ANZAC Day

On this ANZAC Day, let us not forget the horror of war and let us abandon the talk of glory, sacrifice and heroes. Let us abandon the myth that death and mangled bodies, lost lives and fractured families is the foundation on which our country was born. A country born in blood needs blood to continue to give it meaning, the blood of soldiers, refugees and the indigenous.

It is time to get real and find a new reason for our being or we will continue to need war and blood as a sacrifice for our sins.

Emotional Event

(War In Afghanistan 2)

(A reflection on the dehumanised nature of the modern video war where people do not exist as victims but only as collateral damage)

I read in the paper

just a couple of innocuous lines

planted almost hidden

camouflaged amongst a battalion of words

the following

“… the 2000 pound bomb that went astray would cause ‘ a significant emotional  event’ for any one within a square mile…”

then it all became clear to me

war is not about death

people do not die in war

they only suffer emotional events

collateral damage

insignificant

unnoticed

not even counted as a statistics

they were not even there

like the poor

victims of the Great Fire of London

on the illegal immigrants

on September 11

not dead

not included

forgotten

ignored

somehow responsible for their own misery

yes death is a significant emotional event

for all human beings

especially when hit by a

rogue

wayward

homeless

2000 pound bomb

The Emmaus Road Story

Growing up poor in the bush I know about roads. Roads took you to relatives houses, grandma’s piping hot bread and her large feather bed. Roads took you to sport and social activities, often many miles from where you lived. Roads took you on holidays, connecting one caravan park to another, and another.

 

At the same time I knew about walking. Walking around rabbit traps early in the winter mornings, walking barefoot across the 2 1/2 thousand acres following a mob sheep, lost in your own thoughts. Walking toward town when the car was broken hoping someone would pick you up and save your feet. Driving mobs of sheep through the scrub to be shorn.

 

Roads and walking were apart of my early life and both helped form who I became.  Roads were the lifelines and walking the only way to get from one place to the next.  Both allowed you to ruminate on life, the big questions, to day dream and imagine being somewhere else doing something else. I still like to walk and our favourite pastime is going for a drive.

 

On the farm you could easily get lost in your thoughts and almost step on a frill necked lizard just as it reared up to open its frill and its mouth, frightening the life out of you. It was there all the time but you were lost in your own thoughts that you simply didn’t see the obvious.

 

And that’s the Emmaus Road story. Two blokes lost in their own thoughts and conversation. Walking. Talking. Lost in their own troubles and worries. Their world had collapsed with the death of Jesus and they were going home, or at least I think they were. Their heads were down. Their words were low and sad. They probably weren’t even looking at each other. Like characters in a Harold Pinter dialogue they simply spoke out of their own pain without even connecting with the words of the other. It was a monologue delivered by two people who were trying to make sense of what had just happened.

 

No wonder they didn’t see Jesus. It is not that Jesus was mystically hidden from them. They just didn’t look to see who it was. It was just another voice, another person walking with them. As this was not a conversation as such, there was no need to look. Anyway if they did they wouldn’t have seen the obvious because the manner and mode of their walking and talking let no room for Jesus to be alive, let alone to be there. With them.

 

We all know the experience of not seeing the obvious. Our keys are where we left them or our glasses are on our head! It’s obvious to everyone else but us. We have all had the experience of trying to help someone with a major problem, the answer is so obvious but they are so convinced otherwise that it doesn’t matter what we do, they simply can’t see it. You can’t see the sun rising if you are always look to the west.

 

Yet this is where Jesus meets them. On the road. Walking beside them. In the midst of their preoccupation with misery and failure, Jesus comes and begins to converse with them. They stop talking and begin to listen as he talks to them. We know that they were listening, because after Jesus leaves them, they are able to identify that moment on the road when the light began to rise in them. ‘ Did not our hearts…… Something began to happen amongst the dust and the stones, the sun and the breeze. Their minds began to clear and hear. That’s what walking does for you. That’s what the road does for you. As it stretches out ahead of you and you take one step after another, almost without thinking, the worries of the world slip away or at least begin to clarify.

 

Jesus doesn’t avoid the dust and ruts of the road that is our life. Jesus walks with us everyday, the still small voice that speaks to us in then ordinary activities, the day-to-day rituals of modern human existence. Here, the resurrected Christ continues to walk amongst his people just as he had done previously. He steps into the conversation of the retreating disciples and gets his feet dirty. 

 

There is a rhythm to the road. Walking is only one part of the journey. Hospitality is the other. Those of us who have undertaken long journeys on the road know that the time comes to avail yourself of the hospitality of others. A fellow traveller, an inn or hotel, or just a camping ground where you get to rub shoulders and conversation with others – fellow travellers of the road.

 

Sharing a meal with another is a privilege, be it either as the provider of the meal or the one partaking. We were in Ranau in Sabah Borneo. We had come to lay the first stones in a memorial for Australian soldiers who had died there at the end of the Second World War. The village was a very poor. Little work and even less income, yet they offered us a meal after the little ceremony. I prayed over the stones and we walked up to the community hall.

 

It was indeed a feast. The old trestles were creaking with the weight of food we not only could not identify but had no way of pronouncing. The students looked around unsure what to do. All I said was, ‘Eat, it is a privilege to share in their hospitality’. The students did just that, although with some trepidation I have to admit.

 

The walkers ask Jesus in to eat. We are not sure if it was their house or simply some kind of inn. Jesus accepts their generosity and hospitality and sits down to eat. My life is punctuated by great meals, not necessarily by great food. Great food sometimes accompany great meals, but not always. It’s the conversations, stories, transparency and honesty that make a great meal. In Paris I remember sitting in an Indian themed restaurant with a Bulgarian, 2 gypsies, an Italian, another Australian and a couple of Frenchmen enjoying one of the greatest meals of my life. Conversation was limited by the languages spoken and the table etiquette varied from those using cutlery to those eating with their fingers, but it was full of laughter and camaraderie.

 

Jesus sits down at the meal and returns the hospitality by blessing the food and revealing himself to the two travellers. Suddenly in the relaxed environment of the shared table they could see what they missed on the road. Their companion was indeed the risen Christ! It was so obvious. How could they have missed it?

 

They turned around and went back to Jerusalem.

 

Every day the risen Jesus is active in our world and our lives. He is present in our relationships, our encounters, our ordinary experiences. He walks the dusty road of modern life with us. Do we recognise his presence? Do we hear his voice? Or do we become so entrenched in our problems, our tragedies or our preoccupations that we simply do not see or hear him?

 

It is in these ordinary moments that Jesus is revealed and turns us around to continue our journey in his presence. Amen

 

Thomas Encounters Jesus!

(John 20:19-31)

Susan R. Andrews writes when I was a student: "When I was in seminary, Doubting Thomas was my soul mate. Jesus kept "appearing " to my fellow students within the rich stories of the Christian tradition. But like Thomas, I never seemed to be there when Jesus arrived."

Oh, I know what she means. Jesus seemed to be appearing in prayer, bible readings, silence for every other person in the training college, they all had great tales to tell of being touched by Jesus.

Not me. He seemed to take a detour when he came my way. For me faith was more like looking through a dust and bug spattered windscreen of an eighteen wheel road train in the Gibber Desert, I knew Jesus was out there some where, but like the road he was hard to see, let alone feel.

An encounter with Jesus is not something you can import from another person, book or song. You have to encounter Jesus yourself. People can tell you all about their experiences, but if it’s not happening for you, its not happening.

Thomas missed the first time Jesus appeared. It was 8 days after Jesus death and Thomas joins them in the room. No doubt he was quizzed and pestered to believe. But Thomas maintained his integrity. He had given this whole scenario some deep and critical thought. Yes, he wanted it to be true but logic mediated against it being true.

Modern people need proof. It has to be true, true meaning provable, testable, concrete, not the unchangeable meaning of being sitting underneath our treasured rationality. True here means something like to be certain. It is what our young people want and we want it because it gives a sense of being in control of our lives. Nothing uncertain can be countenanced because it can’t be true.

Thomas, though, simply wants to own his faith for himself and puts himself in the place to test his logic, in the room where Jesus had appeared before. He was not closed to the idea, and in the best critical thinking practice, was prepared to dialogue with the possibility that Jesus was alive.

And Jesus Turns Up. The truth is that Jesus just keeps turning up for those who genuinely desire to know him. Elisabeth Johnson writes: " As he came back a week later for Thomas, Jesus keeps coming back week after week among his gathered disciples -- in the word, the water, the bread, and the wine -- not wanting any to miss out on the life and peace he gives." And we know, from experience, how real that is. It is what draws us back here every week. It is not about the liturgy, although the liturgy is important. It is not about others in the congregation, though they are important, it is not about the choir though the choir is important and it is not about the priest, though he or she is important. It is about the fact that Jesus keeps turning up and I, you, discover something new about the resurrected Jesus, just by being here.

Jesus doesn’t chastise Thomas. He doesn’t tell Peter to excommunicate him for his lack of faith. He doesn’t leave Thomas hanging out to dry, another failure to put beside Judas. No, Jesus turns up and offers his presence and his body for Thomas to inspect. He doesn’t. He doesn’t have to touch Jesus. He knows without needing the evidence he said he needed.

When truth comes, we know. We don’t have to test it, try it out or prove it. It just is. Thomas gets it and abandons his need for scientific proof saying, “My Lord and my God!” 

This Encounter Reminds Us That Bodies Matter.

Christianity has a poor record with bodies. In the philosophical duality we bring to our world, western people have seen the material as an opposite to the spiritual and body as inferior to soul or spirit. Many early forms of Christianity treated the senses of the body as evil and something to beaten down. There was no room for the body in a religion that was focussed almost entirely on the hereafter. Even the great St Francis of Assisi, the father of ecological spirituality commented that he had wished he had treated the donkey better. The donkey was what he called his body.

Yet the body plays a major role in spirituality. Greg Carey suggests: "The resurrection story implies that bodies matter. Jesus’ resurrection is not merely a spiritual thing – the apparition of his ghost, or his ongoing spiritual influence. The Gospels all insist that the resurrection includes Jesus’ body.”

The medieval mystics, particularly the women mystics such as Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Mechtild along side John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart recognised the role bodies played in encountering God. Julian of Norwich’s classic work, Shewings, is simply the record of her encounter with Jesus as a result of illness and its impact on her body. Bodies are not be worshipped, sculpted to the point of the ridiculous as is the modern trend. They are to be respected as the receptacle of the spiritual.

Bodies, our bodies, the bodies of those we live with, of those in agony or in exile carry scars, just like the body of Jesus. And they are important. Wesley White writes: "Wherever there is a wound, Christ calls us to find belief by putting our finger there and to energise that belief with a life lived to reveal what is behind the wound." That is the reason for our scars and was the reason for the scars Jesus carried with him. They are not trophies of survival but testimonies to the truth that we are human, alive and infused with life to share so others to can live.

Thomas was far from a doubter who needed to touch the body. He saw. Not physically. His was a Spiritual Seeing which sees beyond the body. I am consequently amazed at the prevalence of such a seeing in our world, despite the fear many Christians have that it has disappeared.

We were sitting discussing the eucharist. These were my secular monks, year 9 & 10 students. They were having great difficulty with the idea of ‘eating Christ’s body and drinking his blood.’ Understandable really. Suddenly Corey, eyes wide with insight said, ‘I get it. It’s about respect, awesome respect for who he is!’ Spiritual seeing isn’t limited to those who believe. It is the providence of all, including Thomas, Corey and each one of us. It is beyond our vision and we see within reality what is hidden from those that only look for what can be seen physically.

David Ewart suggests: "John doesn't care what we see with our eyeballs. He wants us to SEE with our inner eye who Jesus really is. That in SEEing, we might believe; and in believing, we might have the life that is in Jesus."

Thomas sees with his spiritual self. There is no need to touch the wounds. Yes the body is important. But it is what we see that counts. We can look at another and see only a behaviour, a stereotype, a prejudice (all defined by us) and fail to see what is within, the true person. We fail to see the scars and ponder where they came from. We fail to see the possibility for both us in the connection of bodies. 

Jesus does. He keeps coming back, as he did for Thomas, to encourage us, to show us how to look beyond the surface and to encounter the real. It is a challenge, one we will fail over and over again, but when we get it right we will discover, as Thomas did, ‘My Lord and my God”.

Thomas - My Hero!

We live in a world of experts. We have an expert for almost everything from surfboard design to open heart surgery. We do little without consulting an expert, reading the latest research or listening to Oprah Winfrey! The internet is full of appropriately titled ‘7 ways to do you hair’, ‘9 ways to ensure a successful roast dinner’, ‘3 ½ ways to almost get out of bed on time’ and more!

We seem to need a validation or some one to blame if it the actions we take fail to give the results or outcomes we desire. Rarely do we make decisions on our own. We have become acclimatised to quoting our sources before we act!

That’s why I like Thomas. He owns his faith for himself. It is simply not good enough that others relate their experience to him. It’s not that he disbelieves them, it’s not that he thinks they are delusional or making it up. He just has to make up his own mind based on his own encounter with the risen Christ.

And isn’t that the wonder of Christian faith? God does not force us to believe. We are given a life journey in which we experience the wonder of creation, the beauty of life long learning and the mystery of unplanned experiences and have to make up our own minds about each of them. What do they mean? Where is God in this experience? What do I do now?

Jesus does not force Thomas. He allows him time to critically think about what he had heard, what he had learnt from his time with Jesus and to come to a place an encounter with him would be appropriate. Even on the day he simply presents himself and leaves the epiphany up to Thomas. And Thomas, having thought it all through, responds in the same way we do when encounter Jesus anew in some ordinary event, he says,  ‘My Lord’ My God’.

May we emulate Thomas and experience a waiting Jesus today.

An Encounter with the Living Lord!

I remember taking a group of students to Sydney on an art excursion. We visited many places including the NSW Art Gallery where we saw the best art has to offer. But the place, which took their breath away, was St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral. These were non-churched students who had barely stepped inside a church of its type before. Something truly remarkable happened. As they entered through the open door, the beauty, the silence and the sense of the holy transformed them. Students crossed themselves with holy water, went to pews and sat down in silent ‘prayer’, others knelt, others just respected these acts of piety and sat quietly soaking up the scene in front of them

I have witnessed similar in other places, for example after students have walked the Sandakan to Ranau Death March where almost 2 and a half thousand Australians died, only 6 survived. The visit to the war cemetery on Labuan Island takes on the aura of an encounter with something beyond the normal.

Easter day, today, was that kind of event for Mary, Peter and the other disciple who ventured out to the tomb. She had watched as they processed into Jerusalem in direct competition to the annual military parade of power and might. She watched as Jesus took himself out of the city, and often during that week, off into a place of solitude to pray, contemplate and reflect on where he had come from and what he had to do.

She was close enough to Jesus to understand that he accepted that his actions, words and presence tormented the political and religious powers and could only end in one way – death on a cross.

She stood on the hill outside the city and watched them nail him to the cross and she felt every nail, every jeer, and every tear. She stayed until they took him down and away to the tomb. She had died with him. Now she was back, resigned that it was over, but hoping she can see him one more time.

What happens next is more than she can hope for and, almost, more than she can believe. She is confronted by the risen Jesus, the Jesus that came again into her life and enlivened her faith, hope and purpose. Whatever happened outside that tomb, Mary was resurrected. She was alive again and so was Jesus. He was alive in her life and in the imagination of the world.

In Mary’s case the encounter with Jesus was mystical, transforming and loving, an encounter based on a devotion that could not be shaken by the events of the last few days.

Mystical experiences cross the thresh hold between the real and the mysterious. They are full of wonder, seem real and, at the same time, one questions if they actually occurred. Ronald Goetz suggests that "Maybe the various Gospel accounts are best read as innocent attempts -- decades after the first Easter -- to provide some historical hook on which first-century believers could hang their experiential faith." Mary had an experience that was outside what seemed possible. Yet he encounter seemed real, concrete, visible. Had she not hugged Jesus? Had he not looked like the Rabbi she loved?

Experience is often a questionable quantity in this scientific age. Unless it can be weighed, measured, hypothesised and fits in with all proven theories (is that an oxymoron?) it is deemed to not have happened. Yet experience is the only thing a person has to judge the world by. What happens to me; how it makes feel, know and see, and how it changes me for the future is essential to our development as a person. We are not a package of theories, formulas and research papers wrapped up in human flesh. We experience, and what we experience determines who we are.

Mary and the disciples experience a risen Jesus, how they had that experience and how the ‘saw’ Jesus is not as important as what that experienced did to them.

It transformed them. It transformed Mary, the disciples and the world. Mary was longing for Jesus to return and to be and do just as he had been and done before. Craig Barnes writes "What we long for, what we miss and beg God to give back, is dead. Easter doesn't change that. So we cannot cling to the hope that Jesus will take us back to the way it was. The way out of the darkness is only by moving ahead." Transformation takes what was there before and infuses it with new meaning, a new sense and a new sensibility. Transformation rarely occurs on a bright sunny day – when life is rolling along and all is well. Transformation occurs when we disappear down the rabbits hole, to quote Alice in Wonderland or disappear into James Cameron’s Abyss. When we are in the deepest black place is when we have the greatest possibility of transformation.

Mary and the disciples were indeed in such a place. Their world had collapsed, there was nothing left of the previous superstructure to patch together and begin again. Something completely new had to occur. And it did. Some of us know that story personally. Life is rolling along fine and then along comes relationship breakup, a major illness, financial ruin, tragedy or an unexpected death. Everything we had is no more, or seems to no meaning any more. We wander in the wilderness, we feel like we have fell down the rabbit hole or into the abyss, and we can see no way forward. Then something happens. A word, a thought, an encounter with someone, prayer or something and we begin to build a new life for ourselves and move forward. That is transformation. Mary experienced such an experience. Where does it come from?

Love. In our case our love for self, for others or for life itself kicks in and we begin to live again. Without love life is a drudge, with love it wriggles it’s back to vitality. Mary’s transformation was based on love. It was love that introduced her to Jesus in the first place, that kept her going during what we now know as holy week, it was love that helped her stand while Jesus was crucified and it was love that brought her back to the tomb.

And it was love that allowed her to transform herself through her mystical encounter with Jesus. She didn’t understand what had happened. She didn’t have to. She loved Jesus and that was all that mattered. She grasped the idea that love and transformation, mystical love and transformation, have no need to be understood. They are as real as the experiences they embody and are to embraced as such.

Love is the key rational ingredient in the Good News that found its ultimate expression in three days in the life of Jesus. For Mary and those of us who have encountered Jesus mystically and been transformed, love is all we need. Barbara Brown Taylor ."What happened in the tomb was entirely between Jesus and God. For the rest of us, Easter began the moment the gardener said, "Mary!" and she knew who he was. That is where the miracle happened and goes on happening -- not in the tomb but in the encounter with the living Lord.”

My prayer this Easter is that each of us gathered here and in churches throughout the world continue to live out of and to give witness to the power of an encounter with the living Lord. It will change your life and the lives of those you meet. Amen