Pen and Ink Reflections - Pen and Ink Reflections

welcome to the divinity reveal party

12/24/2024

past Christmas focus in St Luke, Toowoomba

Something is missing here. What do you think it is? I mean, I have been involved in these Christmas Eve gigs for a long time. I’m sure there is something I was typically aware of, on Christmas Eve, in the first years of my ministry, which we don’t see around us here…

failing systems and poor widows

11/10/2024

In one of his essays,[1], Oscar Wilde wrote that, in his view:

the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the Vendee voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism.

Hearing our Gospel story this morning (in Mark 12.38-44), we might be tempted to say something similar: that the most tragic fact in the corruption of the world of Jesus was not the hideous colonial violence of the Romans and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, but that the poor widow gave all she had to a failing leadership and its flailing religious institution. Furthermore, what similar tragedies might we see, and be part of ourselves, in our own world?...

beyond embarrassment: the cry of the blind

10/27/2024

healing of Bartimaeus by William Blake

Deep faith is often embarrassing. Maybe that is a reason we human beings avoid it. We typically prefer to seek to live ‘good’ lives, or the opposite: to seek to be respectable in our opinions and behavior, or, alternatively, to find value and reputation in kicking against, or rorting, the system. Admittedly, in choosing radical pathways, we may also conceivably live out of the vulnerability of a type of deep faith. Yet that also risks centring ourselves in our own egos. Deep faith however is not only about letting go of human conventions but also about letting go of ego, into God in godself. The expressions of this can be quite embarrassing, even alarming. Maybe that is why organised religion, including much of our Uniting Church traditions, often tries to keep deep faith under control, in liturgy and in church life. Imagine, for example, if, like Francis of Assisi, we were indeed to heed Jesus’ to the rich man and give away all we have to the poor. What if, like the original Quakers and Shaker communities, we were to be so overcome by the fire of pentecostal love that we would literally move in the Spirit, shaking and quaking, in our prayer and witness? No wonder, faced by the zeal of early Methodism, that Bishop Joseph Butler famously told John Wesley that ‘enthusiasm is a horrid thing.’ That, surely, is not simply a classic English reaction to faith’s embarrassments. It also expresses much general unease about the consequences of letting go into God. For deep faith is beyond embarrassment, as we see in today’s Gospel story (in Mark 10.45-52)…

leaping in faith

10/13/2024

Byard's Leap

‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Today’s Gospel story (Mark 10.17-31) is a challenging one, and, in the poem we heard,[1] Malcolm Guite is surely right to ask each of us to wrestle with it and what God may be asking of us. To assist that engagement, let me speak about three things: about conventional human assumptions of security, about addressing our wealth, and about the deep call of discipleship. Each are certainly key themes of this passage and the wider Gospel. Firstly however, let me share a story from Lincolnshire, the English county in which I grew up…

Wisdom embodied

9/15/2024

‘but who do you say that I am?’ said Jesus. What a question! How do we respond? Let us explore this vital faith inquiry a little bit this morning, also asking what the figure of Wisdom in our reading from Proverbs might have to say to us. And let us further ask what the question of the identity and purpose of Christ might have to say in relation to our own identity and purpose in this Season of Creation and Faiths for Climate Justice Week of Action. For how we name and understand the divine makes a big difference to how we relate not only to God, but to ourselves, and to the wider world…

rejoice and play

8/11/2024

Powerful proclamation is at the heart of today’s Gospel reading (from John 6.35, 41-51). Let me therefore speak about three things in relationship to it: about Christian doctrine, chess, and two Reformed gifts; and about how they may each help us to rejoice and play in this our current season of gratefulness…

sharing in miracles: the feast of grace

7/28/2024

I want to speak today about three things: about magical cats, about scarcity thinking and the famine of grace, and about sharing in miracles. First however a question: do you know the rousing 19th century hymn ‘Alleluia! Sing to Jesus’? The second verse, referring to the Ascension of Christ, includes lines which have always struck me: ‘Alleluia! He is near us: faith believes, nor questions how.’ How do you respond to that? In my case, I have to confess that I have always tended to sing the last part not as ‘faith believes, nor questions how’ but as ‘faith believes and questions how.’ What do you think? In my view, how we respond helps determine whether we can overcome scarcity thinking and the famine of grace, and, instead, grow as magical cats, sharing in miracles…

disturbing the peace

7/14/2024

Giovanni di Paolo, “St. John the Baptist in Prison Visited by Two Disciples,” ca. 1455-1460 (photo: Public Domain)

Try as I might, I have always found John the Baptist to be an off-putting, and certainly a disturbing, figure in the Christian story. And I have tried. For I was ordained deacon in St John at Hackney, a church named after John the Baptist, and I served in the community there. Each year, we would have our patronal festival, and try to find ways to see how the Baptist could relate to our usual church life. To be honest, it was easier than in the past. For St John at Hackney was originally a very high society church – indeed, the focal borough church in Hackney - and its impressive churchyard still contains many notable figures, such as the Baden Powell family, from whom the worldwide scouting movement issued. By the 1980s however, Hackney was both London’s poorest and most multicultural borough, and our congregation was very different; all part of the Anglican Church’s journey in the inner cities from being the church of ‘the great and the good’ to being one of the ‘marginal and the odd’. Over half of our congregation also drew their origins from West Africa or the West Indies. Well, maybe John the Baptist might have felt somewhat at home, being on the prophetic margins of his society. Yet his appearance and demeanour would still have marked him out. Indeed, even some of the more radical and vibrant of our congregation would have struggled with some of his language of repentance and its tone. Similarly, I suspect that we would not be wholly comfortable with him here. For John the Baptist was most certainly a ‘disturber of the peace’ in very uncomfortable ways. Indeed, the story of his violent death we heard this morning is hardly the most attractive within the Bible. So what do we make of it, and of the Baptist’s significance within our faith journey?...

family belonging?

6/9/2024

Where, to what, and, perhaps most importantly of all, to whom do you, do we, belong? These are core questions at the heart of faith, and of life itself. Let me therefore begin with a little quiz question, to which those who know 1980s popular music may be able to respond. Who sang the following words? If it helps, think of it sung falsetto by a redheaded young man:

You leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case
Alone on a platform, the wind and the rain on a sad and lonely face
Mother will never understand why you had to leave
But the answers you seek will never be found at home
The love that you need will never be found at home

The song is Smalltown Boy, sung by Jimmy Somerville, from the British synth-pop band Bronski Beat’s album Age of Consent. It came out in 1984, at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s political power, and, for folk like me – not least small town kids like me – it was emblematic both of protest against oppression and of the creative, joyous, expression of queer courage and change. Indeed, among other things, Bronski Beat also headlined ‘Pits and Perverts’, a concert in London’s Electric Ballroom to raise funds for the Lesbians and Gays support the Miners campaign: an event featured in the film Pride. Smalltown Boy also reached number 8 in the Australian charts and it is but one symbol of the historical struggle which has led, finally this week, to a formal apology from the New South Wales government for the horrendous abuse and violence that has been inflicted on queer people, and not least on gay young men who were told, in no uncertain terms, that they did not belong. Yes, let us celebrate that! Today Smalltown Boy is a celebration of what was largely still a declaration not to be crushed, but to survive, and thrive. For as Jimmy Somerville sang:

Pushed around and kicked around, always a lonely boy
You were the one that they'd talk about around town as they put you down
And as hard as they would try they'd hurt to make you cry
But you never cried to them, just to your soul
No, you never cried to them, just to your soul

Soul power eh? As Jesus, another smalltown kid, taught, and showed, this is ultimately at the heart of any life-giving change. For it is where we find our true belonging…

Jesus as story

4/14/2024

image: Kamala Bright on Unsplash

‘Tell me the old, old story, when you have cause to fear.’ Yes? No? Maybe? How do you respond to that: and, more broadly, to faith, and God, in Jesus, as story? Many years ago, on the radio, one of the radical thinking clergy of the Church of England was asked about how they understood God. ‘God’, they said, ‘is the poem in which I live my life.’ Yes? No? Maybe? Does that resonate with you? Many people, secular and faith-based, would be quite dismissive. Stories, and poems not least, they would say, are typically fanciful and not factual, fabricated and too often false. Of course, that kind of response generally lacks self-awareness and is very narrow, and, often, quite ideological. Apart from not recognising that different expressions of life have their own characteristics and validity, they typically miss the way in which story, metaphor, and symbol, exist within all areas of knowledge. Science for example is full of different models, and ideas like evolution are themselves stories. Scientists are right in saying that life-giving stories are helped by empirical verification. Yet, without stories as such, it is impossible for human life and consciousness to exist. That is something that liberals and progressives, especially in faith spaces, have often missed. It is not enough to point out the weaknesses in a tired traditionalist story: whether that be about creation, sexuality, or anything else. Even more importantly, we also need to tell a new story. Populist politicians, like rabble-rousing religious preachers, know this well. Facts are malleable but stories, once established, persist: whether they are particular ways of understanding the body, the nation, the world, and, of course, God. All of us therefore have stories, conscious and unconscious, running through our heads: some of them planted there long ago, some of them picked up from the latest social media frenzy; some of them giving life-giving purpose to our lives, others providing scripts that limit us but which are hard to shake off. What then is our story?...