“THE GREAT SURGE”

   

Oops! Sorry I missed last issue. “Mea Culpa”. I was abducted by medical staff who ordered an angiogram while I was at RNS Hospital having a peritoneal infection attended to, so I was out of action for a week. My article this time is now being written while in respite for several weeks in Kamilaroi where I can concentrate on my dialysis exchanges without having to look after the rest of myself in between.

I was feeling very sorry for myself when I saw her on the nightly TV news. She was a teenaged girl being lifted from a dodgy looking boat that had made it to Europe, one of many getting as far away as possible from what was home in war-torn Syria. The girl was in a wheelchair and I recognised all too well the condition of cerebral palsy. Her chair was pushed by her elder sister along the endless bumpy gravel road from despair to freedom as they determined to join their brother who had already made it up to Germany.

Like so many others these sisters would be camping where they could along the way dependent upon the unpredictable grace of others. At least I would have a welcoming roof over my head for respite, food provided on the table, laundry done plus the little unexpected kindnesses within a secure environment. Unfamiliar as my pillow may be, I am not in a strange country fleeing a dangerous space. And I can still walk.

There are too many who can well appreciate those words of Jesus when he told his first disciples that “the Son of Man has no place he can lay his head”. The number of displaced people surging on the move now exceeds that of the population of Australia. Europe and Australia have great difficulty in getting an act together to address this critical need.

There is a prayer by Michel Quoist which describes that helpless experience of being flooded with relentless overwhelming demanding need that tests one’s resources to the limit. The older (and sometimes sicker) we grow the more we feel our own powerlessness. Quoist prays to our Lord for relief from this never-ending burden of pressing needs and the Lord answers him, “While all these people have been streaming in, I have slipped in among them.”

Yes, need is bearing down upon us and will always be with us. The refugees today represent all of history’s displaced people over millennia, among whom we may find some of our own ancestors. We and our governments will have to factor in this inevitable displacement of many persons fleeing unsafe places to places of refuge. These places were factored in by the people of God in ancient Israel within their own communities and not swept under some offshore carpet.

Yes, we can step up if we seek strength from the ever living Christ who has slipped in among us. He advocates of behalf of those who cannot yet advocate for themselves so that they can have that opportunity to share our strength and compassion among those who will come after them.

“AND WITH YOUR SPIRIT”

      

Did you ever like ghost stories? Has anyone tried to tell you about haunted houses where strange things have gone bump in the night? Have people talked to you about “ouija” boards and mysterious séances? Have I now managed to get the hairs on the back of your neck standing straight up?

You may remember those days when adults standing up front in Sunday School or Scripture spoke to you about the “Holy Ghost”. This term changed to the “Holy Spirit” once little boys like me kept sounding a low and ominous “Woooooooo” whenever “Holy Ghost” was mentioned.

Perhaps you did a hunt through the Bible to find out how many times the word “spirit” was mentioned and where. Yes, you are quite right, “spirit” is first mentioned in the second verse in the story of creation where the Spirit of God hovered/brooded over the face of the waters.

Spirit is free. Spirit cannot be locked up (even though “spirits” can be bottled). We can’t nail spirit down. Spirit comes from God for spirit is within the triune God at the time when God alone existed. Although spirit can be contained within God, spirit emanates from God as God wills.

Pentecost celebrates the season when we, the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church recognises that God, through Jesus Christ, has made spirit available to us where we are no matter who we are. We become energised by spirit because the Holy Spirit is God expressed in energy with us, among us, around us, and between us.

Too often we have looked upon the Holy Spirit as just a personal spiritual relationship between us and God – “We’ll build a world of our own that no one else can share” as the Seekers used to sing. I’ve heard many stories of spiritual journeys where it is just the person and God with the person pre-occupied with personal identity. Spirit is personal but by no means individualistically confined.

Spirit involves relationships. When the prophet Elijah was about to depart forever, his apprentice Elisha asked to inherit his spirit (2 Kings 2:9). Jesus promised his disciples that by leaving them the spirit could then and would come. (John 16:7-15). In Jesus Christ, God had become matter. With the physical body of Jesus departing, God as matter would be replaced by God as energy. Einstein would have understood this relatively well.

Matter is confined to one place and one time. Energy is not. With Jesus ascended, the Spirit could be seen to be free to be wherever disciples gathered or scattered. When we gather for worship, the Spirit warms us like coals in the fire-place. When we scatter to serve, the Spirit becomes our energy expended for the world around us. When we are weak, this gives us strength.

This has come home to me personally earlier this year when a new chapter began for me with my need for regular peritoneal dialysis to support my weakened kidneys. The warm support I have been receiving continues to be my strength as I adjust to living with this attached lifeline catheter of mine. This has underlined for me the presence of the Holy Spirit among us 24/7.

So many of us can attest to the spirit moving among us at worship and fortifying us for service. This has kept us going for now over 2000 years and will nurture and sustain us for as long as God wants. Like Elisha and the first disciples we have inherited the Spirit from those who have since physically departed. We can pray that when our time eventually comes for us, too, to depart we will have mentored others so that they too may share in the joys and challenges of the Spirit as part of both the gathered and the scattered people of God.

“COMING THROUGH EASTER ”

The anaesthetist murmured something to me as he hovered over my bed in the small operating theatre. My eyelids closed for a minute and when they fluttered open again he appeared to have morphed into three nurses grinning at me to tell me “it was all over” and that I “had come through”. I asked them where their wings were before they had me wheeled through the narrow corridors, where passers-by were almost pinned to the walls, back to my room where I had time to contemplate before the surgeon (now unmasked) returned to examine his handiwork. I thanked him for taking me to the theatre but apologised for falling asleep during the performance.

This all happened to me last December when I had my catheter attached to me for dialysis. I thought of what would have happened if I hadn’t woken up again. Would I have known I hadn’t awoken? Would that have mattered? Questions kept tickling my mind. It would have been a peaceful way to have gone back to God and somehow that wouldn’t have bothered me.

With Easter coming upon us, those contemplations return to me but with the added reminder that Jesus’ own going back to God was anything but peaceful. The Gospels tell us how he had reminded his disciples after Caesarea Philippi what his fate would be once he entered Jerusalem but that he would rise after the third day.

Mind you, these Gospels were written at least a generation after the event so it is hard to tell how much editorial had crept in before then. I am sure that this reassuring afterthought wasn’t in the front of Jesus’ mind on that fateful Friday morning and certainly wasn’t recorded in any of his sayings from the cross.

But Easter is a package, both the Friday and the Sunday. One doesn’t make sense without the other. Paul’s account of resurrection in 1 Cor 15 was written before the Gospel accounts. He couples Jesus’ death and resurrection with our death and resurrection. Paul does this because he had been a Pharisee and, unlike the Sadducees, believed in resurrection according to the last verse in the Book of Daniel.

This was something for me to contemplate having then just come out of surgery. Have you had this experience? This is not something we normally chat about over our morning cuppas but I would be surprised if it hasn’t crossed our minds sometime. Did you, like I did, engage in animated discussions in your youth groups, as I also did in theological college?

One thing we do know is that is difficult to find anyone with genuine experience of having come “back from the other side”. No, seances don’t count.

Yet, right throughout our New Testament is that hope that once we go to God we are in his hands and that can be OK. What’s left of our body may be, as we say, “pushing up daisies”, continuing the recycling of our molecules right through from the day of the Big Bang far into the unknowable future. But we are more than body and recycled molecules. What’s left of us somehow remains in the hands of God and whom better can we trust?

            The stories of Jesus, the Risen Christ, that we read reassure us of that trust even though like the first disciples we may not always “get it” in the beginning. But these accounts have kept generations upon generations of disciples going in faith right down to us. These have kept disciples going when the journey is hard and challenging because always at the end we have that promise of being forever with God and we know it took the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ, now risen in us, to open our eyes to this promise.

            Dare to travel through the blackness of Good Friday into the dawn of Easter hope.

“THE RENEWING OF OUR MINDS ”

            

New Year resolutions, according to my desk calendar, go in one year and out the other. My resolutions were decided for me. Early in December, Santa had presented me with a Tenchkoff catheter inserted into my abdomen (hence my move from belts to braces) to enable me to drain out into one bag and re-fill from a fresh one.

Mid-January saw me at the RNS Peritoneal Dialysis (PD) unit undergoing intense one-on-one training from the nurses where I had to learn 30 odd exacting steps on how to administer four bag exchanges every day, first before breakfast, next before lunch, then before dinner, and last before bed, each process taking about an hour. I am slowly but steadily learning how to do this myself thanks to patient filial tutelage and to fit the rest of each day around these constant processes.

So, my resolution is to learn how to manage this new chapter in my life helped by breathing exercises and mindfulness in minimising my anxiety and other stresses. Paul’s message to the Romans takes on new meaning when he writes, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind”, or in other words, “Get out of your rut and be groovy”. I’m sure we all have experiences of change along the way where we have to take new directions outside our comfort zone and embark upon a steep learning curve.

Thank God we belong to a community here at North Ryde where we support one another in prayer and in many other unexpected ways. The spirit here glows wherever we need that warmth in stressful times.

Lent is arriving again. Baby Jesus has not only grown up to full maturity he is now about to “set his face towards Jerusalem” where his near future will be dreadfully grim. He does this because he knows our best interests far better than we do. Lent emerges because Jesus gives up his life.

We cannot move forward without leaving behind us anything that impedes our new priorities. Lent is the time when we focus on Jesus and the way he set his own priorities with us in mind. We refresh our own discipleship by auditing our own priorities in this light. Events happening in our own lives often oblige this audit for us. Now is the time we can support one another through such not always painless changes.

Let us continue our ongoing process of being transformed by the renewing of our minds.

(P.S. This article is a little shorter because my next PD transfer is now due)