Pen and Ink Reflections - Pen and Ink Reflections

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’…

how do we share in healing, hospitality, and handing on hope?

10/17/2020

A few weeks ago I invited us all to address the question of Jesus: ‘who do you say that I am?’ This is central to the Christian spiritual pathway. As I affirmed, the answers to that question will differ, as they have differed, subtly or significantly, down the centuries. Today, on St Luke’s Day, Penny and I want to ask three more questions, which also feed into our community visioning day. They seek to open up three important areas of life: firstly, healing; secondly, hospitality; and thirdly, how do we hand on hope, as we experience it in our spiritual lives. Penny and I will do this together as a conversation. For, after all, isn’t one of the most beautiful stories in Luke’s Gospel that of the conversation between the disciples on the road to Emmaus, as they rediscover the living Christ in new ways?

Before all that however, I want to ask Penny about our relationship to St Luke. For we’ve had a bit of history with St Luke, haven’t we?...

on not shutting God up

3/3/2019

The Transfiguration - as Joseph Pagano has described it “three holy heavyweights hold a summit meeting on the ways God will fulfil God’s promises through the death, resurrection and glorification of Jesus”. It is not heralded with the pomp and ceremony of Trump meeting Kim Jong Un. But the outcomes are life changing for all of us.

Peter, James and John nearly sleep through it all – a foreshadowing of course of their inability to stay awake in the garden of Gethsemane. Whether it is the glory of God or the agony, the joy or the pain, we mere humans are inclined to choose sleep over wakefulness, because being awake asks so much. But never perhaps in the church’s history has it been so imperative that we keep awake to what God is doing and to refuse to shut god up in boxes and booths of our own making...

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…

flash, bang, wallop - what a picture!

4/15/2017

What is your favourite Easter story I wonder? I read a lovely one the other day. A teacher had asked her young pupils to write a line or two about what they were going to do over Easter. The children started scribbling away until one little boy put his hand up. ‘How do you spell gun?’, he asked. A little bemused, the teacher replied, ‘G-U-N’. The boy started writing and then put his hand up again. ‘And how’, he said, do you spell die?’ A good deal more perturbed, the teacher replied, ‘D-I-E’, and then she added cautiously, ‘what is it you are going to do?’ ‘Oh’ said the little boy, ‘it is going to be fun… we’re gun die eggs’.

Well, a number of folk among us have certainly dyed eggs for today: just one of the many wonderful symbolic traditions which have grown up over the centuries around Easter. Indeed, some of these are perhaps as curious as the little boy’s spelling and grasp of language. They are certainly diverse, rather like the variety of ways in which the Gospel writers and St Paul speak about the Resurrection. Does that matter, do you think? My sense is that that is precisely as it should be. For the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is like an explosion, the impact and implications of which can never be understood and lived out by one tidy account or explanation. Rather the meaning of Easter is only something we grow into, day by day, year by year, as we reflect upon the different ways our Bible and Tradition speak of it, and, crucially, as it comes alive for us in our own lives and times…

happiness indicators

1/28/2017

One of the joys of moving house as we have just done, is that all kinds of forgotten and unlikely treasures come to light. Indeed, among the many books that Jo and I shifted this week was a copy of the New Testament in French. My French is not wonderful, but good enough to follow familiar words. So I looked up today's Gospel reading and was struck by two words in that French translation in particular.

The first was 'heureux' or happy - the word we usually translate 'blessed'. Blessed has a much more 'religious' feel to it. Quite possibly it better translates the Greek μακάριος and the French might also use the word 'beni' for that. Yet the French word 'hereux' is much more straightforward. This is what it is to be happy. Now human beings are always seeking after happiness. Preferably a quick fix of happiness. Hence the popularity of self-help programs and even lotto. We live in a culture and era where it is often assumed that happiness is about wealth, success, strength and stability. In the face of such key indicators of happiness Jesus's suggested list of the happy presents a challenge. Jesus says that the happy include the poor, the sad, the downtrodden, and the persecuted. We might question who would choose to live in such a way, let alone count themselves blessed to do so...

hope and the school of hard knocks

11/25/2016

Just before Christmas last year, I was visiting Brisbane’s South Bank cultural precinct and stumbled into the end of year concert of the School of Hard Knocks. It was a wonderful occasion. Full of joy and humour, resounding song and moving poetry, it shared the lives and love of many of Brisbane’s homeless and disadvantaged people. This year’s concert is again at the State Library, at 2 pm on 16 December. Check it out if you are down that way. It will lift your spirits and encourage you. For in some ways it could be said to be an embodiment of the hope of the season of Advent which we begin today. In the face of the pain and struggle of our lives and world, all of us are encouraged by the promise of God’s coming salvation to start again. The invitation is there, in the closing words of our reading from Isaiah: ‘come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!’…

remembering, pain and hope

11/4/2016

My older sister was born in 1944 when my father was fighting in Egypt in the royal signals corps of the British army. He caught diphtheria in Egypt, foolishly swimming in the Nile in the company of a dead donkey or two, and consequently did not make it home from the war till late in 1946, to face a child he had never met, a wife whose hopes for their life together had dwindled and a struggle to find employment. He had a nervous breakdown soon afterwards and would never speak of his experiences. So my knowledge of war came through my mother, who lived through the blitz in Liverpool, and told tales of rationing and lucky escapes from bombed out air raid shelters, of knitting fine wool socks and of hours of work in the munitions factory in the bitter cold of winters with no fuel. She spoke of painful partings at railway stations when Dad had come home on leave, and for the rest of her life she could not bear to wave anyone off at a train. Such were the symptoms of trauma that stretched into my childhood many years later.

War is an evil and we are not here to celebrate it in any form. Wars open up opportunities for more evil, for anger, hatred, theft and human rights abuses of all kinds. Wars can shatter the human capacity for love and gentleness. Wars do not end in peace. They end in victory or defeat or dangerous stalemate. Peace, or shalom, wholeness, healing, takes a very long time afterwards to achieve and should never be let go lightly.

So why are we here today? We are here to remember the sinfulness of war; to acknowledge our human tendency to make a dreadful mess of things and to pray that we may do better. Today and every Remembrance Day our veterans remember their friends who never came home. We remember those who died too young and we also remember those like my parents who did not die, but whose lives and relationships were irrevocably changed in destructive ways. We give thanks for what our veterans did on our account, and what our serving forces continue to do, and we mourn the waste of human life and love...

wrestling God, holding our hurts and hopes

7/29/2016

One of the wonderful things about many Jewish people I have met is their capacity to wrestle with our human experience and ideas of God. They just do not settle for simplistic answers, especially when it is comes to the really big human questions of hope and suffering, life and death. Indeed there is a famous saying: ‘ask two Jews, get three opinions.’ Now, of course, this, can occasionally lead to a certain stubbornness and unnecessary conflict. It points us however to the very heart of biblical religion, especially as we find it in the Hebrew Scriptures. For the God of the biblical tradition is very much a God with whom to wrestle. We see this, not least, in the book of Hosea, from which we hear again today. Indeed, the God whom Hosea reveals is very much a God wrestling with God’s own compassion, very much as a parent wrestles with their own hurts and hopes for their child. This is the deepest, most mysterious, heart of love, and it is into this kind of love we baptise Margaret Rose today…

transformed by suffering

3/24/2016

I have a good friend called Peter Millar who was recently diagnosed with bone cancer. Some of you may remember him, for he visited Toowoomba a few years ago and he is quite a tour de force! Some of you may also know him from his writings. For Peter Millar is a leading member of the Iona Community in Scotland and a former Warden of Iona Abbey and he has contributed prolifically to sharing contemporary faith and engaged spirituality through many books, articles, poems and prayers. Like many contemporary Celtic Christians, he has also woven together a deep life of prayer and faith with commitment to building community locally and across the world, especially with the poor and the marginalised, and the struggles of the wider environment. Most of all, I think, Peter is an amazing person and model of encouragement for so many people, So it is particularly sad to see such personal struggles afflict such a spiritual live-wire, aflame with the love of God. Yet perhaps this is where, as in the sufferings and cross of Jesus, the love of God really comes alive and shines forth its truth….