An Ordinary Life

Matthew 4:12-23

 

Do you remember singing the Sunday school song “I will make you fishers of men if you follow me”? Anyone prepared to sing a verse? No?  That’s ok. Has anyone really thought about the song and its relationship to the passage it refers to?

 

Today’s gospel verse takes us into a key moment in the life of Jesus and those who first served with him. Jesus has relocated his life to Capernaum. We are not sure when he went there, just that it was after John the Baptist was arrested. We do not know how long he had been there, just that he had been there long enough to make a home there.

 

Understanding this is not an impulse action on the top of the baptism, the period in the desert or John’s arrest putting this story into the realm of an ordinary every day activity is valuable. He simply didn’t turn the page of his “This Is Your Life’ script and read, “John’s arrested, go to Capernaum and recruit some disciples.” It happened in the midst of an ordinary life in a small village of around 1000 people on 25 acres. It happened to people known to each other, recognised as part of the ongoing life of a small fishing village.

 

It happened as Jesus did what seems to have been a regular activity for him – “As he walked by the Sea of Galilee”. It seems walking by the Sea of Galilee was not an unusual activity for Jesus. It probably was something he did as a daily routine, whether for exercise, as a spiritual practice or just to get some quiet while he took in the scenery and the people he lived amongst. It does appear he was fully present to the natural and human environment, observing people and nature to inform his practice, memory and understanding of others and people.

 

It is not hard to imagine Peter and Andrew were known to him or he had, at least, made a careful study of these two men as they went about their fishing business. In a village of 1000, there would have been few strangers and as he made his home there we can assume they visited the same space for prayer and teaching, passed each other in the centre of town and had mutual friends.

 

It seems that their contact had been sufficient for mutual respect and positive relationships. The encounter on the side of the lake is not one of negotiation or a dialogue in which one had to put their case to the other nor was it unexpected and therefore an instantaneous response. It was a simple ask receiving an eager yes. One can’t help thinking this conversation had a backstory and the invite was not unexpected. And neither was the response. Jesus, Peter and Andrews’ reputation and knowledge of each other ensured both the ask and the answer were positive.

 

Jesus gives the invitation to people who were going about their life. None of the four disciples in this story sought Jesus out or asked to go with him. They did not approach Jesus openly or seek to be his disciples. He broke into their ordinary lives and they responded. While they did not seek the call they responded based on their relationship with Jesus forged in the everyday life of the village.

There is an insight here for us. We can be so keen to have a spiritual experience, to experience a mystical event or to be a spiritual person that we miss the value of simply getting on with life open to the possibility of encountering God. God breaks into our lives when we are deemed ready, and not before. God comes to us and opens up our lives when we are working quietly on being human, ignoring our pretensions and ambitions to be something else. God sets us for his work when we are already fully occupied with being present as ourselves with others. It is the faithfulness to our humanity God enhances through an encounter with Jesus.

 

It is interesting only two of the four who are called are actually identified as ones who will be made fishers of people. Andrew and Peter, not James and John, receive that call. It is not a universal call for all. “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people” is personal and directed, it is contextual and prophetic, and it is their call and their call only.

 

We can so often appropriate for ourselves the lives of others and forget the truth that their life is their life and our life is our life and that is the way it is. We look at others success, others wealth, others experiences and become jealous, desiring to share in a life like theirs. For Peter and Andrew they receive a specific call and promise and would be held accountable for that throughout their lives. It was specific to them. It is not for James and John, and it is not necessarily for us.

 

Now this may sound counter to what we have been taught yet it is important. We are all tasked with being open to the breaking in of God as we journey to wholeness, we are not all tasked to fish for people. Interestingly this is the only positive use of this idea in the Old and New Testaments. Elsewhere it refers to capturing others who oppose you or are your enemies.

 

This returns us to a consistent thought throughout humanity’s engagement with God: our relationship with God is not static but ever evolving and renewing just as Gods relationship with all creation is ever evolving and ever new. In this way it is mystical or based on a real experience of the Christ both specific (it is our experience personally) and universal (it is the experience of and for all people).

 

Jesus’ call to Peter and Andrew differs in specifics but remains in its essence same as that of Jesus’ call to James and John and to us: to follow the way into wholeness and justice for the whole world. The specifics are relevant to the individuals involved and will go on to structure and influence the direction ones life takes.

 

We are not all called to be fishers of people, and if we are, not in the same way as others. We live out our life in this world according to the circumstances, opportunities and understanding specifically ours. Jesus calls us to follow his way: life giving, life affirming and life releasing all the way to the cross in willing self-sacrifice.

 

Jesus call to these four men affirms the material world and our experience of it. A man on his daily walk offers an invitation to men going about their daily business in a small insignificant village where they shared community life and had made their home. This affirmation of the created world by one incarnate and ordinary should give us pause to contemplate the incredible nature and potentiality of our engagement with the everyday.

 

It is pregnant, full of life and hope. Let us be open to the voices we hear and respond to the call to be alive with wholeness and love in the midst of each noisy moment.

 

 

 

 

 

  

Baptism of The Christ

Baptism of Christ. Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River by John. Davezelenka

Matthew 3:13-17

 

Today we celebrate the baptism of Jesus, the iconic story of incarnation, subservience and mysticism, often reduced to the role of a theological statement about the identity of Jesus. We pay little to the relationships between Jesus and John, Jesus and the created world, and Jesus and spiritual experience by using it to prove Jesus is divine and already righteous without the need of John’s baptism.

 

Yet this is an incredible story, told in all 3 synoptic gospels, each with their own twist but consistent in the central truths portrayed. John is baptising on the banks of the Jordan. It is a baptism for transformation and change, a baptism not of ritual but of experience. He is challenging those who come to be transformed by the experience and to go away and transform the world in which they live. Yes the word sin appears, but it is not the trivial definition we use of personal sin today, but an understanding of the disconnection from our one-ness in creation and our need to rediscover our co-independence in our movement in relational wholeness empowered by love. His is a baptism of community for an evolving creation destined to find its beginning and completion in Christ.

 

John is correct, Jesus has no personal need for such baptism, but he does have a representational need to do so. He comes to John, his cousin and mentor, as a student comes to a teacher. This is about participating in the experience and become a participant in the journey to wholeness which is a journey to himself. The great Christian mystics such as Merton, Bede Griffiths, Teilhard de Chardin and others, along with the seminal mystics from other faiths and spiritual practices, all speak of the journey to wholeness as the journey to self. They all, in their various understandings, equate the inner journey of discovering your true self as the experiencing of the Christ at the most intimate and personal level. Merton write that the only journey a human takes is the inner journey.

 

Karl Rahner, a modern Catholic mystic, writes: “In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all.”  Jesus and John both agree with Rahner, without a deep and undeniable experience of God there is no way of being for Christ in the world.  This is not necessarily an emotionally charged moment of bells and whistles, it is often the breaking open of ones self perception in such a way one becomes a completely new being, unrecognisable from the one who existed before, especially and most importantly, by ones self.

 

In the baptism of Jesus this is exactly what happens. Here we have a young man recognising his need of John’s tutelage and baptism and coming in obedience to John’s call. For many this may fly in the face of what we think about this story. Jesus is not just following a divine script. He is a created being, a thinking man, making a considered decision to be baptised by John.

 

It is an act rooted in a personal relationship with John and completed in the created world. Both points are very important. Jesus is an ordinary person, engaging with others and the created environment who experiences a mystical awareness of his true self in the midst of both. Jesus does not have his mystical experience, his awakening to his true self, in isolation from others or the world. It occurs in the midst of an act of obedience, surrounded by others engaged in the same, on the banks of a shallow and narrow river on the edge of the desert.

 

What happens next is, apparently, witnessed by others, but most specifically experienced and reflected on by Jesus, not just in the desert where he went after this occurs, but in his discussions and teachings with those who followed him. This event dislodged Jesus from his ego self and set him on a deep spiritual path he invites all of us to participate in – through journey through him to him.

 

Jesus is the fulfilment of creation and brings with him into our world both the way and the end. In his baptism he understands this truth. He participates in an act representative of the evolving understanding of the spirituality John brings and is connected to the source of all creation (God) by the power to bring us to evolved fulfilment (the Spirit). God speaks, the Spirit hovers of the waters, just as in the first creation myth. God speaks similar words to those attributed to him then, ‘and God saw it was good’. Here he says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

 

An interesting comment in itself as Jesus has yet to do anything, his ministry has not begun, there have been no acts of power, words of wonder or miracles of healing. It seems the ordinary human being Jesus is deemed to be sufficient by God and the simple act of responding to John’s call has opened the gates of heaven and placed Jesus in a new relationship with God.

 

Is this just an experience only Jesus can have? Do we read this story and listen to this sermon and go, ‘Nah, couldn’t happen to me. I’m not good enough. Only Jesus who was God’s son could have this experience.” We have been fooled by the idea that because we understand Jesus was both divine and human and somehow that excludes us from emulating such experiences. The truth is that this should be the normative experience for those on the spiritual journey. It is not the experience only of Buddha, Dalai Lama or Jesus or Mother Teresa or Rumi or any of the other spiritual pilgrims, it is the experience we all are destined for if we participate in the acts of being human and open to the possibility of such experiences.

 

I suspect Jesus was unaware of what was about to happen to him when he came to John, despite the prophetic words of John and Jesus's response. I suspect Jesus was still coming to grips with the guidance John had been giving him and simply wanted to do what was necessary. His baptism dislocated him from his self-understanding in such a way that he heads into the desert to make sense of it all. What happens there is the continuation of his evolution into the Christ and the path that would take him to complete self-denial and love on the Cross.

 

Yes, this an iconic story of incarnation, subservience and mysticism, but not one reserved for Jesus and out of reach for you and I. It is available for us if we participate in the journey to relational wholeness in the created world out of love for God and others. This experience will set us on the Way to the Way, it will bring us, through the experience of Jesus to ultimate fulfilment in Christ. It will occur when we become open to the possibility, diligent in our worship and practice, inside and outside liturgy, and when we come just as we are, just as Jesus did. Amen 

Pentecost - Being Christ in the World.

John 15:26 - 16:15

 

 

Today is Pentecost Sunday, the day of the breaking in and breaking out of the Spirit in the lives of all who live a life of love and compassion in Christ. To be en christos is to be empowered to live and love in a manner which challenges the accepted ways of the world. To, in fact, be Christ in the world. You. Yourself. No-one-else.

 

No longer is there a Jesus to turn to for direction, teaching, hope, advice and spiritual comfort. You are on your own. You are to speak as if you are Jesus and to act as if you are Jesus because, for John, you are. And you will experience life just as Jesus did. For you are mystically one with Christ.

 

John writes about the coming of the Spirit at a time when we associate Pentecost with miracles, speaking in tongues and other super-natural events, and yet that seems far from what John has in mind. No where in this farewell discourse does he mention the doing of miracles or speaking in tongues or ecstatic experiences s being the lot of the those he was writing, his community which was beginning to feel the wrath of persecution and the struggles of remaining faithful even within the synagogue.

 

One would have thought if these were to be the tools of a disciple’s life, John would have spoken strongly and clearly about the power available. He doesn’t. Instead he links the disciples lives and experience of life directly to that of Jesus and stresses that the Christ is now in them as God was in him and that is all they need.

 

Jesus is saying that even if I go away, the meaning I came to bring will not disappear. What I have done is to open to you a new understanding of what it means to be human. Trust it. Now that it has been opened, it cannot be closed again. Spong writes that Jesus continues with; ‘The spirit of truth, which proceeds from the father, will come to stand where I have stood.’

 

David Ewart suggests "Whatever else we may want to say on this day of Pentecost about the Spirit, it is important to notice that Jesus always refers to the Spirit as the Spirit of truth. And in John truth is always the way, the life, the light, the joy, the friendship."

 

Here we discover a mystical and mutual indwelling bringing into existence a new being in relationship. It is no longer one of authority but of indwelling friendship. It is a new way of engaging with the divine. The divine is no longer up there, beyond the clouds, but has entered life, your life, my life in the form of the very spirit of truth. This was the spirit we saw in Christ and now will be visibly evident in the lives of those who form the ‘body of Christ’. Us.

 

William Loader, of Murdoch University says, "Jesus is not left behind that we might soar into spiritual fantasy and relish the prospects of more magic and more religion. John promises no such flights and is silent about future miracles. The task of the disciples and disciples after them is to bear fruit, to let the seed sown in death rise to new life. Transitional events are minimised. What matters is life and love."

 

Our life and lives are transformed by the indwelling Christ. It is our actions, thoughts, experiences which become the visible presence of God in the world. Pentecost is not about the supernatural crashing into the world in the form of special effects and magic tricks, it is the empowering of ordinary people to do ordinary things so that extraordinary changes take place in people, places and things.

 

In the Anglican Church there has been a process for young people to take communion after confirmation. When I was a school chaplain I used to alternate the services with 2 out 3 services for the High School students being a Eucharist. Almost all of the young people had neither church background nor any religious education in relation to the sacraments. Yet when the invitation was given many would come forward to take communion. Fortnightly 25% of the 600 students did.

 

Some teachers and other clergy questioned to authenticity them taking communion. Yet these young people made a conscious decision to come forward as did those who decided to stay in their seats. For both groups this was not simply following the crowd but a deliberate act of the will.

 

And it was a truly Pentecost experience every time. They would look directly into you eyes as you distributed the sacrament, moving from bread to wine respectfully and deliberately. While they may not have been regular church attendees outside school, their reverential actions spoke loudly about a deep sacramental and mystical experience of God. They were experiencing being in Christ. They trusted what was within them and stepped forward in faith to receive.

 

John’s Jesus speaks to the ordinary person, saying I know what it is like to be a human who is different to those around me, to march to a different spirit. Jesus says I also know the spirit is sufficient for all your needs, not only your physical needs, but your need to make decisions, to live in a certain manner, to endure hardships and persecutions.

 

It is perplexing when we see the Spirit at work, and adults even Christian adults, respond with questions and doubts, unable to accept that God is at work in ways and in people outside of what we perceive as the normal spiritual way. We simply shut down Pentecost.

 

Here we sit amongst a community of people who are open to possibility. That is why they bring their children to ballet, make school lunches, run exercise classes. It is all about what is now and will be in the future. It is about awakening the spirit with in, going beyond the mind that is. It is the mystical ordinariness of the incarnated spirit of God alive in the daily activities of human beings.

 

In an experience known as the Louisville Epiphany, Thomas Merton expresses what this Pentecost event is, and it is no different to the first event in Acts.

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

 

We are challenged on this Pentecost Sunday to see the supernatural possibility in the natural, to see God’s spirit already at work in those around us and to find ways to engage and to be en christos with them. We are not to demand that they change or convert to our thinking but to find ways to befriend and to compassionately be one with them. In doing so we open up the miracle of Pentecost and bring about a new world for all. Amen’

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Thinking About Christian Unity.

John 17:6-19

This week is the World Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.  An admirable title for an admirable goal, I am sure but I am a little unsure what the week of Christian unity was about. You may say it’s obvious. It’s about all the various expressions of the Christian church joining with one another in unity.

But what does that mean? What are we trying to unite? What are we trying to bring together as one? Can there ever be a united Christian church considering the varying doctrines, liturgical practices and church governance present in the world, let alone the history of animosity and bloodletting that has gone on over the years.  I can still remember not being able to talk to Catholic girls on the bus only 50 years or so ago!

The resource material for the week posed two questions:

 Which is the path of unity, the route we should take, so that the world may drink from the source of life, Jesus Christ?

Which is the path of unity that gives proper respect to our diversity?[1]

John, the Jewish mystic provides a path for us to follow in the gospel reading of today. And it all hinges on a basic Jewish mystical concept – that God was and is a permeating presence, not an external being. John Spong suggests in his book Tales of a Jewish Mystic, God was that life-giving power that embraces all those who are willing to accept the vulnerability that love always brings. For John, Jesus was not one who had come and then departed and who would someday come again. Jesus was rather a God presence inviting all to enter who he was and is, to be born of the Spirit and to participate in the eternity of God.

This passage is known as the High Priestly Prayer of Jesus, a prayer for the church of the Ages in which Jesus would be enshrined as its high priest. Jesus interceded with God on behalf of all who are embraced as God’s body, the Church here on earth, past, present and future. It is a kairos prayer, cutting across all categories of time and peoples to be ever present and ever personal.

Jesus in fact prays three different prayers. He prayers firstly for himself, then for those who had been with him and for those who would believe because of the witness of the disciples.  The primary focus of his prayer is unity but not unity as we would normally think of it. 

It was not a prayer for ecclesiastical unity, a prayer for the institution and its power to exist and to manipulate those within it for its own purpose. The larger the institution, the more the power and the prestige, the money and the influence. We have lived through that stage and have seen the many abuses of power and might that have occurred at state, institutional and personal levels. The recent child abuse expose is evidence enough of how power can be misused.

It was not a prayer for false unity. The Archbishop of Canterbury made this clear at a recent inter-religious conference: “We need to move beyond inter-religious interaction in which we the usual suspects issue bland statements of anaemic intent with which you could paper the walls of Lambeth Palace – and much good would it do you – all desperate to agree with one another so that the very worst outcome could possibly be that we end up acknowledging our differences. … ... True friendships and relationships can withstand honesty about differences in values, opinions and religious understandings and a common commitment to mutual flourishing in diversity.”

It was not a prayer for content or doctrinal unity. It is not about right believing, having the right words and formulas in which to package the authorised belief of this or that institution, theologian or teacher. Getting a uniform set of doctrines or creeds has been historically thwart with angst and appear no closer to being resolved that an the force church council. Anyway doctrinal unity is more about excluding ideas and beliefs which conflict with and undermines institutional stability and power.

It was not a prayer for a unity that can be imposed by any external agenda or program. It is not a law and cannot be legislated fore. Like morality and ethics, unity does not come from the outside. Regardless of the range of laws we may impose on what people can and cannot do, they will continue to do as they wish, when they wish and for whatever reason they wish. Legislated morality will never deal with immoral behaviour. That is a decision that comes from with in and will always over rule the law.

It was, is a prayer for unity that is an internal experience and revelation, something that rises up within and infiltrates us from the inside out. It is being in christ - en christos - an idea that permeates Paul’s writings. It is a prayer for the actuality of the vine and branches in individuals in such a way they are united by their oneness with the divine. It is our individual oneness  with God through Christ that unites us, not any externally imposed form of unity.

In 17:3 ‘John even makes Jesus use the third-person name and title for himself to make this point: Unity comes in knowing “the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent”.’ Spong again:  “The word of God comes from God, reveals the meaning of God, and returns to God”.  It is a mystical experience of oneness in  which individuality is not lost but affirmed, security is surrendered and a new being is entered.

This unity already exists. It is the possession of every believer who has seen into the God who is in us individually and in the church catholic. We are striving to bring about a unity which already exists. We already have what we are searching for and are perhaps afraid to acknowledge. Christian unity is the unity which we share in Christ. It is already present. We simply don’t act on it.

We know that there is enough resources in the world to solve the problem of world poverty. How much does it cost to solve world hunger? A price has been set and estimated by the United Nations to solve this crisis – $30 billion a year. It may seem like a large sum of money, but when compared to the U.S. defense budget of $737 billion in 2012, $30 billion seems more attainable.[2] We have what we need to deal with this seemingly intractable problem but we fail to activate it for a range of apparently rational reasons. It will cost us power, control and may in fact allow others to challenge our position in the world.

I would dare to suggest that the same occurs with in the Christian church. To accept that we are already at one with each other means that we have to let go of our finely tuned theological, doctrinally and liturgical positions and begin to focus on the one essential belief that unites us. It would mean saying yes to sharing resources, facilities, leaders, programs and worship in such away that we begin to give form and shape to the kingdom of God, right here and now.

Just a cursory glance across the suburbs of Melbourne shows us that we have much money, people and time resources tied up in replicating the activities of each other. In pronouncing our manifestation of the Christian faith as more hip, cool, relevant, traditional, evangelical or progressive than that found any where else we are diminishing the visible presence of the kingdom of God in our city. This is a worldwide phenomenon. Even the Anglican Communion is again facing a possible split because we are unable to find unity on doctrine, practice and morality.

John says the unity we seek is mystical and is the possession of all who believe in Christ. There is neither Greek or Jew says Paul because we all share the same baptism through the life and death of Christ. What would it be like if we could only grasp this truth? What would the church look like? What would it mean to come together to worship God? Would we have as many Sunday services in Glen Iris/Ashburton as we have today or would we come together as one?

These are uncomfortable questions in an uncomfortable world yet that is the essence of the High Priestly Prayer. Jesus the high priest has made the sacrifice on behalf of all so that we can all be one in God. No longer are there those who are unclean in doctrine, practice or lifestyle, the Christ has come and set us free to embrace a relationship in God and each other. When are we going to make a start or are we always going to be praying for a Christian unity that has already come? Are we so  blinded by our own religious geography that we fail to see it? Amen

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[1] http://www.ncca.org.au/component/content/article/25-wopcu/786-week-of-prayer-for-christian-unity-2015

1.    [2] Feb 15, 2013

2.    The Cost to End World Hunger - The Borgen Project

borgenproject.org/the-cost-to-end-world-hunger/

Age of Entitlement

(Ps. 107:1-3, 17-22 - Hesed - The Unfailing Mercy of God, Ephesians 2:1-10 - Hesed Continues- Saved by Grace not Entitlement. But we Can’t Complain, John 3:14-21- Look Up and Be Lifted Up)

Our modern world is one of entitlement, blame and complain. It is never my fault or my responsibility, it is someone else – them - (whoever them is) who is responsible for the situation I want to complain about. Because I am entitled to better, more, respect, recognition etc. And our society feels entitled to and complains about everything! Not enough money, roads, school, medical support, decisions others make, the that’s not how we do it complaints, the I don’t want to change complaints, the it won’t ever be right no matter what you do complaints.

 A man in Canada sued a restaurant because when he bowed his head to say grace the sizzling hot plate of food he ordered, sizzled and burnt his face! So he blamed and complained.

 A couple of years ago a Kenyan Baptist minister spoke to our year 11 & 12 students. He told the story of his church, his people and the lack of opportunity they faced. Almost one in two Kenyans are unemployed[1]. 70% of all unemployed are young people.[2] It is suggest that only one in 6 of those who attend primary school go onto high school. These figures vary greatly from region to region. The Baptist Minister explained that is because of the cost. Uniforms and fees equal about $300 Australian Dollars for a high school year, an amount only about a third of the ipad, iphone, surfboard or dress for the year 10 formal. A fee that would cover less than 30% of a years school fees for those listening

It was interesting to watch the reaction of the young people. They went from complaining about the small stuff to putting it in perspective. What they felt entitled to, a new pair of shoes, the latest iphone, a new surfboard etc seemed of less import to the situation faced by their peers in Kenyan. In one hour we raised $1,000 from what was obviously the students own resources, enough to educate 3 students for one year.

Entitlement, blame and complain seems to hardwired into our human existence. Ask anyone who attempts any kind of change in companies, institutions or even in family relationships. Change is threatening, the process unnerving, the outcomes uncertain. At the first sign of difficulty people begin to blame and complain. Now take the Hebrews in the desert, or maybe you would think twice about taking them into the desert, if Moses’ experience is anything to go by. They were slaves in Egypt. Exiles and outcasts, fodder the economic development of that country and without a country of their own. They managed to remain in tact as a people without a place. Moses comes along and, as instructed by God begins the process of setting them free from their captivity. They are ecstatic. This is what they were entitled to. They are going home. Wait a minute – out there – into the desert – what are we going to eat – where do we get water – how long are we going to be here – we were better off in Egypt – it’s all your fault Moses – Now why did God bring us out here to die – it’s all his fault.

Now we know they finally made it to the promised land, not all of them, not even Moses and anyway at 120 years of age and having spent 40 years with that lot in the desert I am not sure he wanted to. Yet make it they did. But they stilled blamed and complained over and over, against God, against others, against the situation they found themselves in.

You see the good news that found embodiment in Jesus Christ speaks not of entitlement but of grace. It is the Hebraic concept of Hesed, the unfailing goodness and mercy of God, which formed part of the Old Covenant reimagined through the life and death of Jesus. Through that experience we have the opportunity to reimagine our own lives in a way that reflects the values of God – compassion in action. Paul in Ephesians suggests that it is not anything we do but it is the initiative of God’s grace, hesed that means we have the capacity to live in a new and life giving way. You don’t get there because you are entitled to because of your good works good works are the outcome of grace. The definition of good works means taking sacrificial responsibility for self and others. Grace is given free but it has a cost – the relinquishing of the passions and desires we are enticed into by our nature and our culture.

If our nature is to complain and find fault or to always point the finger at someone else then we are called to let go of such a nature. If our nature is to want our way at all costs to those we share the world with, then we are called to let go. If our nature is to hold onto old hurts and faults, then we are called to let go. If it is our nature to think none of this applies to me but I can those it does apply to, then we are called to let go in response to God’s unfailing, unending goodness to us. We cannot simply say this is the way I am and you are going to have to deal with it.

John at the end of Jesus conversation with Nicodemus, a Torah Jew who was unable to accept the message he had heard, connects Jesus directly to Moses and the serpent. The people complained and poisonous snakes afflicted them. God instructs Moses to place a snake on a pole and to hold it up and healing was possible. Not simply physical healing but the wholeness that comes when you see something for the first time. It not only was to heal the snake bite but also the sense of entitlement, blame and complain that was preventing them moving forward into the promised land.

The death of Jesus acts in the same way. The Moses story is a type of the Jesus story. In the death of Jesus we do not concentrate on who to blame but on the example of hesed – the unending goodness of God which Jesus never ceased to offer to the world. The law apportioned the blame but only a new vision of the world provided by the death and resurrection of Jesus heals the blame.

In his resurrection we see the possibility of living out this unending goodness everyday. Not only do we see it as a possibility, but we recognise it as our responsibility to do so and to do it to the world, not just those we like but those we don’t like; not just those the same as us, but those who are very differentOh and we are to do it within the worshipping community of St Oswald’s too. The challenge for us this Easter is to give up any sense we may have of entitlement, any inclination we have to blame others and any tendency to complain about the way things are and come together with the Good News present in others, wherever we might met them on a daily basis, in away that ushers in the new way of living, the realm of God!

[1] http://www.tradingeconomics.com/kenya/unemployment-rate

[2]http://www.africaneconomicoutlook.org/fileadmin/uploads/aeo/PDF/Kenya%20Full%20PDF%20Country%20Note.pdf

And God Breathed and Laughed

Taking life too seriously is a health risk. Laughing is a lost art, especially the ability to laugh at your self.

Last weekend my wife and I were in Sydney. On Saturday night we shared a meal with one of Gayes' very best friends. Over a great meal and a nice bottle of wine we chatted, told stories and laughed, loudly!

When Gaye spoke to her yesterday and asked how she was, she replied "My sides still hurt!"

When was the last time you, your partner and/or your children laughed so much your sides hurt? There is something extremely liberating and freeing about laughter, perhaps it is the way we breathe down deep as we exhale in guffaws which is so therapeutic.

Breathing is essential to our being. In Genesis God breathes and the world including man comes into being. In the beginning of John's gospel we are reminded of the breath of God in the form of Jesus who is breathed into our world. The last act of Jesus on the Cross was to breathe out. At Pentecost the Spirit of God is breathed on humanity as the empowering act of God.

In the midst of all this God laughs for the breath of God confounds those who take themselves seriously. And God is still laughing. When we laugh deeply from the centre of our being we join the breath of God creating, saving and resurrecting our world.