, sometimes very angry.

It’s the same with our images of God: is God an old man with a big white beard in a white toga who sits on a cloud, smiling benevolently down on the world? I don’t think so.

In our readings today we meet God as a lover who grieves the loss of loved ones. In Isaiah, we read the beginning of a love song that describes how God planted a beautiful vineyard, which in this case represents the land of Judah. God is bitterly disappointed, because this tenderly-nurtured vineyard produces only wild grapes that are sour and useless. The bitter fruit is bloodshed and injustice: God’s chosen people are behaving badly again, and God is pretty cross with them. So God warns them that they will be punished, like a vineyard that is turned into a wasteland.

Psalm 80 is a lament, as the psalmist pleads with God to restore the people of Israel. This was probably written after the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE, and it also pictures God’s people as a vineyard that has gone to ruin. The invasion and conquest of the Northern Kingdom was seen as God’s punishment for the sin of the people, and the psalmist longs for God to look kindly on the people once again.

In the gospel of Luke we heard Jesus speaking to his disciples as he was on the way to Jerusalem and his death. He says he came to bring fire to the earth and wishes it was already burning, and talks about families being split because of him. Is this the gentle Jesus, meek and mild we know and love? What about the peace on earth the angels promised at his birth?

This is not a weak, tepid, quiet and unassuming Jesus: this is a muscular, angry, powerful Jesus who shouts to the crowds, “Read the signs of the times!” Look around you, look at your world and what you have made of it. What kind of fruit are YOU bearing?

The reading from the letter to the Hebrews that we heard this morning comes at the end of a long list of the heroes and heroines of the faith. The writer is at pains to tell his readers that all these people down the ages, although they suffered for their faith, did great things because they trusted in God and had hope. They lived and died long before the Messiah came, the fulfilment of hope. Therefore, we are told, with the encouragement of their stories, we can run the race and live our lives in faith because we have Jesus at the finish line.

After all, if those great ones of the Old Testament times could live in faith, how much more can we, who know the Saviour? We have the promised Holy Spirit to lead and teach us; we have the promise of eternal life.

Jesus spoke of bringing fire to the earth. Fire can burn and destroy, but it can also purify; and the Holy Spirit is represented by fire.

These readings speak to us of warning and of promise. They speak to us of a God who is angry with us when we are unjust, careless, greedy, selfish and violent. They speak to us of a God who loves us very much, who cares deeply about us and wants us to live in right relationship with one another and with God. They speak to us of the cloud of witnesses, the countless believers who have lived and died faithfully and courageously, whose lives are an example and an encouragement to us.

And they speak to us of Jesus the man, who felt despair and anger, sadness and pain, who longed for people to wake up, look around and start making changes.

Are we ready to listen to him: to put away our cherished images of gentle Jesus, meek and mild, and see the real God-Man who so urgently calls us to change?

Are we ready to allow the fire of the Spirit to burn away the rubbish in our lives, leaving us free to live lives of faith? Can we here in Armadale in 2007 produce sweet fruit that makes a difference in the lives of those around us?

Let us pray.
Holy God,
Help us to follow the examples of those who have lived lives of faith, who have gone before us;
Help us to read the signs and hear the urgency in Jesus’ words;
and show us how we can serve you and those to whom you send us: in Jesus’ name.
Amen

Preached by the Rev'd Lorna Green at the Parish of S. Matthew, Armadale

EXTRAORDINARY, GOD

19th August 2007 : Pentecost 12 : Year C
9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 5:1-7 : Hebrews 11:29 – 12:2 : Luke 12:49-59

We live in a world that seems to become more and more extraordinary day by day. This is especially so in the field of medical knowledge and advancement. Often enough I encounter hospital patients who are admitted for heart procedures that have become increasingly more sophisticated, increasingly less invasive, people whose second or third sojourn into the world of cardio-thoracic medicine introduces them to techniques that weren’t available or even dreamt of the first time around.

But we don’t have to look at anything as complex as medical science to see how technology in particular has advanced over the decades and, more commonly now, months. When I were a lad cassette tapes were the pinnacle of musical technology. The Walkman was a breath-taking innovation. (And for the younger folk who may be listening the Walkman I’m talking about played cassettes, not CDs … No one in the general population even dreamed of anything like a compact disc!)

The point is, the extraordinary – at least in the West – surrounds us and fills our thinking almost by default, and it’s tempting to think that we become so used to it that little surprises us any more and that this is one reason the Living God has to work overtime to attract our attention.

Tempting it is – but it is not a modern malaise, not some latter-day obstinacy that carefully, though automatically, cordons off God while we go about our quotidian tasks, accepting technological change with an appropriate, though short-lived wonder that quickly becomes blasé about the extraordinary, while the Living God patiently continues to do what the Living God does, older than history, longer than time.

It’s clear enough from today’s readings that humanity has long-failed to understand, let alone appreciate that extraordinary is not simply a word that defines the Living God’s actions in our world but, so far as we can use the phrase, is, from the human viewpoint, the normal and natural condition of the divine. This shouldn’t surprise us but constantly we are surprised. We could almost say that our failure of appreciation and understanding is equally part of what the philosophers call the “human condition”.

So when we meet God in Isaiah we see divinity wounded by a humanity that ignores the essence of God’s invitation to produce a fruit that God defines in the same terms as God’s own manner of dealing with creation – namely, with respect and care, even love. God tells the recalcitrant people of Israel that their enemies will triumph over them but accepts the responsibility and in doing so maintains control of the situation.

God does not withdraw from the scene and leave Israel to their fate. Extraordinarily, God remains, however great the displeasure.

So what is that God’s people have failed to do? Have they failed in their quota of attendances at church on Sunday? Have they fallen short of the minimum number of sacrifices? Didn’t they give enough money or serve on enough committees or belong to enough groups or organise enough sausage sizzles?

No and no and no. God expected justice, peace and the attempt to encounter God and live as Godly people. Instead, humanity gave God violence, injustice and disregard for the dignity of others. The irony is that how God’s people live – in ignorance of the essential reality and in-built extraordinariness of God – is how they will now live and die, consumed and subsumed in the perversion of everything that God stands for and asks of us.

So their cities and grand homes will lie empty and desolate. Violence, begetting violence, will overtake Israel and the will be sucked into the vortex of that violence simply because they are no different from those around them, even though God DOES call them – and us – to be different.

It’s like adding red paint to a puddle of red paint. We might increase the volume of it but we can no longer tell which bit of red paint is different from the next. Israel’s lack of regard for human dignity and worth makes them no different from their neighbours, who will suck them back into the cauldron of indifference from which their actions emerge.

However cleverly and intricately we may devise our human systems, those systems are meaningless if they do not reflect God’s concerns for creation and humanity. So when Jesus delivers a sober and frightening warning about family division he is deliberately striking at one of the unifying elements of the faith of his time.

Jesus is not denying or attacking the importance of the family. What he’s doing is pointing out that the things God stands for, the things God invites us to participate in, are more important than human constructs. Those constructs serve a useful and worthy purpose, without question, but if they do not reflect the ultimate concerns of the Living God then their usefulness is not only severely diminished but they become actually harmful.

In other words, if our human-defined and –invented structures are not showing God’s love and concern for peace and justice and respect for the poor, then, like the violence of Israel in Isaiah’s time, they simply become another part of the mix that is the whole churning, boiling mess of human despair and violence.

I’ll repeat a brief story I’ve used before: A particular priest gained a reputation for being a great preacher. His church was full every Sunday. On one particular Sunday, as he was greeting parishioners at the door after the Service, one of them somewhat gushingly remarked, “What a great prophet you are!” To which the priest wisely replied, “If I were a great prophet this church would be empty and its windows smashed by rocks and stones …”

We would rather merge into the prevailing culture than stand apart from it speaking of God’s love and Jesus’ compassion. It’s easier for us to tug our collective forelocks at the consumer world than to live in the Spirit of the Living God, seeking God and justice in the knowledge that ultimately they are same thing.

And when God comes near, the world reacts, even if that world has snuck its way into the hearts, minds and souls of the Church. It’s like adding a mere drop of water to a tweezerful of phosphorous: the reaction is loud, bright, violent and immediate!

So this is God’s call to us – to remember God’s ways, to remember how Jesus lived according to those ways, and to follow where Jesus leads us, strengthened and made bold in the power of the Holy Spirit.

As I said last week, we won’t have any trouble finding avenues for doing God’s work here in Westfield – or anywhere else for that matter. What IS hard is throwing out the influence of the world with its caution and fear and half-truths and lies.

But if we are seeking God, day by day, then we too, in the Parish of the Holy Spirit, Westfield, can be part of God’s ways and plans for love and justice in our community!