“IT’S ALL ABOUT JESUS”

          

            Easter holidays are coming and right across Australia plans are underfoot, as they are for any holidays, on the best ways to enjoy a good break from work and school. There’s footy to watch, sailing on the river, camping in the bush, perhaps a tour away from the traffic congestion to somewhere more exotic.

            Australians look forward to holidays. Maybe somewhere along the line some one may pause to ask if anyone knows what the holiday is for. Amongst the shrugs a voice plaintively utters something about chocolate eggs and bunnies so a toast is raised to chocolate bunnies and the show moves on.

            The media don’t help that much. Amongst all the special days in the year, when did you last see or hear Ash Wednesday mentioned? The day before, certainly, but the season of Lent has now been all but forgotten in the public eye.

Conspicuous consumption continues its reign uninterrupted by little known seasons like this.

            Mentioning Lent does not boost sales, the market cries. Closing down for respect for Good Friday is considered a nuisance. Paying penalty rates for working Sundays and any other special day when work has to be done is grizzled about. In all, we are encouraged to forget the reason for the season.

            The culture we now live in today is at pains to airbrush the name of Jesus from society. It is socially taboo to talk about him even to mention him as an historical figure. Certainly, bringing to anyone else’s attention, his self-sacrifice on Good Friday, particularly if others are in the middle of a good time, is being the wettest blanket of all. Try raising the reason for the season this Easter.

            I had an unforgettable experience the first time I walked into Holy Spirit Catholic Church. As soon as I’d come through the doorway, there confronting me was a life-sized, life-coloured crucifix with the bleeding Saviour of this world draped awkwardly from it. In that church there was nowhere else to look. I was left in not the slightest doubt what it was all about.

            It’s easy for even us disciples of Jesus Christ to become so caught up in the business of church and of life itself that we can erase from our minds that it is all about Jesus. Jesus is no narcissist even in an age where narcissism is thrust into our faces almost everywhere we turn and that is the point. Where “fake news”, “alternative facts”, and “disinformation” become fashionable, the idea of self-sacrifice is shoved off the radar even at Easter.

            So, what we are called to do during the rest of Lent coming up to Easter is to ensure that in the living of our lives this time is all about Jesus. Put your head inside the doorway of Holy Spirit Church and get the picture. Everything else is meant to fit behind the one whose kingdom is not pre-occupied in bombing civilians or cornering the global market but rests in the spirit where love, joy, peace, goodness, gentleness, and self-control become currency for now and the future, just as Jesus showed us in spades.

            Yes, it’s all about Jesus and the sooner the world is exposed to this truth the better it will be for the future.

“BELLING THE CAT”

         

Aesop tells us the fable of the Mice and the Cat. There was a nervous group of mice whose number was steadily diminishing by a cat stealthily sneaking up on them and quietly carrying them off one by one. The mice assembled for a secret meeting to decide what they could do to preserve themselves from this silent predator.

After much discussion, one bright young mouse came up with the idea of hanging a bell round the cat’s neck so they could then hear it coming and escape in time. This received enthusiastic approval from all the mice except for one old mouse who remained silent. They thought he was deaf and began to explain their proposal in detail. He stopped them with one question – who will actually put the bell round the cat’s neck?

Uh oh! So many worthwhile plans fall at the hurdle of implementation, and by now you are wondering what this has to do with Easter anyway. Ahhh! The bottom line of the fable is not only to remind us how reality impedes all our idealism but that to achieve something worthwhile and essential is often impossible without cost and self-sacrifice. We cannot have our cake and eat it too.

We see this so plainly in what happens in the world around us. US Presidents and other leaders have been assassinated when they promote peaceful and just diplomacy over violence. We see Barack Obama copping it for trying to institute fair healthcare in the US. We see German Chancellor Angela Merkel pilloried for her courageous generosity in helping Syrian refugees find safety in her country. We ask why it is so risky, dangerous, and costly to do what is good in the teeth of vested interests determined to milk the vulnerable.

There are two events in the Acts of the Apostles where Paul suffers from doing what is good and right. In Philippi he heals a demented slave-girl fortune-teller from her suffering only to have her owners, now thwarted from their easy income, have him and Silas thrown into prison. In Ephesus Paul preaches a God not made with hands to the ire of the silversmiths who cause a riot because their income would be threatened so they force Paul into house arrest for his own protection.

Now the penny drops about Easter. Jesus sets his face towards Jerusalem knowing full well he is unlikely to leave it alive despite the protestations of his disciples who want to see him achieve the Kingdom by force.

But that would have defeated the purpose. The true Kingdom that needed to come required running a relentless gauntlet into ultimate self-sacrifice.

            There is something in what we call human nature (which is anything but truly human) that resists that Kingdom coming in which God’s will is done on earth as it is done in heaven. We keep expecting God’s will to be done in heaven as it is done on earth. One only has to look at Syria, Manus Island, and too many other places to know all human beings seem able to do on earth is to establish hell instead.

            Belling the cat is going to be dangerous and costly if it is going to work. Jesus takes up the self-sacrifice himself, not because of any perceived wrath of God but because of the wrath of human beings who will not co-operate with God’s Kingdom or any other rule where one cannot receive the lion’s share in it. And it’s all because we as human beings have since time immeasurable have insisted on our advantage that it became necessary for Jesus to take on the disadvantage that would then have to occur.

            This is why Jesus has become the most avoided person in history because we know all too well that it’s not God but ourselves who are responsible for putting Jesus on the cross. We call the day Good Friday because Jesus with eyes wide open gave himself for us. In the words of children’s hymn writer Cecil Frances Alexander, “He died that we might be forgiven. He died to make us good.” We call the season Easter because our crucified Lord has risen and he has risen in us. “You ask me how I know he lives. He lives within our hearts”. And we are the Church because we can experience and share our new lease of life. Go out and live.

“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.

“WHO KILLED JESUS?”

I enjoy a good “Whodunnit” where I try to get into the mind of the detective working from whatever clues are available to see if I can spot the killer before the others do. Not all cases are closed and that is the challenge. Are we sure, for instance, that we know who killed Jesus?

Bringing suspects before the courts hasn’t been fruitful. The common response, even in the ICAC, is an almost automatic loss of memory with the words tumbling out, “I cannot recall.” Fortunately, in this case, we have at least four reliable witnesses, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John who have faithfully recorded irrefutable evidence that the murder took place.

The soldiers who hammered those spikes into healing hands claim they were only acting under the Governor’s orders. This Governor has been exposed in our traditional creeds when Jesus was described as having “suffered under Pontius Pilate”. Pilate pleads that the baying crowd would have had him reported to Rome so he acted “under duress”. The people point their fingers at Caiaphas and the other religious leaders – “They made us do it.” Caiaphas is on record for excusing himself with those unforgettable words, “It is expedient that one man should die for the people”.

Fingers, disclaiming responsibility, are pointing everywhere. Lawyers thrive today because taking responsibility for what goes wrong is simply “not done”. Victims cruelly suffer and suffer even more when no one can be held accountable. Obeyed most scrupulously is the Eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not be found out”.

Likewise, the killing of Jesus is commemorated as something inexplicable that happened so long ago but we are rightly disturbed when we sense ourselves more involved than we intended to be. Somehow, all these people there at the time remind us too much of what we tend to say and do. Consequences happen and we find that we “have done those things we ought not to have done and left undone those things we ought to have done”.

Looking around at the wrongs that are happening around us and the good that is left undone, we can only look within to find that we have fallen short in rectifying the situation. Lent up to Good Friday reminds us only too well that suspicion for the killing of Jesus does not simply rest on those there at the time, but that we are implicated as complicit after the event. Human behaviour, then and now, have continued to contribute to the steps that led Jesus to the loneliest of hills outside Jerusalem’s wall.

Yes, in this climactic twist, this “Whodunnit” has nailed the killers – you, me, and the whole damned world. The one to be killed, Jesus, looks at us all knowingly, and still goes on his tragic way. His murder becomes his self-sacrifice because he knows.

Easter occurs for us so that we have that new opportunity to live as if Jesus has come back to us again to put behind us that behaviour which craves victims for our ego, and to live that life, expressed in Jesus, that God wants for his created world.

“ROTTEN TOMATOES”

My next door neighbour has been picking tomatoes of a bush in a pot. This tomato bush emerged from the pot after she put on some of her compost on some other vegetables she had planted. Apparently she threw an over-ripe tomato into the compost and a seed survived to sprout again.

Whoever thought that out of rotten tomatoes would come fresh unexpected fruit. Is God trying to tell us something?

There’s a sense of Easter here. Out of something dead has come something living. Everyone is surprised. That’s the story of Easter.

As Lent moves on with the crepe myrtle flowers of the Indian summer to remind us with their deep purple blooms with variations of red, we join Jesus in his long journey as again he sets his face toward to Jerusalem the place where they stone prophets.

Like Peter and the others, we beg him not to go where nothing good could happen to him but he looks at us sadly and trudges on relentlessly. It all goes horribly, horribly wrong. We feel his humiliation at the hands of the cruel and his abandonment as his disciples turn their backs on him feeling that God has done so as well.

I won’t go down that path to describe what it must feel like to be nailed to a piece of wood which is jolted into the hole dug for it on top of a hill shaped like a skull. We will, like those who still loved him, follow at a safe distance, and yes, too, silently beat our breasts.

He will be taken down, put away in a borrowed tomb and the stone rolled across to keep body snatchers out. His body will be left behind as past history, perhaps remembered, perhaps not. His friends will meet and wring their hands. It is all over.

Stop the presses! It is not all over. He is not dead. He has risen. Disciples are excited with joy and become apostles with tireless feet. The rest is history, our own history, and it still goes on.

So, where is Jesus now?  In my youth we used to sing a chorus with the words, “You ask me how I know he lives. He lives within our hearts.” It’s more than looking at the story this way and that to make sense out of it all. The story becomes an experience for us and still goes on even though we walk through the shadows of death.

We don’t particularly like change, well, not if we have no say in it so often the case. From the time we are born until the time we die, we keep on changing often without even knowing it although there are times when it can be very sudden. Things and people we are used to are replaced by those we are not.

It also happens with churches even if we want to sing “and nothing changes here.” During April, the Easter season, several of us will be attending Synod 2013 at Knox College where we will be obliged to face uncomfortable changes outside of our control. We will have to learn how to work smarter rather than harder, learning good stewardship of shrinking resources just when the need is greater. In so many ways, we are called to walk the dying and rising again experience.

The church is not meant to avoid these experiences of the world into which we are sent. Somewhere deep down in us often where we can’t always find it is that little seed escaped from something that is forever gone.

After Easter will come Pentecost where the church acknowledges that though the body of Jesus has gone his spirit has chosen our flesh to clothe our new life for the sake of the world. Remember, Jesus Christ has breathed on his disciples so that we receive his spirit, so that just as the Father sent him so he sends us.

May the death and life of Jesus grow within you!

“DEATH AND RESURRECTION EVENTS”

Easter is a time when we commemorate death and resurrection. The second part of this we like but going through the first is the challenge. Reflecting on our lives, we recall death and resurrection events.

I’ve been attached to various churches during my journey and they have undergone such events. I started Sunday School at Rose Park Methodist Sunday School, SA in 1944. Last time I heard it was a combined Uniting Church-Churches of Christ congregation. I returned to Eudunda where the Methodist Church (built in 1888) was my spiritual HQ. Recently, I heard the building was past safe use so the Uniting congregation now meets in the local Health Centre.

My next church was the big old Wallaroo Methodist Church from 1951-1952. After church union, the buildings of the old churches fell into disuse but somehow somewhere a Uniting congregation still meets, I believe. My middle high school years were spent at Tusmore Methodist Church. After I left, a new building was constructed but recently a number of Uniting congregations have formed a more central congregation.

To cut a long story short, I was confirmed in 1958 in the Bagot Road Methodist Church in Subiaco, WA. Several churches in the area combined years later, and a few years ago a Coffee Shop venture replaced the buildings. My first appointment in 1961 was Midland Junction Methodist Church with Greenmount further up the hill. The Midland venue in time became a car park for Woolworths while the wooden Greenmount building was eventually transported and the surviving congregations now meet together in the newer suburb of Swan View.

My first post-training place was Mullewa now an outstation of Geraldton, as is probably Mingenew whose brick fence outside the bee-infested wooden building was stronger than the building. Brookton/Beverley doesn’t have its own minister now. Regional resource ministry is alive and well in rural WA. My Gosnells congregation (1978-1982) later moved to the former Salvation Army property.

I re-visited Dubbo in February where I was one of 2 & 3/7 ministers from 1987-1989 working out of 3 buildings. Now it is down to one building with a regional minister working out of Wellington. There you are, death and resurrection of congregations within three States during my lifetime… and it is still going on as we travel on new and risky paths.

Most of us have come to North Ryde Community Church from previous places to pool our experiences and resources, remembering the death and resurrection events that have led us to this present moment. We follow Jesus who had the death and resurrection experience to outdo us all.

None of us know what the future will hold for us, individually or as a congregation, although as a congregation we are better placed than so many we know of. Years ago, I met a visitor who came from Salonika in Greece, formerly Thessalonica of New Testament fame. As I suspected he belonged to a church named St Paul’s (why should we not be surprised), probably one of the longest serving churches in existence.

We cannot strive to repeat that kind of history. Our churches are more mobile than we know. Faith has come to us from many lands through centuries of death and resurrection. First has come the death of Jesus and his resurrection through his first disciples who became the Body of the Risen Christ. These disciples died but the Spirit of Christ within and among them has been continuously resurrected throughout each generation from then to now, and hopefully continues to those coming after us.

The sun sets and it is night but it always rises again to begin a new morn.