“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)

“PEOPLE ON THE MOVE ”

            

Where did your family come from? Delving into the stories of our forebears (Goldilocks had but three), I find mine just didn’t stay put. Born a 4^th/5^th generation South Australian I found my Manchester Ridings ancestors probably arrived there from Yorkshire centuries before. Some of my German ancestors (Nitschke) were in Poland with one line (Gehling from Gael-ing) settling via Denmark from France. These were Huguenots, and I have several other ancestors like them who scattered to parts of England (Coe from De Caux) and Ireland (Bunn from Le Bon).

No matter where I looked I recognised refugees who are now part of my becoming who I am. Ancestors of mine emigrated from religious persecution, political turmoil, war, financial hardship, hunger, and from even family disputes. They kept moving from places where they were not safe, taking risks in finding new homes in strange lands. What are the stories of your families?

When I look at the Christmas Bowl appeal, I still see desperate people forced onto the move. Some yearn to be able to return to their damaged homes to rebuild their shattered lives. Some are stranded for generations in makeshift slums we call displaced persons camps. Others flee far away to find fresh places where they are allowed to settle.

On the poster this year we can read the plea, “Show you care this Christmas” and one of the calls is to help Burmese refugees have enough to eat until it is safe to return home. You can be assured that our gifts are not wasted. Like some of our ancestors, people today have no choice but to find safety somewhere and to survive until they can again stand on their own feet.

We will hear again the story of Jesus born in a stable that was away from home. We will remember how Joseph and Mary took him even further away because he was in danger. We see this story re-enacted not just in our Nativity plays but also lived out, as we read this, in the lives of countless children who are at risk by staying where their families used to call “home”.

There are reasons why people cannot stay put. When you look at it people have been on the move since humans came into being. I am sorry to say that they have not always been welcomed by those who have arrived before. History is littered with hard examples, and still goes on too close to home even as I write this. But when we do welcome those coming to us with our support, we are welcoming Jesus himself because he remembered all too well what it was like.

Show you care this Christmas! God has done so through Jesus.

“WHAT IS FAIR?”

           

What is our place in God’s world? Synod is looming with some thorny issues and difficult decisions. Social Justice Sunday is upon us. The challenge of ethical choices within a world not known for fairness stalks us relentlessly.

The recent re-telling of the Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard (Matt 20:1-16) brought back to my mind an historical event in Australia just over a century ago. High Court Justice Henry Bournes Higgins (1851-1929) brought down a judgement establishing the basic wage as a fair and reasonable return for work done that enabled a family of five to survive. A son of a Methodist minister, he would have heard his father preach on this parable and I would like to think that it remained in the back of his mind when he considered his judgement.

The story also reminded me of today’s employment difficulties for the young with little work experience, for the older workers past their peak, income discrimination based on gender, and for those with disabilities, whether from birth or acquired, who are unable to compete in the labour market.

Whatever is trumpeted about the market, we cannot say that is fair. Both business and politics are practised in a “hard ball” way with no quarter given to any vulnerability. This parable still embarrasses those of us who, consciously or unconsciously, evaluate human life and dignity according to economic worth.

Jesus, as usual, turns such thinking on its head. God wants us, so Matthew’s gospel tells us, to look at people regarding their needs rather than their worth. It becomes a decision made not just about “bottom line” figures but involving moral and ethical choices which cannot and must not be evaded.

We use the word “grace” for a number of things. I had a great-aunt and now a great-half-niece both named Grace. We say grace before meals. The grace features in the Benediction. Grace is God providing space for us to breathe in a world that attempts to confine us within the straightjackets of our human invention.

Every one of us breathing depends upon the unpredictable grace of those stronger than us. The market has no grace. That alone comes from God as expressed through Jesus Christ. Those around us can only know grace when it is can be demonstrated and thus recognised. Thus the least deserving labourer in the vineyard experienced the evaluation of his need rather than what his labour was worth. We have the opportunity to act like the householder in the parable rather than like the earliest labourers and thus show grace is still possible.