“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.

“THE SHOCK OF LIFE”

  

Yes, I know I missed last issue again. Will my excuse of stopping breathing (temporarily, of course) on 21 Oct 2015 do? I collapsed upon my couch at home early that afternoon and awoke to find 5 pairs of eyes staring intently at me before I was briskly carted off to Royal North Shore Hospital in an ambulance. On the way in, I was told that my son had performed CPR on my by then bruised chest and so enabled my life story to continue. Otherwise I might never have known about the condition of aortic stenosis, often described in medical circles as the silent killer.

Open-heart surgery was prescribed and performed so that the clogged valve could be replaced into my heart by one from an unwittingly generous animal. I can now be identified by a thin red line down the front to match the yellow streak down my back. Three months after hospitilisation, I have been brought home to complete my recovery. My thanks to so many of you for your prayers and kind attention all of which has surely helped my healing process.

I never knew how easily and so quickly and quietly life can end. The difficult bit happens as one experiences the shock of life with the slow and challenging journey to recovery to live the life so graciously extended for me. Innumerable angels in many guises have appeared before me upon whom I have depended to help me recover. Those words, “No man [sic] is an island” thudded back into me, day by day.

We are beginning a new year. Epiphany comes to us in many ways and the best gift the wise men (and women) can bring to us is the wisdom accumulated from the experience of life. There is much stupidity and cruelty within this world so that we are left wondering how on earth we can ever change it. Like a “brand plucked from the burning” (Amos 4:11) – words quoted by Susannah Wesley when her 5 year old son, John, was rescued from the burning rectory at Epworth – we have been given the opportunity to do so and to ensure we leave the spirit behind us to those left to take up the challenge.

Epiphany with Lent about to come brings again to our attention the person of Jesus, hastily delivered from the sword of the soldiers of Herod the Great to put his own life on the line in his own time that we may live lives freed from the greed and violence that destroys so many. Yes, we too can be shocked into life that we may continue to follow Jesus on his journey so that lives may be lived in all fullness.

“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)

“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.

“LIFE IS LENT”

     

Facebook can be such a time waster if you let it but now and again, a real gem appears. Recently celebrated in the US (and further) was Martin Luther King Day, and one of the posts I thought too good to keep to myself. It was just in time for Lent. This is what he said the year before his assassination.

“You may be 38 years as I happen to be. And one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause.

“And you refuse to do it because you are afraid … You refuse to do it because you want to live longer … You’re afraid you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized, or that you will lose your popularity, or you are afraid that some one will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house, so you refuse to take the stand.

“Well, you may go on and live until you are 90 but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the announcement of an earlier death of that spirit.”

Martin Luther King, jr (1929-1968)

In Lent, so my lectionary card tells me, the Church remembers the life and ministry of Jesus and renews its commitment to him in Christian discipleship. That’s the short version of it. However, I’ve been told that the Church, as an organisation, must have a poor marketing strategy because its founder and head neither became a billionaire through the market nor lived to a great age.

Martin Luther King was killed, aged 39, as was Dietrich Bonhoeffer over 20 years before him. And we are called to follow Jesus Christ who two millennia ago also was killed in the prime of his life. Lent includes that fact otherwise why are we here committing our lives to one believed by so many not to “have made it”?

This is where MLK (for short) has a point. Would we be here at all had Jesus put his safety first and survived to a great age with descendants all around him? Would he be anything more than a bare footnote in historical memory, if that?

We are here because Jesus Christ is the source of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer and MLK and many nameless persons have said and done since that first Good Friday two thousand years ago. And Jesus Christ is the source of all that because he saw the great cause of the Kingdom of God and called upon those near and far to come out of the darkness into that light. Yes, he might have made a lot of money and settled down with a loving family.

Instead, he saw need and gave a hand up. He saw despair and gave hope. He saw sheep without a shepherd and lay down his life for those sheep.

When we talk about his “life and ministry” it’s not about our own which has been comfortable by his standards. It’s about a life and ministry cut brutally short because he put himself in peril that we might be spared that peril.

            But whoever follows Jesus may be called to take those same risks he took, like Bonhoeffer, MLK, and the host of others before and after them. While we often wonder why the world around us doesn’t seem to “get the message”, the spirit of this Jesus Christ enables us to be the message.

            Lent calls us to remember the life and ministry of Jesus, yes, but more than that, we are called to keep that spirit alive to inspire those yet to come.