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Hope to you this Advent, Peace for Christmas 2017 & a positive 2018

“Arrunga” Uniting

334 Kissing Point Road,

ERMINGTON NSW 2115;

(02) 9807 4942

cnridings@gmail.com

How are you? Welcome to my soap opera Episode 78

May this Advent and Christmas fill you and those about you with peace.

            My previous chapter was much truncated and I had to cancel my slow mail activities due to my move from Ryde, several falls including bruising my left shoulder which put my left hand and arm onto very light duties, several visits to hospital, and my continuing “dedication” to my kidney dialysis still keeping me from running amok on the streets. My epistles are briefer. You won’t want to know all the medical details.

            You will be pleased to know that my home peritoneal dialysis performed four times every day before meals and bed for 2 solid years, ceased towards the end of January when I had a fistula inserted into my right arm ready to convert over to haemodialysis which required my attendance at Royal North Shore Hospital thrice every week stating early in February where this arm was pinned down and things (this is where I look away) inserted to circulate my blood for 4 hours by very capable specialist nurses who cackled with laughter at the noises I made when 2 local anaesthetics were injected. I really am a sensitive new age guy.

            I began to find this year that there were far far less events I could attend. My GP advised against my driving which meant that only when kind friends could chauffeur me was I able to go. Very isolating. My haemodialysis sessions were on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday afternoons. I would be picked up at Arrunga by Patient Transport anytime between 11.30am to 2.30pm to go to RNSH and be returned home anytime between 7.30 – 10pm. Being a kidney patient tends to eat up the day. My son Andrew went shopping with me for an iPad to use with my left hand during dialysis while the right one had to be kept perfectly still to keep the “things” from popping out and sending the machines into alarm mode. This helped me communicate sanely with my former world during dialysis.

            The fistula took a while to mature from a sensitive thin line to a steady reliable one and some surgical adjustments were made. Daughter Joanna flew down for Brisbane to Sydney and called in briefly to look over my new home which, of course, was wheelchair friendly. I recommended a choir familiar to our Care & Share group to also perform at Arrunga which was well received.

            In May, Andrew left Brisbane for Melbourne to begin work as a Research Assistant at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology which thrilled us immensely. Because my GP retired me from driving, I needed to dispose of my 2001 Toyota Echo hatchback NVJ201 I’d had for about 9 years. It was unsaleable due to much electronic development since that time so it was given to a youth charity in June so it could be dismantled with the parts sold. I am now spared from trying to squeeze onto those conveyor belts known as roads which swarm with a plague of vehicles probably looking for a space to park. The bus service is rarer here than at Ryde so venturing out from Arrunga on my own is something I hope to master.

            I managed to squeeze a time between specialist appointments to return to my dentist who saw a molar in my right lower jaw that, like my little car, needed removing. Andrew flew up from Melbourne for the first weekend in July to help me celebrate my 78^th birthday. Pity I can’t spin at 78rpm. I had two bouts of the dreaded URTI during June and August which banished me like a leper into solitary confinement unless I was wearing a mask. So nice to feel wanted. Let us spray.

            Andrew was kind to come up to accompany me to Knox Grammar School where our NSW/ACT Uniting Church Synod celebrated the ministry of jubilarians and I was one of those marking 50 years of ordination. For those who came in late, I was one of three Methodist ministers ordained by the WA Conference on Sunday, 15^th October 1967 in Wesley Church, Perth, WA. At my local Uniting Church, we called our new minister, aged 30, ordained about 50 years after me. Now our ministers are younger than my children, and have no history of those three unpronounceable denominations who united in 1977.

            I’ve managed to be taken to our Church History executive but as I cannot get to my Faith & Unity committee meetings in Sydney, I have retired from this committee. I also feel I’ve passed my use by date there. I am disappointed that other churches in NSW aren’t as inclusive as our Uniting Church. There is still denominational red tape about the ordination of women and celebrating Holy Communion together, and I found more collaboration when I was on HACC where both church and community agencies had none of those handbrakes.

            During the year, the ABC TV ran a segment on Barossa Deutsch and showed, to my surprise, a photograph of the foundry in Eudunda with my great-grandfather, Johannes Gottlieb (Big John) Wiesner standing with his men, left hand on hip, on a platform. No one else yet has seen that particular program. Did you?

            This will have to do for now. What has your year been like?

                                                                                                                        Shalom !!!

Christopher N Ridings

“JESUS IS COMING”

 

            I was early for worship and I was a little down that morning. I trudged in to find my seat and noticed the choir practising for Advent. Suddenly they burst out with, “Jesus is coming. O yes I know!” with such vim and confidence that my spirits shot up like a dog stung by an ant.

            It’s been a difficult year for so many of us in so many different ways. Changes come our way whether we will them or not. Our lifestyles are reduced by the downsizing of our lives and we grieve for what we had and what we could do.

The news outside puts our little crises back into the first world bracket. Whoever first wrote, and I suspect the prophet Joel, “There shall be blood and fire. The sun shall not give off its light and the moon shall turn to blood” seems to be referring to the morning Al Jazeera news on SBS each time I turn it on. If you want to know what I pray during the news, the prayers are laments and intercessions as the common people suffer while their leaders muddle. How long, O Lord, how long, my insides wail silently.

“Jesus is coming. O yes I know!”  Whatever is happening to each of us and all of us anywhere, we can now sing this affirmation as the budding agapanthus outside ushers in Advent joining with the already ubiquitous jacaranda. In fact, throughout this spring the flowers in their diverse harmony of colour speak the colours of the rainbow to us when our spirits descend into grey.

Living in Arrunga among the aches and pains of looming age, I can look out on the rose bed where the carefully tended square garden of roses still flaunts its living beauty. On the way into RNSH for my haemodialysis, we pass garden after garden in the streets of bouganvillia with a glimpse of Illawarra flame tree and liquid amber with the emerging Christmas bush. Each in its own way and from its own place, they cry peace through beauty and hope after winter.

I can’t help noticing the landscape of most of these places wrecked by conflict, covered with stones, rubble, and dust, the only colour being the clothing of survivors fleeing to God knows where, crying for help from God knows whom.

“Jesus is coming. O yes I know!” We hear these words ringing in our ears and in our hearts even from the colour in the flowers around us. Would that we could send all these colours to those for whom their environment for the forseeable future is the greyness of endless dust. How will they know the hope we can now sing? Well, we have the Christmas giving tree, the Uniting World giving scheme, and our Christmas Bowl, plus many other opportunities to send hope somewhere that needs to hear what our choir sings to us.

Forget those congested shops encouraging children to visit “Satan” as one typo affected blurb put it and to buy one of those floor sized lime green and purple plastic pencil-sharpeners on special. Bethlehem sends out a quieter but longer lasting gift to all the world in all its wretchedness, one who brings beauty and colour and peace more reliable than whatever we can anxiously muster.

“Jesus is coming. O yes I know!”

“CORNELIUS”

            The Apostle Simon Peter, deemed the Rock of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, had been sent away with a flea in his ear by that upstart Paul from Tarsus. This humiliating story is told in Galatians chapter 2 when Paul rounded on Peter why he believed that all Christians, whether Jewish or not, should live the same as Jews.

            The Galatians themselves were an example of this unnecessary victimisation. They had little or no background in what we call the Old Testament so Paul had to start from square one to present to them the good news about this Jesus whom he called Christ. This epistle is the result of the events in Acts 14:8-23,27. After Paul had left, the area was visited by Christians from Jerusalem determined to ensure the Galatians Christians filled in the missing Jewish gaps.

This included the whole law of Moses, especially the dreaded Leviticus, including the stipulation that all faithful males be circumcised (ouch!), a painful practice from which we males are thankfully now exempt. And Peter had, without thinking this through, had gone along with this. Paul was livid at this misguided leadership display when they met at Antioch and told Peter so.  

The flea in Peter’s ear had not retreated when he arrived at Joppa (Acts 10). While waiting for lunch, he dozed off on the roof and dreamed of all sorts of animals, reptiles, and birds coming to him and a command to kill and eat from them. Being still a good Jew, Peter protested to God, quoting from Leviticus as one does as if God cannot read, aghast at eating anything “common or unclean”.

Back came the voice, “What God has cleaned, you must not call unclean.” The penny was beginning to drop for Peter as he was invited to visit the centurion Cornelius from the Italian Cohort, as Gentile as they come. The rest is history continuing into Acts chs 11, 15. Several of the chapters in Acts are out of sequence when first compiled but once sorted out the message becomes clearer.

Because of that historic meeting between Peter and Cornelius, stimulated by Paul, the good news of Jesus Christ has come down to us. Peter probably accompanied Cornelius when he returned to Rome so here we are.

We are here because our spiritual ancestors were prepared to step out of their comfortable box to include those they had previously left out. Cornelius keeps coming to the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church through our yesterdays and today, knocking on the door, strangers to what we have become used to, to seek inclusion.

Cornelius comes from different ethnic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds, from women seeking ordination, from those with all sorts of disability, and from people of differing and diverse sexual orientation. That voice still comes back to us, again and again, just when we thought we were comfortable in our own familiar ways, “What God has cleaned, you must not call unclean.”

“LEARNING THE GREEN THUMB”

            I was never meant to have green thumbs. Some authority adult guided me when I was a boy to a garden bed and bid me pull out some tough looking things called weeds then left me to it. They were certainly tough weeds and the novelty of this new experience soon wore off once my hands started protesting.

            Much more inviting were similar looking plants nearby and I found them much easier to pull out. The authority adult returned to scrutinise what I’d done and I looked up with my beaming smile to receive my well-deserved praise. Instead a thundery brow loomed down on me, “You stupid little boy. You were meant to pull out those infernal weeds, not those flower plants I planted yesterday.” Sigh! Ever since then I’ve been guilty of watering plants that ought not to have be watered and leaving unwatered those plants that ought to have been watered. Gardeners, have mercy on me!

            How that reminds me of Jesus’ Parable of the Weeds found in Matthew 13:24-30 among the parables of growing things. Weeds are defined as plants in the wrong place. They have a special habit of sneaking among the “good” plants and using them as shields when human hands reach down to uproot them. I am sure other would-be gardeners have caused some collateral damage in finding they have uprooted the wrong plants in their tidying up the garden patch.

            The gardener in this parable is fortunately very wise. Obviously having heard of my experience in my boyhood attempts at horticulture, he hesitates to let his staff loose on his garden at this point, preferring to wait until the reapers can better distinguish the crops.

            If only we could take this to heart more often today. Over this year or more, two great ancient cities have been destroyed before our televiewing eyes.

Aleppo was known to me in my childhood as a prominent trading centre, and Mosul was just across the River Tigris (one of the first rivers mentioned in the Bible) from even more ancient Ninevah, capital of ancient Assyria, known to us from the Book of Jonah and other parts of our Old Testament. To see such ancient history destroyed before our eyes is enough, in itself, to make one weep.

            Aleppo and Mosul have been unlucky to be caught up in two not unrelated wars continuing side by side. Invading forces have determined to root out militant resistance hiding within those cities among the terrified citizens. On this morning’s news, I learned that 40,000 civilians in Mosul have been killed, and God knows how many before in Aleppo.

            Tragically absent in all of the falling of Aleppo and Mosul is the wise words of the gardener in this parable. The “weeds” defending their patch in these respective cities have been hiding behind the civilians, effectively using them as human shields. Families able to flee are caught in the cross-fire, escaping one danger and succumbing to another. Just seeing their distressed faces and hearing their stories of unrelenting crises brings out the lament in me. Good Lord! Where are you?

            We hear excited shouts of victory with guns let off into the air and flags flying as if returning from a footy match where our team has won. The weeds have been taken out, yes, but what a pyrrhic victory with even more civilians, children, women, and men, those who couldn’t get out of the road in time, the casualties numbering much more than these “weeds”.

            Just imagine these cities were ours, every place bearing our postcode number reduced to unlivable rubble, family members, friends and neighbours no more to be seen or heard and we reduced to living from crisis to crisis. Not even a church building for shelter. Doesn’t bear thinking about it, does it?

            All this has happened before, of course. During the Normandy invasion after D-Day, the ancient city of Caen was bombed by the Allies to flush out German defenders, who had already retreated. Look up for yourselves the number of civilian citizens who perished in what was then considered a necessary act. “C’est la guerre!” was the resigned shrug.

            It’s so easy to plunge right in when wrongs need to be righted without considering the collateral damage which may well exceed the worth of the effort made. The number of civilians caught in crossfire by being in the wrong place at the wrong time because of human irresponsibility should sit heavily on human conscience while God weeps over the loss of human beings loved by him and by one another, future doctors, teachers, prime ministers, scientists all necessary to the future of their communities.

            Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers, as Tennyson keeps reminding us.

We may know this parable but we also need to have the wisdom to remember it when tough decisions are being made.