“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.

“THE CHATTERING TREE”

           

Have you noticed the “chattering tree” on your way to North Ryde Community Church? It’s a huge tree (you can’t miss it) on the corner block facing our church. Each time I arrive this tree is alive, its leaves hiding a mass of resident birds of differing species loudly discussing their accommodation arrangements with their neighbours.

There are other noticeable things available. When the bottlebrush trees alongside Cutler Parade are in bloom, each tree quivers full of lorikeets feasting upon the nectar. In the front of the North Ryde Community Aid Centre you can notice community beds of flowers and of vegetables and herbs growing.

Perhaps we may have been in too much of a hurry or have too many things on our minds to notice any of these things. God has so much to show us and we do mean sometime to stop and smell the Manse roses but procrastination is always something we put off trying to correct.

We are entering that long part of the season of Pentecost where we are called upon, according to “With Love to the World” to “focus on God’s creation and reflect on our own faith journey”. We are often so busy trying to keep on top of things that we miss the simple messages of creation all about us. We ignore them at our peril and at the peril of those who will come after us who may well find them no longer there when it is too late.

Less and less we taste the locally grown food and depend upon imports from God knows where. Not only is the little community garden next door to our church hardly noticed but its purpose to encourage attenders at the Centre to participate in the nurture of these plants. In times of disadvantage, an ability to grow and prepare one’s own food can mean the difference between dignity and despair, between self-reliance and dependency. And it is only when we begin to notice our environment that we find our proper place within it.

I suspect that El Nino is arriving in what is turning out to be a dry time for us where water and therefore some foods become all the more precious through their scarcity. The bowling green lawns look brown. Watering is taking place this winter because the rains are spasmodic.

All these are signs that we are neglecting our environment – the creation of God. Our farmers continue to find rural life more difficult with our cities becoming more congested by default. Country bridges, the lifeline to many communities, fall into disrepair because resources seem only available to develop high-rise urban living.

The sign of the chattering tree is that of God telling us something about his creation. In Jesus Christ we have been given the opportunity for new life, not just for us, but for our community, not only for ourselves but for all life placed around us. When we stop for a moment, we may hear the cries of people treated badly, near and far away. We may experience in the changes of our climate that we have not treated our environment much more kindly than those seeking asylum. We find to our horror we are capable of great cruelty and indifference when what we want is put at risk in any way. Nature and human victims cry out like the murdered Abel in Genesis ch 4 from the ground on which we stand.

We remember Jesus who did not shrink from putting himself at great risk so that we may have life abundant. Our call to discipleship is to include others and our environment to taste this great life which God has given to us.