Pen and Ink Reflections - Pen and Ink Reflections

a tricky question

11/3/2024

Most of those asking Jesus questions so far in Mark’s gospel have been hostile – seeking in various ways to catch him out. However, as Mark records the encounter it would seem that this scribe is different. They listen and hear that Jesus answers well and receive his response gladly, in such a way that Jesus declares them as ‘not far from the kingdom of God’. The question is nevertheless a tricky one, and Jesus’s response is careful. He limits his answer to the Torah. He begins in the most orthodox way imaginable by invoking the Shema, “Hear, O Israel,” from Deuteronomy 6:4–5; first, an assertion of who God is and to whom God is and then, a command issued on the basis of that identity, to love God with all one’s being — God and no other. And then, Jesus adds from Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is in effect nothing novel about any of this. For our part we have heard this so often that it there is a danger of it having become practically ho-hum – love God, love your neighbour; the Golden Rule, ‘Mrs do -as you -would- be -done -by’; nothing new to see here, go back to sleep?! But if that is what we hear, then I suspect we have not heard at all. For here we have not such much a series of commandments – love God, love your neighbour, love yourself – as what Buddhist teaching might call a koan – an unanswerable question designed to wake us up and which over a lifetime of reflection may yield a multitude of possible resolutions, none of them complete. No part of this teaching yields easy answers. What does it mean to love God with our whole being? Who is God for a start? What is my mind, my heart, my soul, to say nothing of my body? I don’t even know how my little finger works, so what makes me think I can begin to contemplate God? Only when I realise this and might be about to give up, might I be ready perhaps to begin...

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…

a green-er way

3/24/2024

green heart image by Adithya Vinod on Unsplash

Let us think about three things – about greenery, about the Sydney GreenWay, and about Hildegard’s Latin word ‘viriditas’, meaning greenness or verdancy, that informed out recent entry in the Mardi Gras parade. And let’s keep in the back of our minds a couple of questions – what connects Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem with Extinction Rebellion? Ad what might Hildegard and the GreenWay have to say to the vibrancy and future of the church in our own time?...

magic realism and earth healing

9/17/2023

Un Mundo, by Ángeles Santo, Museo Reina Sofia

What value does the book of Revelation have for us, especially in the face of ecological crises? My guess is that most of us have not spent too much time on the Bible’s last book. Some people of course have, including those looking for a special secret code to life and history, and those puzzling out different timetables for Christ’s second coming. Such interpreters however typically have little concern for ecology, and some even welcome signs of environmental apocalypse. Faced by the strangeness of John the Divine’s visions, we may therefore be tempted to dispense with the book altogether. Yet that would be a mistake. For, as this morning’s reading (ch.12 vv. 1-9 & 13-17a) illustrates, truth and light can be received in the strangest places…

laughter amid thorns and gold

6/18/2023

Maybe what she wanted to do was punch Him (God)
But she couldn’t

So Sarah laughed

Didn't Suzanne Terry put it well in her poem 'Sarah Laughed'? How many of us have wanted to punch God, or worse, for what has happened, or not happened, to ourselves and others? In Genesis chapter 18, Sarah laughs out of her deep experiences of sorrow, anger, and utter frustration, with God. After all she has experienced, as a childless migrant woman, in an ancient patriarchal culture where child-bearing was so important, how dare God turn up and now declare fresh hope. Why take so long to give this gift? Why put Sarah through such trials? We can easily identify. As elsewhere in the Bible, we are not presented with a simple moral or spiritual inspiration. Rather we encounter a very human struggle, with which we are invited to wrestle. Suzanne Terry’s poem is a product of this. For she was responding to a book entitled Those Who Wait: Finding God in Disappointment, Doubt and Delay. This, like other writings by Tanya Marlow, seeks to explore how we live with the realities of suffering…

treasure beyond bankruptcy - an economy of hope in time of fear

8/7/2022

photo: by Ashin K Surash on Unsplash

Today’s reading from Luke begins with the often-repeated phrase ‘don’t be afraid’. It is a phrase so often repeated that it has given me pause for thought this week. Do the Scriptures encourage us all the time not to be afraid, precisely because the people for whom they were written were in fact constantly afraid? They would have had good reason to be. As far as we can tell most early followers of Jesus were subject peoples living in occupied territory. The might of Rome was a constant threat, taxes were high, financial insecurity inevitable, and it was not as though they had the securities of modern medicine, analgesics, and antibiotics. Moreover, the expectation of Christ’s imminent return, coupled with an increasing impatience at its delay sounds an anxious apocalyptic note throughout the pages of the New Testament.

But what about ourselves? Are we also afraid? Religion has after all for centuries traded in fear – fear of God’s punishment and condemnation, sweetened by the promise of salvation for those who truly believe, (some have called that ‘pie in the sky when you die’); treasures in heaven beyond the reach of moth, rust, and thieves – and after the last few months in Sydney I’d want to add mould! So, are we also afraid? This is an important question as we enter a period of considering our mission as a congregation. If we are afraid, what are we afraid of? – remembering that fear is not all bad. It is a great motivator to action. But the encouragement of the gospel is not to be afraid, but to act from a different place – a place where we don’t have supposed ‘treasures’ to defend; a place where we are set free from the need to control and secure; a place indeed as the letter to the Hebrews calls it, of faith...

crossing the liminal space

4/17/2022

image: Psit Heng on Unsplash

“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb”

I want to teach any children here today a special and perhaps unfamiliar word – the word is ‘liminal’.
Any ideas what it means?...

I checked the dictionary, and it means, “occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold”. Let me show you what that means. If you come forward here and put one foot on the step of the platform here at the front, and keep one foot on the floor, then you are standing on the threshold – right on the boundary – not on the platform, and not still on the floor either. You are in the liminal place...

hope beyond queasiness

11/28/2021

Visitación, detail from mural at Casa Ave Maria in Managua, Nicaragua

How do you relate to Mary in our Christian tradition? Even mentioning her name opens up a host of feelings and thoughts for so many. As the Danish literary historian Pil Dahlerup rightly said, in an article entitled ‘Rejoice, Mary’:

No woman and no deity in the Middle Ages attracted the poets like the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ. It is, however, hard to read what the poets write about Mary; we are inhibited by prejudices that block our understanding of what the texts are actually saying. Protestants dislike her because she is attributed divinity. Male chauvinists dislike her because she is a woman. Feminists dislike her because she is a woman in a way of which they disapprove. Nationalists dislike her because she represents an alien element in terms of creed and idiom. Marxists dislike her because they do not see her (in the North) as a figure of the people…

Despite this, we cannot avoid Mary in Christian faith. Not least, although women and their lives and gifts are so few and highly gendered in the Bible, Mary simply cannot be erased. So what do we make of her today?...

on kings, and kingdom language

11/21/2021

Growing up, even as a little child I was fascinated by what was then known as the English Civil War (although, to be accurate historically, this is now rightly recognised as several different wars across the islands of Britain and Ireland). It was a bitter and brutal period, culminating in the judicial trial and execution of the King. For this was a powerful revolution. Indeed it saw the establishment of a republic, the Commonwealth and Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. Moreover, in that latter period there was also an extraordinary flowering of truly radical religious and political life and thought. That, I think, was what especially drew me into the study of history. For the origin of many liberal democratic things we take for granted lie there – for example, the insistence on no taxation or legislation without representation, on regular elections, fixed parliamentary terms, equal votes, and, vitally, on religious freedom for different types of groups, particularly the marginalised. Indeed, Cromwell even reopened England to the Jews, who had been banned for centuries. For his supporters were also part of the movements which helped create Congregationalism, the original founding tradition of Pitt Street Uniting Church...

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’…