ROAD RAGE AND OTHER SIN(S)

17th June 2007 : Pentecost 3 : year C
1 Kings 21:1-21 : Galatians 2:15-21 : Luke 7:36 – 8:3

I suspect I’ve used this illustration before but since we’re thinking about Sin today it’s worth repeating. Occasion: the “induction Eucharist” of a friend of mine and my wife’s into the Carmelite Order, in the surreal atmosphere of a convent not very many stone-throws away from the hectic pace of Stirling Highway, Dalkeith.

Came the sermon the priest arose, commandeered the pulpit and spake unto us on just this topic: Sin. Not just spake but dissected the sucker in all its grossed-out detail. I know I should have timed it but maybe I was wise not to because it felt like the preacher-man was giving us the benefit of knowing every type of sin it was possible to commit, from the obvious newspaper-headline stuff right down to stealing a paper clip from the office.

It’s a long list, I need hardly tell you. We were all implicated. Some of us were guilty-as. Boy, did we feel … bored out of our tiny minds …

Well, I did. I suspect it terrified a few of those of the True Faith, as it was probably meant to.

But ultimately, with the benefit of a bit of education and (sorry) Richard Rohr, I’d have to say the Carmelite-induction preacher and others of his thinking probably missed a greater point.

What the priest sed was indubitably not untrue but the overwhelming, all-encompassing sadness of Sin isn’t just about cataloguing the types, kinds and grades of it but about recognising how lost all of humanity becomes when we find ourselves, sometimes moment-by-moment, trapped in a cycle of sinful actions that often enter our minds at lightning speed, coming from places we can’t even begin to know the location of.

Among my many occasions for entering full-bloodedly into Sin is when I’m driving. I may seem kind, mild-mannered, even jolly, when I’m in the dress and the scarf and the poncho or whatever but put me on the road behind a steering wheel and who knows what it is or where it comes from but I’m as given to road rage as the next driver. You know the commercial about the Mum who picks her daughter up from school, scolds her for swearing and then proceeds to give a mouthful to some hapless driver who cuts her off as she’s leaving? Compared to me, she’s a pussy, a total wimpette. A mere apprentice road-rager.

Let’s be clear about this. I’m not proud of it but I confess it to illustrate the dynamic that Sin can assume – a suddenness that seems to come from the mythical “nowhere” and then engulfs us in actions we might not normally even think about.

Fortunately, one of the benefits of my listening to Richard Rohr is to understand that this phenomenon is simply a reality. It’s the way I am, at least at the moment. That doesn’t make it okay. It’s part of the large collection of things I “get wrong”.

But what I’ve found myself doing now is almost immediately reminding myself that, Hey, Alistair, you do stupid things too. You’re impatient and discourteous when you’re driving, too. And then I say sorry to God. I literally say, Sorry, Lord. I do stupid stuff too.

The point is that at the same time as putting human propensity for sinning into perspective we need to take it seriously enough sincerely to try to do something about it. In a nutshell, to seek the transforming love, acceptance and comfort of Jesus.

We become obsessed with Sin and its manifestations partly because we’ve secretly or otherwise bought the heresy of dualism and the moral universe created by conservatives. Of course the Living God wants us to live morally. But that’s not the criterion for entry into communion with God. It’s faith. And faith implies nothing about our moral standing.

As Richard Rohr points out several times, Jesus never – that’s NEVER – goes out looking for sinners. He’s not a one-man vigilante squad. He looks for the lost, the people precariously on the edge, the outcasts, the impoverished. The ones, effectively, who have absolutely nothing left to lose and who are therefore totally free to replenish their emptiness with Jesus’ love.

He doesn’t look for the anointing woman but she comes to him. Simon knows she’s a sinner. She knows she’s a sinner. Jesus knows she’s a sinner. Does Jesus judge her? Does Jesus recoil and say, “Whoa, sinner-woman, back off. Back off now. I have a seriously Lawful Pharisee on hand and I’m not afraid to use him!”

We know the answer to these and a legion of other questions.

No, the woman knows her state, she seeks Jesus and expresses her faith in him. He forgives her, it seems just because she needs it.

Ours is exactly the same dynamic. Yes, we need to acknowledge our sinfulness. But let’s not obsess about it. Jesus didn’t. He simply wanted people to come to him so that he could transform them. And the Christian scriptures show this happening time after time after time.

Likewise we need to do it time after time after time because we will probably never get it right all the time. Like the rest of the human creation, sometimes we get it right (Hallelujah!), oftentimes we get it wrong (so let’s sort it with God and get back on track).

We see the roots of all this radical acceptance and lack of judgement in many places in the Hebrew Scriptures, such as this morning’s story of Naboth’s Vineyard. Too often we secretly cheer at the grossed-out image of the dogs licking Ahab and Jezebel’s blood but the real point is that God, though outraged at the abuse of power, at the total disregard of Naboth’s rights, nevertheless refuses to return the royal violence with divine violence.

The Naboth story finely indicates the dynamic of envy and greed that lie at the heart of personal and systemic violence. But what we see in the divine response is the seed of everything that finds fruition on the cross of Jesus – this divine refusal to take on the very worst of human distortions, to become violent, to seek revenge. God – unlike humankind – is NOT into payback. God’s version of payback amounts to saying, Do your worst. I still love you.

This is where Jesus calls us to be. Not seeking the sinner so we can judge them. Not running terrified from the Church’s self-appointed Sinner Squad. But coming to Jesus, acknowledging this weakness of our being and seeking his transformation.

This is what Paul means when he sez I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.

This is the state of having come to Jesus. This is what happens when we allow Jesus to transform us: Christ lives in us and we act more and more out of this new reality, a reality in which Sin no longer enthralls us, or does so less and less, and in which we become less judgmental and more loving, open, accepting, welcoming.

Of course we need to take Sin and sinning seriously. But we do not need to let it be our master. We have the solution – our friend, Jesus. It sounds twee and quaint. Maybe it is. But it also happens to be true.

Why don’t we try it this week? At least, for those of us, like me, who still need to. Seek Jesus. Put away the judgements (note to Alistair: and the road rage) and allow Jesus to be the vision in our eyes.

A QUANTUM GOD

3rd June 2007 : TRINITY SUNDAY : Year C
Proverbs 8:1-4, 23-31 : Romans 5:1-5 : John 16:12-15

So I’m back at the University of Western Australia. I’m part of a rough band of what one of my Politics tutors would later call “young intellectuals” and I’m studying English, which in UWA-speak meant English LITERATURE. (We openly scoffed at Harold Robbins – and at anyone sub-literate enough to mention his name.)

But not all is well in the Garden. Rumour has it that in the Department of Philosophy they sit around discussing whether anything exists if they cannot apprehend it with one or more of their five senses. In other words, if yon philosophers can’t see, hear, touch, taste or smell it, does it exist?

Weird, man. Real freaky. I mean, like, “young intellectual” or not, I had no doubts at all about the existence of certain things or people that at any given point in the time-space continuum were beyond the capabilities of my sensory systems.

Flash forward to May and June 2007 and I’m sitting waiting for an appointment and getting real immersed in a New Scientist article on Schrödinger’s cat, the poor beast in a box that’s rigged up to produce cyanide gas if certain conditions prevail.
Schrödinger’s cat is an illustration of the New Physics – Quantum Theory. Deals with matter at sub-atomic levels. That’s small. Smaller than small. Smaller than the topmost atom at the peak of a pinhead small.

Here’s the thing. Schrödinger’s cat sez that until we know what’s happened to the cat by taking a peak inside the box, then at any given moment UNTIL we look, sed feline beastie is both dead AND alive!

Defies logic, doesn’t it? Reminds me of those philosophy students three decades ago.

Problem is, science, in its inimitable fashion, had long since demonstrated that these sub-atomic particles could – and did – exist in several different places ALL AT THE SAME TIME. Controlled experiments can demonstrate, for instance, that an atom can exist in three or more places AT THE SAME TIME.

If it reminds anyone of all those parallel universe stories and movies we keep seeing, don’t worry. It’s not accidental. Yes, we are talking about parallel universes, states of existence, etc. At least fictionally.

Scientifically, no one, apparently, has leapt from Quantum theory and sub-atomic particles to more complex collections of atoms, such as leaves or mice or humans but if I were a gambler I would bet someone’s thought about it …

All of which is a long-winded way of suggesting the Church has long had its own Quantum Theology, namely the doctrine of the Trinity – the One God who is three Persons AT THE SAME TIME; one in three yet three in one.

I have to admit Trinity reminds me again of those philosophy students, and now Schrödinger’s Cat and Quantum theory. Of course the Church doesn’t call it Quantum Theology or anything like that. This is just as well because Quantum theory, as opposed to theology, posits a well-nigh de facto infinity of possible states of existence whereas the Church in its conservative wisdom will only give us three possibilities – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

For several reasons Trinity is a most confusing and aggravating doctrine, not least of which is because it IS a doctrine.
For one thing, as I’ve sed on other occasions, despite our best and most ingenious attempts we cannot conceive of or produce a single analogy that adequately describes Trinity. ALL our analogies ultimately fail because none of our analogies can restrict themselves to three and ONLY three different parts.

S. Patrick’s three-petalled clover has a stem, or can’t exist separately from its mother branch or twig. A peeled apple contains things like seeds as well as a peel, flesh and core. Ice, water and steam come close but they rely on external agents and cannot exist independently. That is, ice must have a drop in temperature; steam requires heat. We do not find them together at the same time but rather changing from one form to another.

But, in addition, for those of us who value such things, Trinity seems to exist outside holy scripture. Flashing back to my pew-warming days in the Parish of Christ Church, Claremont, I still remember the then-Assistant Curate, one Peter Basil Ratnam Manuel, now Rector of Bayswater, preaching a Trinity sermon in which he spoke the following sentence: “It’s not in the bible, you know.”

I remember feeling outraged. I felt cheated. I felt as if the Church had pulled a swifty and was operating under false pretences. Silently I screamed, Foul! but young Pete, having amused himself by this shock pronouncement, happily preached on, offering a pretty sound analogy of his own – the sun as heat, light and radiant energy.

At least Peter didn’t try to fob us off the old “it’s-a-Mystery-and-ya-can’t-understand-a-Mystery-or-it-wouldn’t-be-a-Mystery-any-more” line. Not that Trinity isn’t a Mystery but we so often miss the point about Mystery and use Mystery as an excuse to stop thinking about it. The point is that Mystery offers an invitation to participate in, to wrestle with, become involved in it.

And so we must. Because, just as we cannot have a healthy spirituality if we banish Trinity to our back-burners hoping it will fade away, equally we cannot in any healthy way dismiss it as a fanciful intrusion into our comfortable spiritual life by saying, Well, it’s not in holy scripture so it can’t be kosher.

The reason is, as I suggest in the pewsheet, that today, right now, we each have the same sorts of experiences of the Living God as the people of the Christian scriptures.
Namely, we do have those moments when God is for us a caring and protective parent-like figure. But sometimes we find ourselves filled with gut-wrenching compassion of Jesus and know God in that all-consuming way. At other times we move with the creative energy and passion of the Spirit, find words and ideas and strength that seem to come from nowhere.

This is the experience of the early Church. This is our experience. We cannot blame our ancestors in the faith for trying to make sense of it and ultimately creating the doctrine of the Trinity. Privately, I often suspect it was an ill-conceived enterprise but I do understand the impulse to carve out the doctrine.

What these people were doing was actually entering into the Mystery and engaging it, not side-lining it. But just as our Trinitarian analogies inevitably fail, so does our wrestling. But the point is never to win the bout. We ARE talking about the Living God here – and even though Jacob apparently won his wrestle with God, he left with a permanent injury and perhaps a life-long question about who really won …

The point is – and this is true for all of our spiritual journey, engagement and encounter – the point is that we learn and grow and become stronger by these very acts of participation. For instance, I’ve been regular at my local gym for a few months now and I can do more or do it more easily or for longer than I could when I first began. How many bicep-curls does anyone imagine I could do if I simply sed, It’s a mystery to me how anyone can lift that much weight??

But the fact is it IS a mystery how anyone can lift that much weight but by giving it a go, by engaging the dread machines, by continuing to participate in the mystery, who knows? maybe one day I too will be one of those hunky sweaty dudes who exude as much attitude as perspiration and ripple away as if they emerged from the womb that way!

As for valid objections that we don’t find Trinity in scripture, perhaps we expect too much wanting neat answers and ready-made, ready-formed conclusions. It’s as dangerous as missing the point of Mystery because when we get the pro-forma stuff laid out neat-as-a-pin and only have to go through the motions to make it work, then we’re simply acting automatically, without having to do any thinking or engaging.

The Living God is not a series of pre-defined propositions or spiritual templates that we simply call up and accept as-is or tweak to our liking. God asks for a relationship. We can only have a relationship with those beings to whom we bother to talk, with whom we walk, to whom we go to share our joys and sorrows and successes and aggravations. This is what makes a relationship LIVING. This is why I always refer to the LIVING God – to remind myself that God is not a theory but as complex and worthy of my full attention as any other person with whom I seek to be in relationship.

So where do we go with this? Honestly, I don’t know, except to say that the journey has not ended. As good as our relationship with the Living God may be, we ALWAYS have something more to learn, something to bring, offer and receive. Praise be to the Living God for that!

And, of course, may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all!

LIFE OUT OF DEATH

10th June 2007 : Pentecost 2 : Year C
1 Kings 17:8-24 : Galatians 1:11-24 : Luke 7:11-17

The late comedian Dave Allen, as those of us who remember him and/or enjoyed his humour will recall, liked to send up the Church and anything or anyone else that took themselves a little too seriously. Thankfully, it’s one of the healthiest spiritual activities available to us because if we can’t laugh at ourselves and our strange and idiosyncratic ways then we’ve drifted far from the possibility of transformation through Jesus: we take on an aspect of certainty that precludes faith and God’s ability to influence us in whole and healthy ways.

But that’s another sermon. Cut back to Dave Allen and his penchant for, among many other things, funeral sketches. I remember one in which two funeral processions are on their way to the graveyard. When they become aware of each other’s presence they begin a Keystone Cops-like descent into slapstick absurdity as they fight to get to the cemetery ahead of their rival. Dave Allen was poking fun at the Irish superstition that if two people are buried on the same day, only the first gets into heaven: the second one has to wait till the next day …

I was reminded of that sketch when I began perusing the gospel. No, we don’t have competing funeral processions. Just the one. But one was enough to ring in the associations. And I can see the point of the website, Girardian reflections on the lectionary, which asserts that Jesus crashes headlong into the funeral procession.

I hope the point will become clearer before too long because although Jesus doesn’t literally come into physical contact with the procession what he stands for, what he’s about, certainly does.

It’s one of those points that seem quite obscure until someone mentions it or explains it – and then it becomes so obvious you wonder why on earth you couldn’t see it in the first place. At least, that’s how it was for me.

The “crash” is between death and life. Life, AKA Jesus, collides with death – the funeral procession of a man whom the town clearly held in some regard, given the large crowd. It’s quite possibly a loud and noisy event, with wailing women and percussive noise-makers giving death a centrality and importance in human culture and thinking that is totally at odds with the view of the Living God.

Well might the people mourn, especially the mother. She’s a widow, therefore reliant on her only son to provide her with sustenance. This was social security in Jesus’ time – and even now in many countries of the world. Without her son the widow may have had to resort to begging on the streets in order to live. She was a woman with very bleak prospects indeed.

Enter Jesus and we know the rest – the only son of God brings back to life the only son of the widow of Nain. Death and life clash with each other and life wins.

Happily the story – unique to Luke – echoes the story of the prophet Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. Unlike the uber-cool Jesus who simply issues a command to rise, Elijah engages in one of those weird roundabout exercises that result in more questions than answers.

But the result is the same. The sons live and the widows get to enjoy life in a new way, a way that the Living God now infuses with energy and hope.

These parallel stories are not, of course, mere happenstance. It’s not as though our intrepid lectioneers chose the gospel for today and then came across Elijah and the widow of Zarephath by accident. Chances are Luke has modelled his story – found only in his gospel – on the passage from the First book of Kings. He’s already done something similar with Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel and the Magnificat in his infancy narrative.

What it suggests in both cases is that what Jesus does in his own gospel days is not so much unique as the full and proper outworking of the Living God’s desires that have existed for all time and will continue to exist for the rest of it.

In other words, God offers us life. God will not allow us to descend into the closed-off world of death and the creepy boredom of the shadowland, Sheol, where no one can praise God’s name.

And for us as we enter the period after the Easter season with these Sundays after Pentecost, it’s a reminder that life emerging from death is NOT just a groovy jaunt reserved for the Son of God, but is available and promised to all of us, any time, anywhere.

Life clashing with death and being victorious is the ultimate meaning of the good news.

But as Paul’s letter to the community of faith in Galatia reminds us, we can and should see the same dynamic at metaphorical levels also. For Paul, he was in the dead-end business of persecuting the infant Church. Every indication is that he yearned to eradicate the new Jewish sect that had sprung up from the chaos of Jesus’ execution.

Paul was himself a purveyor of death and violence, a complete Hebrew scriptures dude who clearly believed that he was doing God’s work in persecuting the Church. The same Living God turned that around by introducing Paul to Jesus, the peaceful purveyor of life, and so Saul the persecutor became Paul the preacher, and the rest is pretty much as they say …

But the point remains the same: out of death the Living God creates or recreates life. God offers that life to us as a free gift, available with every proclamation of belief and act of faith. I suspect the only reason we don’t get steak knives and fries with that is because the gift of life is probably pretty much secure at the top of the tree.

What, then, are the situations of death we find ourselves battling in the Parish of the Holy Spirit, Westfield? I suspect those situations are plentiful. But the question – as we know - really isn’t how many death-dealing and violent places we find ourselves in but whether we have enough faith to accept God’s gift of life.

Our readings today make clear the movement of the Living God in world history and ours. What do we need to do in order to accept the gift of life so that we in our turn can share it with those round about us who so desperately need it?

RESURRECTION FORGIVENESS

Sunday, 15th April 2007 : Easter 2 : Year C
9:30am Westfield
Acts 5:27-32 : Revelation 1:4-8 : John 20:19-31

At sunset yesterday the Jewish holy day, Yom Hashoah, began. Yom Hashoah translates as The Day of the Holocaust, as western Gentiles call it. But Bishop Mark, in an address at the clergy conference in Mandurah, pointed out that Shoah really has the sense of calamity or catastrophe: "holocaust" is a mediaeval term coined from a couple of Greek words, meaning a whole burnt offering, or a sacrificial offering wholly consumed by fire.

It was out of the horrors of Ha Shoah, from the Auschwitz death camp, that the following prayer of forgiveness apparently came:

O Lord,
Remember not only
the men and women of good will
but also those
of evil will. And in
remembering the suffering they
inflicted upon us,
honor the fruits
we have borne thanks to this suffering
--- our
comradeship, our humility,
our compassion, our courage,
our generosity,
the greatness of heart
that has grown out of all this;
and when they come
to the judgment,
let all the fruits that we have borne,
be their
forgiveness. Amen.

It’s a prayer that we can well imagine on the lips of Jesus himself, who even from the torture chamber of the cross sought forgiveness for those responsible for his agony. The post-resurrection outpouring of forgiveness confirms that those words were not the delirious rambling of a man near death after suffering barely-imaginable torments.

It’s part of the scandal of the cross that even after it’s all over and God achieves the ultimate victory over what Paul calls the "last enemy", death, God does not react in a way that humankind might expect, least of all in the manner that humanity has chosen century after century, decade after decade, year after year …

After all that brutalising and torture, God does not come out fighting, hurling thunder-bolts at the major players in the drama. No all-encompassing earthquakes or tsunami swallowing or sweeping away innocent and guilty alike. In short, no acts of vengeance, even though the God who can raise a Son from the grave would have no trouble at all in sorting out the villains in a very seriously permanent way indeed!

But that’s part of the point. We humans like to scapegoat, point fingers, blame and accuse. That’s how Jesus got himself the best view at Golgotha, hammered onto a couple of pieces of wood.

But not God. Jesus began his ministry preaching forgiveness, he demonstrated that forgiveness throughout his ministry, he preached at the most dire moment of his waning life – and after resurrection he’s still urging us to exhibit the attitude and behaviour of the forgiving spirit.

And so we find Peter proclaiming the message in the temple and John reinforcing it, albeit in different form, in the Book of Revelation. Equally, the risen Jesus gives a clear, though ambiguous, instruction to the ten apostles skulking in their locked room, to be agents of God’s forgiveness.

Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

It’s no accident that Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on the apostles before giving them the instruction to forgive sins because no human can achieve the kind of blanket, no-matter-what forgiveness that Jesus espouses by invoking mere will-power.

We can squeeze our eyes tight enough to pour with sweat or concentrate our forgiveness energy hard enough to give ourselves the mother of all migraines but without the Holy Spirit we will never get to the kind of radical forgiveness that, in the post-resurrection world, is the mark of Jesus’ good news avalanching upon the whole creation.

But here’s the problem and this why Jesus’ words are ambiguous. Priests in our tradition and those who’ve attended enough ordinations know those words very well because they’re an integral part of a priest’s ordination: .If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.

Almost immediately, it sometimes seems, we translated that statement into exactly the kind of power-playing, authoritarian weapon that Jesus spent so much time trying to destroy. For centuries the Church has used this power over people to terrorise them, to fill them with guilt, to blackmail and extort, to control.

Priests and bishops took Jesus’ words as a gifting of well-nigh ultimate power even though we knew that Jesus clearly forbade his followers to exercise what Richard Rohr calls "dominative power". Jesus’ terminology is more familiar – he called it "lording it over others", and he wasn’t planning to make exceptions when he told his followers, You are NOT to do that.

So that’s exactly what the priesthood did! You’re all a bunch of wormy, totally-depraved sinners – but don’t worry, chasps, just see me after the Service and I’ll take it all away from you. Until next time. (I reckon a statement like that ought to conclude with eerie church-organ music and a manic laugh!)

But here’s the good news – remember the good news? the stuff Jesus came to disseminate in wildly extravagant, prodigal container-loads? And it’s this, an interpretation I came across only recently.

It’s a reading that is exactly in keeping with the God of peace, the God of non-violence, the Jesus who refused to fight back, the Risen One who did not seek revenge for his maltreatment but offered forgiveness instead.

According to this reading, forgiveness is what I like to call the "normal and natural" demeanour of all followers of Jesus. Forgiveness is to be our hallmark, one of the qualities that distinguish us as Jesus’ own people, truly following Jesus because we are doing exactly what Jesus himself did.

For all of us it’s an enormous power. I suspect that many Christians regard forgiveness as a nice idea but deep-down nurse a suspicion that it’s actually a sign of weakness. In a sense, of course, it is – in a worldly, secular sense. Think of tough-guys like John Wayne throwing away tough-guy advice like, "Never apologise, son. It’s a sign of weakness."

Then consider Jesus’ words and realise that something apparently simple and free that we puny humans do on this planet can have a corresponding effect in heaven, however we define heaven … Consider also that if forgiveness is the normal and natural behaviour of all of Jesus’ followers, then the only way we and heaven can retain sins is if we actually FAIL in our task to spread and practise the good news of forgiveness.

Seen in this light we have an action – forgiveness – that is unquestionably consonant with Jesus’ message and behaviour from beginning to end – even on the cross, which may be the most powerful exposition of the message Jesus ever made. When we retain sins – when we do not forgive – then, far from exercising a rightfully-given power, we are actually and very illegitimately confounding and preventing the good news and the kingdom from operating.

It is only by making the authority to forgive universal, in other words, allowing all followers to access, exercise and participate in the spreading of this good news, that Jesus’ life, death and resurrection make sense and can begin to move towards accomplishment. When the authority becomes part of the power-package of a discrete sub-class then it defeats the purpose of Jesus and mangles the message something terrible.

Who in our lives, who on those streets out there, in Westfield and beyond, needs to hear a message of authentic good news today? Something to ponder deeply; something to offer prodigally. The authority is ours: let us use it with love in all places, at all times, for all people!

THE TRUSTWORTHY GOD OF LIFE: Easter Sunday C

8th April 2007 : EASTER SUNDAY : Year C
9:30am Westfield
Acts 10:34-43 : 1 Corinthians 15:19-26 : Luke 24:1-12

A few days ago I watched the DVD film The prestige, which is about two magicians in Victorian England. The one, Algier, is the consummate showman; the other, Borden, is a gifted illusionist but a relative dullard when it comes to doing what we would call today "marketing" his act. Through various twists of plot and mind they become, as the saying goes, "bitter rivals", although the rivalry is more on Algier’s part than Borden’s.

The title of the film is a reference to the basic structure of a magic trick, or illusion. The first part is called "The Pledge", in which the magician sets up the trick – "I shall now make this caged dove disappear". It creates an expectation; our curiosity is piqued; we dare and demand the magician to fulfill the promise. Part Two is the "The Turn", in which the magician provides that fulfillment – the dove apparently does disappear.

The audience admits the cleverness but is ultimately unimpressed because, as the Michael Caine character observes, that’s not enough. A good trick must conclude with "The Prestige". The Prestige is where the magician makes the dove "reappear" from another place, perhaps from a coat pocket or a nearby hat. And so the audience is enthralled and captivated.

The Pledge, The Turn, The Prestige.

It almost sounds like the basic structure of the resurrection story. We certainly find The Pledge in Jesus’ various announcements of his impending fate in Jerusalem. The incredulity of the disciples is understandable because this is a whole new ball-game, a world away from making a dove disappear!

The Turn comes when the terrible things Jesus has foretold DO happen – and they’re arguably far worse than anyone expected. The religious establishment and the Roman occupiers arrest, try and execute him on a Roman cross.

Well … ho and hum … Getting the Romans to brutalise and torture to death a Jew-boy from the country was probably not a real clever trick in 1st Century Judaea. The audience turns and leave in a mutter. Some demand their money back. Seen it all before …

Until we get to the Prestige. As we know, The Pledge wasn’t just, "I’m off to Jerusalem to suffer and die." Jesus’ Pledge was, "I’m off to Jerusalem to suffer and die AND [drum-roll, please] rise again on the third day!!!"

And this is what the most consummate of all magicians, the Living God, achieves. This is the ultimate Prestige: God raises Jesus from the dead on the third day.

Except for two things. It’s too big, too overwhelming, too beyond that part of human conception that realises it’s all a trick, too far beyond the audience’s psyche that willingly suspends its disbelief in order to allow the magician to override the audience’s logic.

And so The Prestige doesn’t quite happen. People doubt. Even Jesus’ closest friends and followers can’t believe it. No matter which gospel account we read, the closest of Jesus’ friends do not believe that God has pulled off the greatest Prestige of all time.

Because of course it isn’t a magic trick at all. That’s the second problem. The resurrection of Jesus demands far more than a willing suspension of disbelief, far more than an amiable willingness to go along with it.

From beginning to end the resurrection demands nothing less than our total, absolute, committed faith, and when we look back at The Pledge and The Turn we find that this same demand of faith is present. We find also that few of Jesus’ followers – certainly among the men – possessed that faith. At any time.

And no matter how many magicians, illusionists or peripatetic wonder-workers wanted to know "how God did it", they would never find out. Equally, no matter how many believers or non-believers want to know how it happened, we will never discover the secret. And all over the Anglican Communion, in every denomination, and likely in fish-and-chip-loads of newspapers preachers and the press will offer explanations and even proofs that resurrection happened that morning in Jerusalem.

But the mythical 60 Minutes or CNN team were never present. We have no eye-witness account of the event itself because resurrection happens in isolation, unseen, unheard, in the blackness of earliest morning.

And I think God does this deliberately. …Because it ISN’T a trick; because God is not trying to impress the audience. Enthrall and amaze, yes, I think so. But God is not trying to impress anyone because ultimately resurrection is not The Prestige but the outworking and making real of God’s yearning to draw humanity and all Creation back from the brink of self-created disaster by showing – quietly and without fuss – that even after humankind does the very worst we can do, the Living God, the God of the Living, the God of life, is still in control.

We waste our time, perhaps willfully, because resurrection is too large for logic, asking the wrong questions about it. We want to know, we demand the satisfaction of knowing WHETHER it happened, but as Richard Rohr points out in his spiritual commentary on Luke’s gospel if God is the God we claim God to be then something like resurrection ain’t no great shakes. Of course such a God can raise Jesus – or any of us – from the dead. This God created the universe. Not just our tiny planet but the entire universe. What’s resurrection compared to that?

No; the resurrection of Jesus shows us that we CAN trust this God. Remember, it was part of The Pledge, part of Jesus’ To Do list: Go to Jerusalem (tick); Suffer (double-tick); Die (treble-tick); AND Rise again on the third day. Four ticks and several exclamation marks.

That’s what Jesus told us God would do. And God delivered. And if God delivers in this pretty amazing thing then we can trust God to deliver in all the other things that God promises us. Resurrection tells us that we CAN trust this God. …Because, as Paul points out, if God didn’t do it, if God did not raise Jesus, then our faith is in vain and if we trusted Jesus in this matter and God did not raise him then we deserve the terrible pity reserved for the severely delusional.

Now, snuggling as we are into the 21st Century we have an immense advantage that the first disciples lacked. As I sed before doubt flows across all four gospel as the first reaction to the resurrection. We hear in Luke that the group of women who find the empty two and see the whiter-than-white vision of angels report this to the remaining eleven apostles, who dismiss it as "an idle tale, and they [do] not believe them". Peter at least is curious enough to check it out and is "amazed at what had happened".

But Peter’s amazement is ambiguous. We don’t really know whether he believed the resurrection at that point. We DO know that those who first believed – typical of Luke – were the poorest, the littlest, the least significant, the so-called anawim – the ones with whom Jesus consistently conversed, the ones so destitute and marginalised that they had nothing to lose, the ones to whom he gave that most precious gift of hope, the ones who socially or economically, had, to use the title of Richard Fariña’s ’60s novel, "been down so long it looks like up to me".

These women remembered Jesus’ words of promise that the angels happily remind them about. Not just a recollection, not just a biological, physiological, electric transaction of the brain, but a transformative moment in which they realise that the promise is made real – that Jesus’ words were trustworthy, that they can trust, have faith in the Living God.

But let’s not be too surprised, and certainly not judgmental, at the male apostles’ lack of faith. Like the overwhelming majority of men they operate at the level of brute logic. If it’s broke, honey-bunch, I’ll fix it for you. I’m sure part of their despondency following the crucifixion arose from their inability to find anything in their spiritual tool-boxes to fix this major problem.

Few things in life are sadder than the face of a man whose power tools won’t work …

More than that, they lack the one thing that ultimately allows us all to come to the grace of faith – the Holy Spirit. The women already remember Jesus’ words – which is precisely one of the gifts of the Spirit. The Spirit helps us, as John’s gospel reminds us, to remember what Jesus sed and did.

And the reason we need to remember is not so that we can go around converting and dragging in legions of unbelievers – that’s God’s work, thank goodness – but so that we can realise, again and again and again, that what Jesus sed is trustworthy, we CAN believe it, we CAN believe the Living God, we CAN, ultimately, surrender ourselves sufficiently to this God to enable God’s transforming power to shape and re-shape us, time after time.

And when we take our pain and doubt and spiritually-carcinogenic feelings to the Living God for transformation we CAN, in an authentic way that all people recognise, really begin to do Jesus’ work right here, right now.

But that’s enough from me. In a moment we are to witness the manner in which the Living God offers us this gift of the Holy Spirit – through baptism. Tyrone and Cahill will receive the Spirit in what, despite our flouncy and wordy theological fumbling, is quite a simple divine-to-human transaction, using very simple elements – water and oil and light.

This is the same Spirit given to all who are baptised in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The same Spirit who reminds us of Jesus’ words, and gives us the ability to see beyond logic so that we can trust everything that God promises, so that whether we ultimately stand alone, puzzled or terrified, we can indeed have faith that the Living God stands beside us and brings us through to the other side – not of death, because death is defeated – but of life!

FOR AND AGAINST

1st October 2006 : Pentecost 17 : Year B
Mark 9:38-50

Around the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq George W Bush made a bold but illogical statement that in the war against terror we were either for the United States or against the United States. I don’t know whether Mr Bush intended to allude to the words of Jesus we heard a moment ago in the gospel reading but it’s refreshing to have those words to reflect on.

They too are bold words, scandalous words, spoken almost in throw-away fashion and so seemingly-innocuous that we can hear them, raise our spiritual bats and let them pass through to the ’keeper as if they shouldn’t concern us or don’t really matter.

According to Mark, Jesus sez this in reference to the exorcist who is not part of the disciples’ band of brothers:

Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my
name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us
is for us.

The disciples sound petulant, churlish and spoilt. Here’s some dude muscling in on their exclusive territory.

But what the disciples say reveals more about them, their attitudes and their ignorance than it does about the extra-ecclesial exorcist and his actions:

Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and
we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.

How little the world has changed! If we wonder about religious intolerance and extremism we see the seeds of it in those sadly candid words. Except that the implied impotence of the disciples who can only "try" to stop the unorthodox demon-expeller has long since become a ruthless and violent reality purchased at the expense of tolerance, dialogue, understanding and the words, deeds and teaching of Jesus himself.

Notice how self-absorbed the disciples are: "we" saw someone … "we" tried to stop him … he was not following "us".

Jesus stops this last attempt to draw him into the whirlpool of ignorance by counterpointing the disciples’ "in your name" with a pithy lesson on what "in my name" really means and implies.

This is the difference. To do something in the name of Jesus is powerful – filled with, full of power and divine authority. But it’s much more than a vague formula that we can easily counterfeit and pass off as the real deal whenever it suits us or to rationalise violence and atrocity.

What we do in Jesus’ name MUST speak of love and compassion. It MUST bear the fruits of healing and wholeness. What we do in the name of Jesus MUST come through and with the power of the Holy Spirit and it MUST transform the world and its people from places of darkness into dwellings of hope and peace.

Our history is filled with scandalous examples of atrocity committed in the name of Jesus. Folks, we don’t need Da Vinci code to feel outrage at these shameful deeds. Inquisition, for one. The rape and murder of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Chatila, committed by Lebanese Christians while the Israeli Defence Force who were supposed to be protecting the refugees apparently heard none of the screams or gunfire, saw none of the blazing buildings. The Crusaders who captured Jerusalem and then slaughtered the 30 000 Muslim inhabitants.

Often our intolerance simply and complexly takes the form of psychological abuse. Everything from using scripture to shame and belittle those who hold different perspectives to spreading hate and fear via the internet. If you have a strong heart or a genuine medical need to increase your blood pressure you could check out http://www.godhatesfags.com/ some time.

Is this what Jesus lived, died and rose again for? If this is the face of Christianity is it any wonder that so many receive us so negatively, with feelings ranging from distrust through to outright hatred?

And yet in all this we still find Jesus and his words:

no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon
afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us

Scandalous and shocking words indeed because they throw open and wide the window of the Spirit, not only showing us how the Living God operates on the face of this planet but inviting and challenging us to climb through and participate.

It’s a challenge and invitation that demand that we remember that the name of Jesus is the same thing as Jesus himself. But much more than that!

To do something in Jesus’ name is to transform that thing. No matter how dark the thing may be, Jesus’ action of love and compassion will transform it. This is why it is not possible to do a deed of power in his name and continue to speak evil of Jesus.

But we err greatly and unspeakably when we try to confine the things of God within a building, or within an institution, or within the religions that our institutions have a genius for emasculating and perverting.

Remember the story of the Muslim child named Isa who became lost and wandered into a Jewish quarter of town. A Jewish family found him, took him in, fed him and offered him warmth and security, knowing that he was Muslim. They contacted his parents and reunited him with them. The story involves not a single Christian yet the actions scream Jesus! They speak of the love and compassion that the Living God asks us to show and find when we climb out of the windows of our confining, self-absorbed "we/us" systems. It’s a story that tells us about Jews and Muslims behaving, not like Christians, but like Jesus.

And the irony is one that Matthew’s gospel might not have missed. In Matthew Jesus’ parable of the judgement of sheep and goats sez Insofar as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me … Isa is the Arabic translation found in the Qur’an for … Jesus …

The film Joyeux Noel is the story of one of several incidents on the western front in World War I in which German, French and Scottish troops climb out of their trenches on Christmas Eve and for one day forget their hatreds and animosities, leaving behind suspicion and distrust to exchange gifts and discover a shared humanity.

What they discovered beyond that – the discovery that informed their actions and their ability to refuse hatred and violence – was the love and compassion of Jesus, something that goes beyond restrictions.

We try desperately to box Jesus in, to delude the world and ourselves into thinking that the good and great and glorious things of Jesus belong solely to us. But always we find Jesus breaking out and throwing open the windows and doors.

The invitation remains to step outside, to do great deeds in Jesus’ name. What deeds shall we do today, this week, this lifetime – what deeds that speak of love and compassion – the only authentic measure of our faith?

CONNECTING WITH THE LIVING GOD Baptism of Jesus B

8th January 2006 : Baptism of our Lord : B

When I was searching for pictures suitable for this Sunday, on which we celebrate the baptism of our Lord Jesus, I came across something unexpected – a cross whose filename suggested that the illustrations printed on it depicted the story of Jesus’ nativity.

At the top is the Annunciation; on the left arm (facing the cross) we find the journey to Bethlehem, pregnant Mary sitting on a donkey; on the right arm of the cross we see the Magoi and their gifts; and right in the centre, most fittingly, the cross shows us the actual nativity scene, complete with bright star, laconically-inquisitive farm animals, Mary flaked out post-delivery next to Jesus in his manger and a bunch of shepherd-types.

But in the panel below the nativity scene is the bit I hadn’t expected: the baptism of Jesus by cousin John, with the holy family, Moses and possibly the saints all celestially witnessing this event we reflect on and wrestle with today.

I realised as I did my own wrestling and reflection that of course this is most appropriate. The baptism of Jesus effects the "closure" of this all-important, indispensable chapter that begins the story of Jesus. Rather than a separator or stand-alone beginning of the next part of the story, the baptism of Jesus stands dovetailing his birth and the coming preparation for and propulsion into earthly ministry.

While we may commonly assume that Jesus’ baptism is the beginning of that ministry, at the same time it draws together the threads of his birth and perhaps begins a beta-version answer to questions like, Why was Jesus born?

Mark doesn’t have to ask or answer the question because he does not mention Jesus’ birth. For Mark it seems that the baptism of Jesus is the earth-bound beginning, a shattering, planet-changing event that signals the in-rushing presence of God-on-earth.

I’m struck by the drama and energy of Mark’s depiction. It’s somewhat lost in English translations but the Greek happily provides us with a powerful complementary meeting between the divine and the earthly response in Jesus’ baptism.

Mark tells us that "as [Jesus] was coming up, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him." As I read these words I had a picture of the scene in the film The hunt for Red October in which the American submarine hastily and dramatically surfaces, so dramatically in fact that one of the Russian sailors quips, "The Captain has scared him out of the water!" In that scene the camera shows us the nose of the submarine, angled sharply, breaking the ocean’s surface and soaring upward momentarily before crashing in a great froth of water and spray. (We can get the same effect in the bath with a rubber ducky but it’s not quite as dramatic …)

In English we tend not to see the connection between "coming up" and "descending" but in Greek the words have a relationship: they are the same word, defined and redefined by differing prefixes so while Jesus comes up (anabainw) the Spirit comes down (katabainw) and ultimately we have one of those few but happy conjunctions in the Christian scriptures in which we find Father, Son and Holy Spirit present together when God speaks the words of approval and affirmation, You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well-pleased.

But Mark adds another touch – one diluted when Matthew and Luke write their versions. For the latter, the heavens are simply "opened". In Mark they are "torn apart" – like the Temple curtain after Jesus’ death on the cross.

This is high drama and a powerful reminder that the baptism of Jesus is no mere act of obedience, the somewhat wishy-washy answer theology gives us in response to the question that excited Matthew, Luke and the early Church: Why did the sinless Jesus need to undergo John’s "baptism of repentance"?

Good question. Shame we have no good answers.

However, we do know that for Mark this was no mere formality or some event taken with ease when Jesus felt like it. This baptism is a moment in which heaven and earth collide. This is a moment of enormous energy and impulsion. This is a moment of awesome divine power merging with wholehearted, committed human response and connection.

This is a moment like the one I saw when my son was in primary school. Another student was rushing across the oval to meet his mother who told him that tonight they were going to have a special treat of some sort. This clearly pleased the boy, who promptly flung down his school bag, fell on his knees, clenched both fists together and explosively cried out, YES!

In coming to John for baptism Jesus allows God to enter this world through the Holy Spirit in such a way that the divine and the human are fully connected - as they have never been before or since. Here is not just intimate identification between human and divine but actual oneness. And God is skidding on the metaphorical divine knees, crying out, YES!

This is not to say that Spirit was unfamiliar with this planet or that human beings failed to welcome the Spirit in their lives. Genesis reminds us of the seminal activity of the Ruach in the creation of this world. The Living God speaks and in these words the Ruach, the breath, the Spirit works creation. John the evangelist will later deliberately echo all this as he reflects on Jesus as the Living Word creating a new understanding of God and God’s love for creation. Not a different understanding but a new one.

Paul reflects on the connection between baptism and the Spirit coming into the lives of the faithful, reminding us that John’s baptism of repentance did not confer the Spirit and suggesting, as we reflect on these readings, that what Jesus experienced with John the baptiser was not at all about his unnecessary repentance but about this moment of connection and oneness. As such, Jesus’ baptism is a revelation of the triune nature of the Living God, not the conundrum that Matthew and Luke needed to explain away by adding an apologetic conversation between John and Jesus.

For us it is a reminder that our own baptism leads us into a journey of finding that same oneness and connection ourselves. We find this somewhat more difficult than Jesus for obvious reasons! But difficulty is never an excuse for failing to make the attempt.

How, then, are we who are baptised in this Parish of the Holy Spirit, expressing our connection with the Living God? In what ways are we showing Westfield and the places beyond what God thinks of the world? and how are we demonstrating the love and compassion of this God of ours to those who most need to know this good news?

We know what Jesus did. What are WE doing?

BEING LIGHT FOR THOSE WHO DWELL IN DARKNESS - EPPHANY B06

1st January 2006 : EPIPHANY : Year B

TODAY we celebrate the Feast officially known as The Epiphany of our Lord, the true importance is arguably best described by its traditional title, The Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. Yes, we are a good five days early for the celebration, whose actual day is 6th January, this Friday.

But we are Gentiles in a Gentile Church and it is fitting that we remember that within two years – possibly within twelve days - of the birth of Jesus people outside his own faith system were recognising his significance. They came, Gentiles from east of Judaea, to worship this baby, as if he were an earthly monarch, bringing expensive gifts of symbolic importance.

In doing so they brought to life words written by prophets like Isaiah but as we should expect by now the incarnation of prophecy came, as it always will and must, at the cost of human expectation, wishfulness and demand.

The entry of the Gentiles into the world of Jewish spirituality was not about Judaising the planet but about completing the picture, adding the final pieces to the divine jigsaw. Salvation – however we might define that ambiguous term – was for the entire population of the earth, not a select few, even though those select few had the sacred role and duty of becoming and being a blessing to every nation.

The advent of the Magi and their retinue is a powerful and symbolic testimony to the self-denying willingness of the Gentile world to accept Jesus at least as a king.

But that isn’t why Epiphany should excite us and why we should at least pay attention to it. As ever, we can bog ourselves in the morass of details and interesting but irrelevant questions like, Did it happen like what Matthew wrote? Were the Magi kings? Were they three in number and did they have dorky, er romantic, names like Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar? And insurance companies throughout the planet want to know whether they had a valuables policy to safeguard all that loot? and if not we’d be very happy to give you guys a complimentary quote!

No. This is about the effect of light. The light of the Jewish kid spreading – as light does – into every corner of darkness. The light of hope. The same light that shines on and within us. The same light that the Living God invites us to carry at all times, in all places so that those who cower hopeless and terrified in the darkness of pain and suffering will understand what God really thinks of us humans – that we are worthy, that we are lovable, that we matter – that we are OK!

This is part of the importance of incarnation in all its forms, whether it be the birth of Jesus or the arrival of very important people who bothered to get out of bed one day, pack their camels and keep their binoculars trained on the comet shooting westward. Or every act of kindness we display to the lost, helpless and suffering.

As for the Magi, their arrival on the holy family’s doorstep confirms that the light has reached possibly unexpected quarters. Matthew doesn’t say whether Joseph and Mary thought it strange that these guys suddenly rocked up unannounced, though Matt’s compadre, Luke, has at least Mary doing some serious reflecting more than once.

But again, that sort of issue matters less than the revelation that God’s light of hope reaches everywhere – that no place needs to remain benighted, that the Living God has compassion for every darkened human soul – and that WE are an essential part of the bringing of God’s light to Westfield and beyond.

It’s a daunting and dangerous task. But what’s new in that? The real question is, What shall we do to carry this light of hope to the darkness of our community? How are we bringing and BEING light for those who dwell in Westfield darkness? What are we doing – daily – to ensure that we remain within the story of light and so illumine the lives of the hopeless, the suffering and the needy?

GOD-BEARERS - ChristMass 06

24th December 2005 : MIDNIGHT MASS : Year B

Up where we live in Beeliar the developers have opened a new estate called Mevé. In one part of the new area we have a series of streets whose names sound delightfully like a Rowan Atkinson sketch:

GECKO
BANDICOOT
BETTONG
GANNET
BEE EATER

No doubt the Royal Street-Namer imagined he or she was naming these nouveau-suburban thoroughfares after Australian birds and marsupials. Certainly a change from the prosaic Famous Faces or "let’s throw a dart at the atlas" approach.

And although sed Royal Street-Namer probably had no idea that she or he was creating the potential skeleton for one of Mr Atkinson’s pieces it just goes to show how even innocent and harmless entities like street names can become something other than their creator’s original intention.

Sometimes this can be a Good Thing, revealing the hidden, stimulating the imagination, throwing wide the doors of possibility and exposing breathtaking vistas of joy.

At other times the original creation is misunderstood and becomes perverted, or it’s twisted deliberately and becomes perverted. And sometimes it simply evolves into a form that is hardly recognisable as its descendant.

We find these sorts of things happening with the birth of Jesus, the Christ Mass, aka Christmas. Mostly we’re talking some form of misunderstanding but occasionally we get wilful twisting. Evolution appears not to enter the picture because the birth of Jesus, by definition, is a unique event. Nevertheless, Christmass keeps evolution within travelling-distance, albeit on the outskirts, because we all necessarily need to grow and change in our understanding of Jesus’ birth and its implications.

And those moments of what we rightly and properly call enlightenment are the times we see into the text and past the plastic, when we have clarity of sight instead of the blinding glare, wink and flash of millions of aimless light-bulbs. (Without question those bulbs help many experience the wonder, awe and delight which surely accompany our knowledge of Jesus’ birth but when our conversation turns to How many? and How much? and What about the electricity bill? and Is that the best one? then we have to wonder whether we’ve missed the point.)

And of course we don’t have to number ourselves among either the audience or the practitioners of these summer wonderland displays, or add ourselves to the grog-shop packs, or join the whirligig of car-parkers desperately searching the multi-storeys for parking spots that the divine has earmarked only for true believers.

The Church has long excelled at sucking the breath out of an event that ought to remind us of life and hope and yet seems to fall with terrifying ease into the hands of evil geniuses who hose down Jesus-God-with-us and cover him with layers of molten plastic that cools to a white Anglo-Saxon crust.

Surely Jesus is much more than this! Surely his birth speaks of proclamation-yet-to-come, a proclamation to which we are both heirs and honoured bearers.

But many years ago now John Bell and Graham Maule of the Iona Community had to ask a question still relevant tonight:

Lord, where have we left you,
somewhere far away?
alone and in a manger,
a stranger left in hay?

Lord, where have we left you —
somewhere all can view,
well polished and presented,
undented and untrue?

This Jesus was not born simply to delight and entertain our inner children! The shepherds who stared a-goggle and rattled off abuzz with awe were no bunch of Hollywood sentimentalists. They knew then what many have forgotten now: that Jesus was born for a reason and they who witnessed his vulnerability knew they were part of a story that had suddenly become his and theirs.

They saw Jesus and understood that their lives were changed. They saw Jesus and realised that the Living God had acted decisively. They saw Jesus and looked upon God.

As for us, what do we see when the world gives us a model manger and a plastic doll to put in it? Do we understand that the Living God invited the Jewish girl to become God-bearer? Or do we think, Mary had a baby boy …?

If Mary had a baby boy then we have little to offer the world around us. Even those for whom Chrissy is just another holiday know that much.

But, many will argue, these things are symbols, the words we use are metaphors that speak both about things eternal and hope present and future. These are mighty things, grand themes making robust demands.

And more than that – they are the background to God’s reasons for sending Jesus.

But when we behold the symbols and employ the metaphors, who or what has the power? Can we really stand firm in front of the plastic doll and search its production-line physiognomy without hurrying off to do some shopping or see to the roast, all with a warm-fuzzy feeling inside?

Not that we should decry warm-fuzzies – as long as we understand them as affirmations, expressions of care and respect.

But the birth of Jesus is not about such things. When we regard our symbols and utter our metaphors we need to do so with the willingness to stand long, until we flinch with the knowledge that this particular birth involves US, draws us into its life, offers up a purpose and a mission, commands us to live the lives about which these symbols and metaphors speak.

So let us by all means stand by our plastic Jesuses; but let us do so in the knowledge that Miriam was first God-bearer and not just another special young mum with a special bambino; that we are intimates, not spectators; that we are part of the story, not just listeners.

And that OURS is the part where we look at all the world’s pain and our own human, human hearts break and in the name of this Jesus whom we saw and recognised in the guise of a plastic doll, we say, This is not right and armed with the hope that is God’s own love and compassion, we move forward to be God-bearers in our own right, bringing hope and offering love.

BEING ONE!

JESUS SPEAKS WITH great dignity, passion, eloquence, power and yet restraint as he prepares his friends for his departure.

He prays for protective unity, almost certainly not envisaging this day’s multiplicity of denominations.

But our unity is in the Risen One at the centre of a circle on whose circumference we each stand, seeing Jesus from different angles, some slightly, some vastly different.

Each view is valid—but only one Jesus holds the centre!

Let us remember to keep our focus on Jesus at all times, in all places!

Given the Holy Spirit as our constant Helper, it ought to be a doddle!

BEING

1st May 2005 : Easter 6 : Year A
Acts 17:22-31 : 1 Peter 3:8-22 : John 14:15-21

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

We can tell that Pentecost is coming back to us because our Gospel readings are not especially subtle about revealing the designs of our lectionary makers!

This lack of subtlety is a good thing because it helps us focus on several aspects of the Holy Spirit and the Spirit's relationship with Jesus, and God the Father, which tend to become buried in the excitement about the pyrotechnic antics unleashed on the first day of Pentecost experienced by the followers of Jesus.

John's descriptions of the Spirit, whom he calls in Greek the PARACLETE, and whom we encounter as Another Advocate in many of our English bibles, are almost prosaic compared to the material in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles.

For instance, these strange words, paraclete and advocate, simply announce the continuing presence of Jesus in another form with his disciples. Both words essentially derive from the same idea. The Greek word, paraclete, comes from words translatable as called alongside. Very appropriate for a Being who clearly is meant to be our helper in living according to the commandments of Jesus.

Advocate, on the other hand, comes from Latin words translating as called TOWARDS, again quite appropriate in the context of a community seeking to fulfill Jesus' commandments.

But notice that Jesus speaks of ANOTHER Advocate. Not THE Advocate, but ANOTHER Advocate. Meaning a Being who in terms of function and action is same as Jesus himself.

We so often think of the Spirit in other-worldly terms, sometimes cosmological, sometimes supernatural, without realising that Jesus sends the Spirit from God-the-Father quite simply to be and do for us exactly what he would do and be if he were physically standing and walking beside us. It is legitimate to think "Spirit" and think "Jesus" in the same thought!

This makes perfect sense given Jesus' promises elsewhere to remain with the faithful despite his lack of physical presence. Even though, especially in John's gospel, Jesus returns to the One who sent him, he seeks to ensure the viability of the mission by sending, not a trusted and able lieutenant, but exactly the same Being, but in a form whereby that Being - the Holy Spirit - can remain, not only with the community of faith but with and, extraordinarily, WITHIN the individuals of that community.

This, Jesus tells us, is how we know the Spirit. Because the Spirit remains with us and IN us. NOT, interestingly, because we DO specific wonders, though Jesus doesn't exclude wonders in the context of his ministry lived out in our own time and place. But here the Spirit - called the Spirit of TRUTH - is about BEING more than DOING. It is a BEING in the context of keeping Jesus' commandments, and the overriding, over-arching Commandment, the so-called New Commandment, to love one another as Jesus loves us, the reality of which reveals that we are indeed Jesus' disciples.

Thus, when we are able to live the same love for ourselves and each other and the multi-faceted poor as Jesus himself lived, then we know that this Spirit of truth is living and remaining within us.

The Spirit informs our actions not so much as an engine or dynamo separate from Jesus, but as the Being who helps us, more and more, to BE Jesus for all who are lost, oppressed, living in desperation, excluded from society. Thus, although we customarily - and rightly - speak of acting "in the power of the Spirit", we are really doing no more than living the life Jesus himself would be living if he were walking down Lake Road today or hopping on a train at Challis or cruising down Champion Drive.

But of course that NO MORE THAN is pretty powerful in itself.

And so we find Paul in Athens preaching to people - powerful, intelligent, savvy folk - who believe in numerous gods, using terms of reference his audience fully understands, to share the message of Jesus, just as Jesus himself used the life and culture of his own earthly time and place to speak to the crowds.

And Peter expounds the virtues of non-violence just as Jesus taught and lived it, reminding us again that our faith, our ability to believe and to live as Jesus lived surpasses our external experience of the world.

Our ability to be people of faith is not dependent on whether this one or that one is nice to us; on whether we have money in the bank, petrol in the car, food on the table or any kind of sense that the world is being fair or just to us.

We can continue to be followers of Jesus, indeed with the Spirit within us we show that we ARE Jesus by claiming and living our faith in the Living God DESPITE ANYTHING the world catapults in our direction. How often we meet people who dismiss faith among the seriously ill as some kind of psychological sop, a vain mind-game conjured up as the last resort when the chemicals and the scalpels and the radiowaves have failed. And yet how often we use mere circumstance as an excuse for putting our faith on the back-burner!

The Spirit of truth living and remaining within us teaches and, as John will later record, reminds us of Jesus and his words and works. The Spirit empowers us to live with and through our circumstances - whether illness or the threat of closure or anything else - because the Spirit helps us to see these things as Jesus sees them - and to deal with them as Jesus deals with them.

Meanwhile, back at the Areopagus, we find a place dedicated, by the time Paul got there, to trying murder cases, with religion as a safe sideline. Ironically, truth very much exercised the minds of the council members of the Areopagus. Paul revealed a truth, thanks, we may safely suppose, to the Spirit of truth, which the Areopagus had scarcely considered.

Let us not tut-tut too loudly or smirk too noticeably in the direction of supposedly intelligent people who showed their naivete and anxiety by covering all bases with the shrine of the Unknown God.

Instead, let us reflect seriously on whether the God we worship, the God who informs our own lives, is known to us through our prayers and worship and study and fellowship and ministry. Let us ensure that we too are not unwittingly worshipping an Unknown God by revealing in our thoughts and words and deeds - or lack of them! - that the One we claim to worship and follow is little or nothing like the Jesus who sent us Another Advocate.

By our actions towards one another and ourselves and our community, what do we reveal? That we are impostors or deluded? Or that because we do what Jesus does, then the Spirit of truth indeed dwells and remains within us?

GREATER WORKS!

WE CAN OVERLOOK a seemingly outrageous statement Jesus slips in to this morning’s conversation—that we will do “greater works” than him—unless we understand greater as “more” rather than “superior”.

Of course we cannot perform superior acts!

But if we faithfully follow Jesus and allow the Holy Spirit to guide and empower us we will continue to do God’s work through Jesus.

Jesus expresses his faith in our persevering long enough to out-number his deeds!

Those works of Jesus remain as necessary as ever.

What are we in the Parish of the Holy Spirit, Westfield, doing to add to their number? and how shall we continue to increase Jesus’ works?

PROBLEM AND POTENTIAL

3rd April 2005 : Easter 2 : Year A
Acts 2:14a, 22-32 : 1 Peter 1:1-12 : John 20:19-31

In one of the typically-insightful, no-nonsense contemporary penitential liturgies of the Iona Community we find the following words:

God of all time, forgive us … our weird talent for spotting the problem before the potential …

This “weird talent” is one part of what lies at the heart of the amorphous beast the intelligentsia in general and literati in particular call the “human condition”. In more common parlance we know this weird talent by the name Negativity.

It’s a negativity which plagues all humankind but certainly finds expression within the confines of the Church, which has an equally-weird talent for elevating dungeons of despair above ground-level and celebrating them as marvels.

Thus for centuries we’ve taken Thomas out of John, slandered him with an epithet which doesn’t even translate the scriptural text accurately, defamed both Tom and scripture by insisting that he performed certain unseemly acts for which no textual exists, and willfully ignored Tom’s explosive proclamation of faith in the risen Jesus – all in the name of assuaging our own failures of faith and faith-based action.

In other words, we’ve made Thomas a scapegoat – the one who carries our burden of guilt and shame, dumped onto his name just so that we can feel better about ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m all for feeling better about myself!

But the humungous problems with scapegoating are that it provides no more than a short-term solution, and it never successfully challenges us to change because scapegoating never addresses, let alone resolves, the deeper issues which cause those failures to begin with.

But perhaps the greatest problem with scapegoating is that it completely fails to understand the true nature of the Living God, revealed in and through Jesus, and especially in his resurrection.

The scapegoat notion certainly provides one answer to my longheld question why Tom gets dumped-on for demanding the same privilege accorded the quaking apostles holed upon behind locked doors “for fear of the Jews”, though it is better, more accurate and less anti-semitic to say “fear of the JUDAEANS”.

But until recently I’d never wondered what Thomas was doing? Why wasn't he with his knee-knocking chums? One suggestion is that perhaps he was already out in the field, doing the God-work, meeting the risen Jesus among the oppressed and marginalised, the people for whom Jesus worked so many deeds of love and peace and grace. Maybe he didn’t need the empirical evidence the way the others clearly did – for they didn’t believe until Jesus showed them his wounds …

Nor is it entirely improbable that Tom was trying to make good on his rash exhortation to “go to Jerusalem and die with [Jesus]”, spoken not long before the resuscitation of Lazarus.

Either way, Tommy Twinset didn’t die just then, and I admit it’s all speculation. But we DO know that he was NOT locked up with the disciples for fear of the Judaeans.

The point is, maybe Thomas had already understood the message and maybe THAT’s why he didn’t need the proofs. And maybe that lack of need informed his decision NOT to accept Jesus’ grisly invitation to finger the resurrectional wounds.

But it’s our weird talent for spotting the problem which seems to cause our failure to acknowledge and credit Tom’s subsequent explosion of the great proclamation – My Lord and my God! We won’t credit that because it’s not part of our experience: WE don’t say that about Jesus. … Because the scapegoat doesn’t do anything right or good. …Whereas, WE know about failed faith and Thomas looks fit for the part – the outsider (literally!), outspoken where we prefer to be taciturn, willing to express the unpopular opinion, ask the question we are too afraid to ask …

Which brings us back to negativity. We find it at home, at work, in the Church, in our parishes, in OUR Parish …

Scapegoating and negativity are of a kind because both work overtime at spotting problems and neither effectively propose solutions. LEAST OF ALL do they drop sweat looking for the potential. And both work in total ignorance of God’s way of love, peace and grace.

Remember last Sunday? We celebrated the resurrection in a particular way – and rightly we celebrate the resurrection every Sunday, and certainly we’ll celebrate the resurrection in particular for a whole fifty-day period. We call it Easter, which isn’t about one day or a single event. It’s about an entire lifetime.

And that lifetime is lived within the mantle of the Living God who sed, Forget your scapegoats, forget your negativity, and most of all forget your shame and blame. Negativity sed, Jesus was crucified, he’s dead as a Dodo, ain’t no reversing that! And God sed, You forget the potential. I deal with life. I deal with peace, and with grace.

How is that we in the Parish of the Holy Spirit, Westfield, have forgotten that we now live our lives in the love, peace and grace of the Living God, who raised Jesus from the dead on the third day, and sought, not revenge and satisfaction, but people who would accept the revelation of love and peace and grace? How is it that we live and breathe the divine potential made real and shared with us through the Spirit whose name we bear, and yet we still dare to proclaim the gospel of shame and blame?

Is this God’s example? NO IT IS NOT!

As we stumble into one more Parish crisis we need as much as ever to grasp what the Living God does for us and use the potential dormant within us. Some of it happens, certainly. But more can happen. More NEEDS to happen. Unless, of course, we believe that we have no more of God’s work to do here. Unless, of course, we believe that we have successfully completed all of God’s work here. That no more lonely, abused, unemployed, despairing, suicidal, forgotten, unloved, uncared-for people exist within our boundaries and beyond …

If that’s the case let’s all go, like, Alleluia, dude! and rack off to another parish, where we can keep the great work happening.

If not, then it’s Potential Time, B2: welcome the new ideas; nurture the wackiest ones; question the soundest, most plausible ones without negating or destroying them. Search within our own store of potential even as we seek the potential in others’ suggestions.

Above all, live in the New World given us by resurrection. Love, peace, grace. Life, not death. Not problems, but potential waiting to be made real! After all, it’s not we who will act, but the Spirit of the Living God within us. Anyone have a problem with that? Or should I say, Let me know today all the potential you see in the glorious place we inhabit!

THE GOD OF NON-VIOLENCE - Easter Sunday A

27th March 2005 : EASTER SUNDAY : Year A
9:30am
Acts 10:34-43 : Colossians 3:1-4 : Matthew 28:1-10

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I am indebted to the following source for insights into Acts 10:34-43 in particular:
Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary
http://girardianlectionary.net/index.html
Rev. Paul John Nuechterlein

Especially:
EASTER DAY -- YEAR A
Last revised: March 25, 2005
http://girardianlectionary.net/year_a/easter-a.htm

One of the ironies of the Easter story is that the accounts of the reactions of the disciples are so thoroughly human …

Hang on a mo, I hear you say. Of course they’re human! What else could they be?

I’m glad you asked because resurrection, which is what this Easter business is about, also involves the Living God – intensely so! And the “Godness” of Easter is what challenges us humans and offers the way forward into something that is truly new and truly new life.

We may find it something of an embarrassing and awkward truism to say that God looks at this world and its people differently from humankind. We say it easily enough because it’s an easy-enough thing to say. But what are the implications of such a statement? And how do those implications impact on matters like the resurrection of Jesus and human behaviour – especially the kind of violence which killed Jesus, has plagued our world for all of recorded history and continues right now with little sign of stopping?

We see the human side of the matter clearly enough in Peter’s speech to Cornelius’ household. Peter, still a torah-abiding Jew as well as follower of Jesus, had required a little persuading by God to share the good news with these Gentiles. God had to remind him who was the boss and that the boss had the right to explain what the rules really meant.

But Peter, in addressing the Cornelian gathering, cannot move past the confrontational, antagonist language of Us versus Them:

They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third
day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen
by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.
He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one
ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.

It’s the same line as Pete’s Pentecost preamble, which is even more aggressive and blaming:

"You that are Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man
attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did
through him among you, as you yourselves know-- this man, handed over to you
according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and
killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having
freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power.

These are early days for Peter and the Church. They still have a human mindset which seeks to apportion blame and implicitly demand revenge, though they would no doubt have used the euphemism “justice”. Peter’s words, though somewhat restrained by eschewing an explicit demand for satisfaction, nevertheless bristle with the violence which led to and caused Jesus’ execution, which saw Judas handing Jesus over to the religious hierarchy and occupying forces acting out Operation Israelite Liberation, er, Freedom, and which gave rise to the desertion and denial of the male disciples.

Peter – and, we presume, the Church – have not yet grasped what the Living God has done in the resurrection – taken a situation played out on a human stage and recreated the entire aftermath in Godly terms – but still well within the human arena.

In other words, the Father, surely the One most hurt and grievously maltreated in the torturous death of the Son, responds, not with the kind of violence that wiped out Jesus, but with a negation of that violence. By refusing to be violent, God destroys violence as a legitimate answer to violence. So instead of death, God brings life. Instead of retribution acted out in rage and bitter fury, God raises Jesus from the dead on the third day and sends him into men and women’s hearts saying, Peace, and Do not be afraid.

Jesus for his part has to reassure the terrified first witnesses of the resurrection. … Partly because it jolly-well IS terrifying. I don’t know about you but the last time I was walking through the local cemetery and an angel of the Lord screeched down like a meteorite and plonked himself all blazing-white and sizzling on a tombstone, I was pretty alarmed … I can well understand the guards playing dead …

Matthew spares us little of the cosmological terror of the resurrection: Temple curtain mysteriously ripped in two; solar eclipses; the dead walking the streets of downtown Jerusalem. And then this just-about-kamikaze angel. Stephen King, eat your heart out!

And it’s terrifying because somehow the women who go to the tomb realise that the Living God is with them once again – but this time in a way which they have never before experienced, in a way which defies belief and shames the disciples’ betrayal of hope. God’s presence always strikes fear and awe.

But perhaps a later terror will come with the realisation that the resurrection means change. The God who steadfastly and faithfully refuses to allow humankind to cast the divine in a human image, changes the whole ball-game in the resurrection.

We have already considered God’s refusal to repay violence with violence. Death – the ultimate violent act - becomes life. If we want the prophetic foreshadowing and understanding we need look no further than the words of those prophets who remind us that God desires, not burnt offerings, sacrifices and ceremonies, but mercy. In the words of Isaiah:

learn to do right!
Seek justice,
encourage the oppressed.
Defend the
cause of the fatherless,
plead the case of the widow.

In Jesus, these things happened.

But the irony of it is that the change the resurrection demands is not a complete recasting so that something physically different comes into being. Rather, it’s a change of heart, mind and soul; a willingness to reflect on and absorb a newness that is internal but reflected externally.

So, when Judas hands Jesus over in Gethsemane he uses the standard Greek greeting, Cairete! It’s exactly the same word Jesus uses when he appears suddenly to the Mary’s on their way to tell the disciples about the empty tomb. Cairete! sez Jesus. …But now it is a word of hope and life, not a prelude to a death.

Similarly, both the angel and then Jesus tell the Mary’s to tell the disciples to go to Galilee: “there they will see him”. Galilee, the place of Jesus’ early ministry. The northern, marginalised, low-socio-economic hicksville peopled by dodgy characters who dressed funny and spoke funnier. Exactly the kind of people it’s easy to pick on and ridicule – or crucify – when we want to feel better about ourselves. Like today’s gays or disabled or Middle Eastern or different religion or denomination.

So we see Jesus working God’s business on the edges of polite and proper society, among the oppressed and the fatherless and the widow, putting in the “hard yards”, the way many professionals do when they’re on their way to the top.

So what happens when God raises Jesus from the dead? What a climactic victory, eh? That’s one mighty finger in the satan’s face. God rules, OK. So does Jesus get the keys to the Executive Loo? A promotion? A better class of parish where he doesn’t have to spend his time worrying about whether his people will rake up enough cash for his next stipend?

That’s way we humans might think.

But Jesus goes back to the edge. He returns to Galilee. The place where he began God’s work and the same place where he gathers the faithful to send them out to continue God’s work.

So, what’s new? What’s changed? What has resurrection effected? Certainly not a change in the external landscape. But maybe that’s the point – a point we miss when we go hunting for the empirical evidence of a literal resurrection, the eye-witness reportage, the plausible arguments, the minutiae that “prove” what we are supposed to wrestle with and come to as an act of unprovable, undemonstrable faith.

We humans demand evidence of the change and the Living God gives us the same and sez, I’ve been here all the time. Yes, God DOES do something new in raising Jesus from the dead. But it’s not quite the New Thing our human minds initially think it is.

What’s new is that WE begin to realise that God is NOT made in our image, God does NOT think like a human being, God responds to human violence with the non-violence of unrestrained, unremitting love, and God sends us out, Jesus being our example, to every Galilee within our reach to show in our lives and words and deeds the same grace towards others that Jesus showed in his own life and words and deeds.

By raising Jesus from the dead, God shows us definitively that love and peace are God’s ways, not violence and retribution. And this is why we are sent to Galilee, to meet the Jesus who continues to work in the unloved and the victims of violence, that he might send US out again and again to bring, in love and peace, resurrection to those who know no other reality.

See you in Galilee!

NO CHANGE, NO MIRACLE -Lent 5A

I’m looking at a painting of Lazarus stirring from the grave, about to climb out of a sarcophagus. It’s a painting by Vincent van Gogh, one which it has taken me 45 years to discover …

The scholars of art say Vincent, then recovering in a mental hospital from a breakdown, portrayed himself as Lazarus, thus the red hair and circumspect red beard, and used the painting to suggest his own sense of recuperation and returning to life in the world outside the hospital.

It’s a dramatic but colourful depiction, full of the yellow which scholars also say symbolised for Vincent the pulsating, radiating love of God, seen here as the sun – a vigorous yellow, orb-like eye watching, we presume with approval, the unfolding event below.

What strikes me most, however, is the distraught look on Lazarus’ face and the even more distraught visage of a woman who may be Martha, her sister Mary in shadowed prayerful piety ironically hidden in the foreground. This Martha’s arms are outstretched in shock, her mouth gaping in a cry of horror. She looks as if she has run to the tomb upon seeing her brother stirring.

I’m struck, also for the first time in 45 years, by the absence of the joy and celebration I had tended to read into the story. John in fact tells us little about the emotions of the event, other than Jesus’ famous lacrimosity, giving rise (no pun intended) in some translations of the Christian scriptures to the shortest verse in the bible: Jesus wept (in the NRSV translated as Jesus began to weep).

Then I begin to realise, Of course this is not the gay and carefree event so many assume it to be. This is the penultimate power of the Living God in action, as it were before our eyes. (The ultimate act of God’s power will be the resurrection of Jesus himself, the event which this raising of Lazarus foreshadows.)

To experience the power of the Living God is to feel unspeakable awe, the “fear” which strikes us mute as our scrambled brains, filled with empirical knowledge, try to come to terms with what is taking place. …For at the same time as God meddles with the supposedly natural order and obliterates our preconceived and pre-experienced notions of it, yet we are forced to continue living in this world, but now with additional information which defies everything we have ever seen or learned before.

Just imagine looking out the window and seeing someone we knew and love who has died, walking up the drive. How do we greet such a person when they knock on our door? What do we ask them? How do we establish their true identity? Much doubt (Darn, I knew I shouldn’t have had that last tequila sunrise) and many, many questions before we get anywhere near throwing a par-tay.

John is quite clear about the reason God raises Lazarus. It is so that all who witness not just this miracle but every miracle of Jesus, the Son, might come to believe in Jesus, in and through whom we find our salvation from the cul-de-sac of eternal death.

That’s a theological proposition.

But God never acts gratuitously. God is not into party tricks simply to impress people or get something really impressive on the divine CV. Nor is God into one-way, authoritarian relationships. Any miracle in which we recognise the presence and power of the Living God calls us into an action based on what we have witnessed or come to believe.

Certainly, God may be giving us yet another free gift, bestowing yet another blessing, but either or both are meaningless if we ourselves do not begin surfing the bottom line in response to God’s action.

That bottom line is simply to change our own lives. Chances are, that change will have a flow-on effect in the lives of the people and world around us.

Prosaic and challenging as the notion may be, if we are able to witness any miracle of the Living God and subsequently fail to change, then NO MIRACLE has actually taken place! All God has accomplished is indeed a party trick - a pretty impressive one, most like, but nothing worth so much as a text message.

Perhaps, then, part of the initial horror and strickenness of witnessing or participating in a miracle is the subliminal realisation that it will demand personal change. Because God is Spirit, as John reminds us, and therefore invisible, it’s easy enough to cruise along without anything more than cursory reference to the divine. But when the divine acts without ambiguity then suddenly we have to climb out of our spiritual hammocks, fire our life-coaches and begin to get real with God.

The real gift, however, in any miracle we witness is not the miracle itself but the realisation that the Living God invites us, in much the same way as those pulsating crescents of yellow in van Gogh’s painting, into God’s love. Again, we are not simply the passive recipients of God-action but people drawn in by God’s love arc-ing out from the center.

Such a gift in turn allows us to realise our inadequacy to respond fully. And the real miracle happens when we seek the life-giving Spirit who dwells within us and begin to use the Spirit’s power to effect the changes within ourselves which lead to changes in others and the world around us.

This remains the import of Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, given fleshly form and spiritual life in order to give hope to the exiles in Babylon. But that hope – and the promise of return to Israel – are not for the purpose of reclaiming dirt and rebuilding dwellings. They exist in order to change the people, and that change in turn exists in order to change the world – for the better.

But when we accept the gift and the miracle without invoking the Spirit to help us change, we end up with situation Paul describes: a focus on human things, leading to our own and others’ death.

The Spirit, however, is lifegiving, precisely because the Spirit fills us with and at the same time leads us into the source of life.

Our own worlds are filled with miracles, divine gifts and blessings. How many do we recognise? It’s easy enough to measure – all we need to do is calculate the amount of change we have undertaken or become aware of consciously participating in.

The raising of Lazarus is so much a part of our tradition that it has become dead theatre and we sit back and politely applaud at the right moment. We know how to respond – but do we know how to change?

Every miracle of the Living God calls us to change in the power of the Holy Spirit. And we can posit a simple formula: miracle = change. No change, no miracle.

As we enter some challenging times, we need to start recognising some of God’s miracles within our own lives and our community. Let us be on the look-out. What miracles will we experience this coming week – and beyond?