Pen and Ink Reflections - Pen and Ink Reflections

hearing everyone’s voice: setting the Spirit free

5/18/2018

Over the last few weeks I have had the wonderful, if challenging, experience of sharing in leading the God, Humanity and Difference course at St Francis’ College. This has included looking at a wide range of human differences: including those of race, disability, gender, sexuality, faith, culture, history, and socio-economic position. We have heard from a variety of voices from across our Church and world: including Canon Bruce Boase (as an Aboriginal priest, as we explored Reconciliation issues) and, not least, Elizabeth and Ann from our very own congregation here (as we explored faith issues related to disability). In addition, we have been blessed by the insights of the rich mix of backgrounds and experiences within the class itself, including students originally from Sudan and Korea. Sometimes this has meant that we have met fresh questions and ideas which will require some working out. For our God-given human differences are not always easy for us all to live with. We can see that clearly in some of the conflicts and controversies of our Church and world today. Yet, as we have discovered in our course this semester, if we hold them prayerfully, and work with them with intelligence and compassion, they are powerful gifts to us for healing, new life, and flourishing together. For properly to hear each of us, speaking our own witness to God in our own way, is to let the Holy Spirit fly free in fresh experiences of Pentecost…

rebelling for justice - sharing in God's transformation

4/15/2018

What is God’s work on earth and how do we participate in it? These seem to me questions that arise from our reading today - a reading that begins with Jesus appearance to his disciples, and ends with Him sending them out as witnesses to the work of repentance and forgiveness that is to be proclaimed to all nations...

Bodily Thomas and the Differently Abled Christ

4/7/2018

Caravaggio's 'The Incredulity of St Thomas'

If I were to ask 100 people to give me a nickname or adjective for the disciple Thomas, what do you think would be the most popular reply? I suspect it would be ‘Doubting’, don’t you? That is a shame. For there is much more to Thomas than an element of doubt. Ask any Indian Christian for example. They will tell you that Thomas was the great apostle of the ancient East, and that Indian Christianity traces its origins to him. In the very passage we have just read, we also heard Thomas confess Jesus Christ as ‘My Lord and My God’. What a powerful statement of faith! Historically many Christians have paid a great deal of attention to St Peter for saying something similar. Yet Thomas has been largely passed over. Makes you think, doesn’t it? I mean we don't go on talking about Betraying Peter do we? We might just as well do so. For Peter is manifestly more of a betrayer than Thomas is an iron-clad doubter. The fact is that Thomas is much much more than a doubter. You could even call him Affirming Thomas for that theological statement about Jesus as the Christ. However, I’d like to call Thomas something else altogether. Reflecting on today’s reading from John chapter 20, I’m inclined however to call him Bodily Thomas, or, maybe, as the Welsh might call him, Thomas the Body. For that name points us to some very important aspects of the Resurrection of Jesus…

Locked Shut and Breathed Open

4/7/2018

I want to talk about being locked shut and about being breathed open. And I want to explore what it might mean, as Jackie will do today (as she comes to baptism as an adult), to begin again.

‘The doors of the house where the disciples met were locked for fear of the Jews’. Those early disciples were a pretty terrified bunch. Even as the possibility that Jesus could be alive was dawning on them, they remained uncertain, afraid of being arrested and killed. It seems to me likely that they met secretly for a long time. The texts of the New Testament compress what was probably a lengthy process, into the shorter units of symbolic time. But whether these things happened over a few hours and days, or many years hardly matters. What matters is that a change occurred and a new beginning became possible...

God laughs

4/1/2018

Today is April Fool’s day, and there can be no better day for foolery and laughter than Easter Day. For there is a tradition of laughter and joke telling on Easter Day that began hundreds of years ago. The story goes that a monk in Bavaria was pondering the solemn events of Good Friday and the earth shattering events of Easter Day and suddenly he had a new insight, and he began to laugh. Once he started laughing he couldn’t stop; he laughed and laughed and laughed. His hearty laughter startled his companions from their solemn contemplation and they looked at him with amazement and disapproval. ‘Don’t you see?’, he cried out, ‘it was a joke! The best joke ever. On Good Friday when Jesus was crucified, the devil thought he had won. But God had the last laugh on Easter Day when he raised Jesus from the dead.’ And the monk began to laugh again, and his fellow monks began to get it, and they laughed and it became known as the Easter laugh, and the tradition of laughing and telling jokes on Easter Day began. So I am hoping that in a little while over morning tea we can share all our best jokes and laugh together.

The laughter echoing through the ages is a tangible witness to the good news of Easter- that Jesus Christ is alive among us; that death does not have the last laugh; that darkness does not conquer light. All the forces that conspired to kill Jesus, the fury, the lovelessness, the betrayal - God makes of them all a laughing stock. God laughs...

liminal times - new life rising

3/31/2018

We wait at the tomb. As Gregory of Nyssa pointed out centuries ago, Jesus lies in the tomb, in order to bring to life all who lie in tombs. We pause this Holy Saturday night, on the very threshold of resurrection. The Latin word for threshold is limen, from which we derive the word liminal, to describe all those spaces and times that are ‘in between’ - the ‘not quite yet’ spaces; the crossing points from one state of being to another.

Tonight is a liminal time and this is a liminal space that we have created, in order to draw near to Christ. For it is easier to draw near to Christ in a liminal time and place than in any other. Between light and dark, there is the twilight of dawn or dusk, exactly the kind of light in which the women went to the tomb on the first Easter Day. Between grief and happiness there is a space that belongs to the shy gift of joy, whose nature partakes of both. Between life and death, death and life, there is the waiting time; the time when nothing appears to be happening, but actually everything is happening. This is the chrysalis time, when the caterpillar dissolves and the butterfly emerges. The work is done inside, unseen and unknown...

becoming the Passion narrative

3/29/2018

Are homilies necessary in Holy Week? I wonder. Even more than at other times, our liturgical patterns are shaped so much by the Passion narrative as a whole that interrupting it with other words can seem somewhat intrusive. For the main thing is to enter into the narrative and drama of the Holy Week and Easter mysteries. We do not have to understand everything, or even say or do anything. We are simply invited into the narrative to become part of it and to allow the drama to form the core of our lives. For our task in the whole of our Christian lives is to become more like Christ, in Christ’s life, death and resurrection: to be Christ-formed, cross-formed, resurrection-formed. So it is not a doctrine of the cross we seek to know today. It is its claim and shape in our own lives. Maybe however, just a few words can help us on that journey?...

Love, Actually

3/29/2018

Very often the New Testament portrays Jesus as surrounded by crowds - crowds that are needy, crowds that are hostile, crowds that are hungry and demanding- always crowds. But the story of Maundy Thursday is not about the crowds, about the indifferent and fickle multitudes who tomorrow will be baying for his blood. Today’s story is about friends, close and intimate friends sharing a special supper together. We read the story of course with the benefit of hindsight and the reflection of the church. We know that it this is Jesus’s last supper and that betrayal, arrest, trial and crucifixion all lie ahead. We feel the agony of painful parting in his words and actions. The church has theologised this whole event to the point where it is very difficult to be in touch with what really happened. Yet I wonder if we can hear some of these words as if for the first time, and lift from them, if only for a few minutes, the shadow of what happens next..

healing - why and what?

3/13/2018

Recently I’ve pondered a good deal about healing - both in relationship to myself and to others I know.. How about you? For it is a strange thing: the Gospels are full of healings, but, for many centuries, healing did not bulk large in Christian teaching or practice. Healing is prominent in the early Church and in Christian revival or minority movements. Yet it largely drops out of focus until the last century. Then a number of features, including modern challenges, spiritual and liturgical renewal, and the charismatic movement, gave rise to fresh healing emphases. Significantly perhaps this has gone alongside a reduced emphasis on certain ideas of sin, judgement and mortality. For Christian theology changes, or it dies. Today, healing, suffering, and sin are categories with which we wrestle afresh. Like our Gospel story today, we also wonder about them and their inter-relationship…

calendar males and International Women's Day

3/8/2018

I have to admit that I was a little surprised when I looked at the Australian Anglican lectionary for today, with the remarkable John of God as the saint of the day. This feeling grew as I looked at the Church of England’s lectionary calendar for today. For this includes three other remarkable male figures: Felix, 7th century bishop and apostle to the East Angles in England; Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy - better known as Woodbine Willie - the remarkable priest, first world war chaplain, poet and promoter of the Industrial Christian Fellowship; and Edward King, 19th century principal of Cuddesdon, my theological college and saintly bishop of Lincoln. Each of these, like John of God, commands attention. Yet this day, 8 March, is International Women’s Day. One does wonder whether Anglicans are really switched on. Surely we might find one or more female saints to make a link today? Instead, we have to be much more creative to make connection…