Pen and Ink Reflections - Pen and Ink Reflections

a children's festival for grown ups?

12/24/2021

“And the Word became flesh and stayed for a little while among us”

Most children of five or six can tell you at this season with reasonable confidence whose birth they are celebrating – “baby Jesus’” they will chorus if asked. It has to be said that it is with even greater confidence that they will tell you who it is that will visit their homes tonight and should even now be winging their way across rooftops, sleigh-bells ringing, bearing the presents for which they have learnt to long. In the minds of most of them Santa Claus and Baby Jesus belong together; and it cannot be thought surprising if over time the figure who brings the presents becomes more appealing than this somewhat elusive baby, who does not seem to bring anything in particular.

Now I’d like to invite you in these last few hours of Advent, while we still await the birth of Christ, to reflect on the ways in which the children are right – baby Jesus and Santa Claus do belong together; and upon the ways in which they are also wrong, or at any rate limited...

what is Resurrection for us?

4/4/2021

a shared reflection and invitation by Josephine Inkpin (J) & Penny Jones (P)...

(P) We‘ve just heard two different accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, haven’t we?! (Mark 16.1-8 and John 20.1-18) So what we do make of that – and all the other resurrection accounts which cannot be simply conflated? More importantly, what does Resurrection mean to us – to you, to me, to all of us together? That is not a question which can be answered in a few minutes of Reflection. Jo and I have therefore decided to open up a dialogue, which we hope will encourage us all to share in the days ahead. For one thing which is absolutely clear about Jesus’ resurrection of is that it is related through a multiplicity of stories and symbols. These come from different people and biblical outlooks and they thereby also invite us to share our own experiences and insights into Resurrection. For Resurrection is an extraordinary reality we celebrate today. Yet it is not a simple ‘fact’, is it Jo? Isn’t it rather an invitation to see, and travel into, deeper experience, deeper love, and deeper mystery?…

reflections on seven circles of suffering

4/1/2021

On this day we gather to remember the suffering of Christ, and those who. like Christ, have suffered: often needlessly, seemingly pointlessly. We will reflect upon seven circles of suffering: in our own person, in our family, in our close relationships, in our wider community, in our nation, in our world and in our earth. We light the Christ candle and seven candles
to bring to mind those seven areas where pain is often experienced. As we reflect more deeply on each one its candle will be extinguished but the Christ candle will continue.

by another road

1/2/2021

Journey of the Magi by James Tossit c.1894

What jumps out at you in any Gospel story? Asking that question is part of the practice of Lectio Divina – divine reading of the scriptures. If you are not aware of that spiritual pathway, do speak with Penny afterwards! Approaching scripture that way, today it is the phrase ‘by another road’ which springs out for me from the text. Now I know that is partly because, in returning to Sydney very soon, I am taking ‘another road’ in my life and ministry this year. Indeed, this Gospel passage came to mind vividly when I came to accepting a fresh calling in the Uniting Church. What I have to say today is linked to that reflective unpacking. Yet isn’t ‘by another road’ a great phrase for most of us in our world at this time, as we emerge from 2020 where old roads (literally and metaphorically) were difficult if not impossible, and as we begin a new year? Let me suggest three ways in which this may be so, drawing on the story of the Magi. For there are at least three great questions which the Magi pose, and embody, for us all. How, that is, will we learn, love and light up our world, so that we too journey home ‘by another road’?...

from multiverses to microbes - God with us

12/24/2020

One of the Christmas cards that struck my eye this year was one that has a picture of a Jesus figure on the front, accompanied by presents around their head, and the proclamation ‘It’s All About Me’. What do you think about that? I suspect that it is a gentle way of poking fun at both the tendency of some Christians to be somewhat sanctimonious about ‘possession’ of our end of year communal festivities, and also the way in which we often want Christmas to meet our own expectations. This often begins as children - doesn’t it? – when we human beings don’t quite receive the magical Christmas for which we were hoping: maybe when we don’t have quite the special present we were expecting; and/or when our Christmas meal, or worship, isn’t quite right, or too much; or when we, or others around us, aren’t able to maintain the proverbial spirit of peace and goodwill in all our interactions. Sometimes our expectations are just too much, or too unrealistic. Sometimes they are quite right, and we are let down by events or by others. Either way, we may feel a little betrayed, especially if hopes for ourselves are involved. Perhaps however, in the disappointments of our personal Christmases, we may still learn a little of the wisdom in the birth of Christ. Fresh light may then stream in, particularly when we start looking beyond ourselves – not simply to the Christ child, but to everything about them. This may be part of the learning of this Covid-19 year, in which many Christmases are not as the world as a whole would hope. For, like the first Christmas, pictured in various ways in the Gospels, we have had to learn that it is not ‘All About Me’. If God is among us – the central message of Christmas – then he/she/they are everywhere, but not as we expected, and all of us are, truly, ‘in this together’…

a right queer Christmas!

12/23/2020

Have you ever thought about how truly ‘queer’ in the best sense, Christmas is? Angels and shepherds, wise people of dodgy backgrounds with very odd gifts; a baby (but apparently one that according to the carol doesn’t cry!) and an unmarried mum giving birth in a hay barn – to say nothing of God sprinkling glitter across the sky in the form of stars and skies full of glory. It is all frankly very surprising, and really a bit queer.

And this is the point isn’t it? - that God, God always does the surprising thing, not the boring thing! God always turns the world upside down and showers blessings in unexpected places. God makes Godself flesh, incarnate, in some very unlikely ways.

how is your night vision?

11/28/2020

I have to admit that my night vision is pretty terrible. In fact, I avoid driving at night for this very reason. I know I should be exercising my eyes and eating more vitamin A, but the reality is that I have never been able to see very well at night and age is only making things worse. I am not asleep – I just don’t see too well in the dark. But being awake and seeing in the dark are key to today’s gospel reading...

in and beyond borders - living like Andrew

11/28/2020

It is one of those lovely quiz questions, isn’t it – what do Barbados, Romania, the Ukraine and Scotland have in common? The answer is St Andrew of course, as their shared patron saint. In this COVID-19 year, that is something for which it is particularly important to wonder and give thanks. For in recent months we have, as a world together, been both divided by border closures, and united in suffering. On this Advent Sunday therefore, it is good to be reminded of our even greater connections in the immense hope to which St Andrew responded and shared with others. For Andrew’s witness is not least to the central importance of relationships, with God in Jesus Christ, with one another, and with the wider world. Today, as we celebrate the feast of St Andrew, and Advent hope, it is into such mission into which we too are called, and the joy which lies in such relational hope, beyond all the divisions and sufferings of our lives and world. Thus St Andrew should empower us to trust, and find new life, across our human borders and in the borderlands of suffering and joy, despair and hope…

seeking the forgiveness of the land - blowing' in the wind?

9/12/2020

When I was young, parts of the country in which I grew up literally blew away. Living in Lincolnshire, one of England’s greatest agricultural counties, I could see this whenever I traveled. For I grew up as a child at the time of the greatest destruction of England’s hedgerows, many of them very ancient. Indeed, hedgerows are, as the Campaign to Protect Rural England has put it, ‘the most widespread semi-natural habitat in England’, and, more poetically, ‘the vital stitching point in the patchwork quilt of the English countryside’.1 They not only provide character, but essential life to all kinds of creatures, and help protect the soil itself without which there can be no sustainable farming yields. As a child however, I would see such features regularly ripped away, and a vast desert of landscape created, with vital topsoil whirling up in dust storms and carried away. Such soil frequently blinded us, reflecting the blinkered industrialised agricultural thinking which had produced it. It was an early lesson to me of how if we mistreat the land out of which we come and are fed, we also destroy ourselves. How then are we to live, without seeking the forgiveness of the land itself, and renewing creation together?...

parables of patience

7/18/2020

‘He told them another parable’. I love parables, don’t you? And one of the things I love about them is that there is never, ever a ‘right answer’; a single correct interpretation. Of course, that can be rather trying to those of us who like clear answers. But Jesus didn’t give any clear answers, and where he appears to do so, we can be pretty sure that the gospel writer is putting words in his mouth.

This morning we heard a little cluster of three parables – and a dodgy interpretation of one of them – did you spot them all? The wheat and the weeds, the mustard seed and the woman with the yeast. Sometimes they are known as parables of growth, especially as they follow on in Matthew’s version from the parable of the sower. But it seemed to me this week that we could call them ‘parables of patience’ – and as such very apt for our current situation, where the spread of COVID seems to be asking again and again for patience...