Pen and Ink Reflections - Pen and Ink Reflections

comfort for simple hearts on bad days

7/4/2020

I think Jesus had had a rough few days and was not feeling the best. By the time we reach the eleventh chapter of Matthew’s gospel they had taught extensively about the kingdom, healed many and called disciples. But Jesus is feeling that they just can’t win – if they try to be an ascetic like John they’ll say, ‘he has a demon’; and, as it is they are accusing Jesus of being a ‘glutton and a drunkard’. So, Jesus is not feeling over happy, and from that place of discouragement he reproaches the cities that will not welcome them. It is perhaps a comfort to realise that even Jesus can have a bad day. For Jesus, the embodiment of God, experienced the full range of our human emotions and was not afraid of them...

mystery, manifestation and mission

6/7/2020

Today is Trinity Sunday, when the church tries to describe the indescribable; to point to the character and action of the Divine that is always dynamic and evolving. The early teachers of the church came to describe God as Trinity – three equal ‘persons’ or expressions of God, Father, Son and Spirit – or in the beautiful and more inclusive language of Julian of Norwich, the Maker, the Lover and the Keeper. It is a picture of God as a community of equality. That in itself is of immense importance in a world where inequality and autocracy tend to rise up as we have seen this week in the United States. The picture of God as Trinity shows us how God’s very being and nature is about relationship and love. How might this picture of God as Trinity help us in these days of change and challenge across our world?...

On not being stinkers – the Parable of the Dragnet

8/4/2019

We have a pretty tough parable today. For it can seem to be one of those uncomfortable passages about God’s end of time judgement and division. Is that all there is here though? We are so used to that conservative line that we easily pass over this passage for something more wholesome. Perhaps it helps to look a little closer however. For note well - this parable in Matthew 13 is called the parable of the dragnet but it does not stand alone. This striking comparison of the kingdom of God to a fishing scene is but the closing end of a series of parables. And this wider group of parables is important to remember. and I’ll come back to that later. Firstly however some key points from key words...

Matthew - the great interruptor

9/21/2017

This week I came across the account of a student of the Alexander technique. For those of you not familiar, this is a movement based therapy that helps an individual to see their inefficient habits of movement and patterns of accumulated tension, which interfere with their innate ability to move easily. This was their experience as they interacted with a client for the first time.

‘Suddenly I feel overwhelmed by implications. The way he’s co-ordinating to stand is part of his whole way of being in the world, and here’s me about to move in and maybe change that, or at least offer a different possibility. A sense of politeness paralyses me for a moment. I don’t want to interrupt. Later I talk with [the teacher]. She looks at me with steady compassion. ‘Actually, I see that as part of my job. To interrupt patterns.’ She’s right. Interrupting is part of my job.’

Interrupting is part of my job. I think Saint Matthew would have agreed and as we celebrate his saint’s day today, and consider the ways in which he presented the teachings of and about Jesus in the gospel that bears his name, I invite you to consider him as a great interrupter. I also invite you to consider that interrupting is also part of our job as ministers, teacher and spiritual directors. It is our task, with the guidance of the spirit, to help others interrupt their destructive habits of life and behaviour, whether at the individual or communal level, and find transformation....

dance and wail and all with gentleness

7/8/2017

At times Jesus must have felt, as perhaps sometimes we feel, that he could not win. Had he followed the ascetic practices of John the Baptist he would have been condemned as demon possessed. As it is, his critics are quick to judge his joyous engagement with life as a failure of self control and an indicator of immorality. He compares the society around him with a bunch of quarrelsome children, who are refusing to enter into the dances and activities associated with wedding and funeral feasts - in other words they are refusing the very stuff of life. When we refuse to engage with the stuff of life, in all its joy and terror, we repress our emotions and become hard of heart. Then we can indeed become quarrelsome and irritable, concentrating on minor details and neglecting the big picture. Jesus is saddened when this happens, because we miss out on so much. We also end up weighed down with burdens too heavy to carry, that are of our own making, just as the Pharisees did in Jesus own day.

So what is to be done? Firstly we need to look to Jesus, who as the incarnation of God was not afraid to experience the full range of our human emotions of joy, anger, fear and grief. He lived passionately out of the very height and depth of human feeling. Now that can be pretty confronting for ourselves and sometimes others. As most of you know Jo and I have recently become grandparents. This week our daughter has been facing the challenges of an infant living into the fullness of their human emotions, expressing himself in anger and crying as well as beginning to reward her efforts with first smiles. It is quite a challenge for both of them. Yet infants as Jesus said, do indeed sometimes understand things better than adults...

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…

the disturbing story and shocking visitors of the Epiphany

1/1/2017

Do we see the star of the Epiphany? I mean, do we really see the star and understand what it means? Most people don't. Some see the star and are full of awe for a moment or two and then move on. Others see it and understand it wrongly, or partially. Others see it among other lights and then follow them. Others are simply looking in the wrong place. So where are we looking? For the Epiphany story is actually a strange one. It is not what it might immediately seem. Whilst we typically often cover it in tinsel and sentimentality, it is in fact quite disturbing, and, thereby, potentially quite transforming…

Joseph's problem - and invitation to something more than righteousness

12/17/2016

Joseph has a problem! Mary's pregnant and the baby is not his. It is not exactly a unique problem. This is the kind of scrape that appears somewhere in most people's family history, no matter how much pontificating and covering up goes on. I am sure we all have tales we could tell of the judgments that family members make of one another, and of the harshness of some 'good Christians'...

meeting God on a mountain

10/1/2015

What mountains do you know? Mountains are among the most treasured and admired locations on earth - as well as some of the most perilous. I wonder what are some of the mountains that you have heard about or even visited yourself? What are some of the things you love about those mountains?

We've heard about a few mountains here in Australia, some of them local to Toowoomba and to Queensland, and about some mountains far away. Through our links with Nepal we have particular connections to the Himalayas and of course to the world's highest mountain, Mount Everest. Has anyone climbed a mountain that really required the proper gear, ropes and grappling irons and all those things?

Climbing a mountain requires a lot of effort, and preparation and discipline and persistence - which is why climbing a mountain is such a good picture for the spiritual life and often used as such. It is also why some traditional Christian communities are located near the top and on the very edges of mountainsides. Climbing requires patience and faith and provides a sense of perspective. When we physically get up higher we can see more; in the same way the more we advance in our relationship with God the better perspective we have on what really matters in life...

becoming a church of the Magi

1/4/2015

Just before Christmas we had a wonderful gathering in St Luke’s, of many faiths and none. It was a time of remembrance and prayer for those who had been killed and traumatised by recent events, including the Sydney siege and the massacre of children in Pakistan. It was a time of reaffirmation and deepened solidarity as we renewed our city commitment to peace and harmony. It was a time which showed we have something very special here in Toowoomba. For so many places in the world would be amazed that Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Baha’is, and so many others, can not only live together peacefully but even appreciate one another and share their distinctive gifts. That should not seem unusual. Yet it is. We should therefore celebrate and build upon it. For, in a deep sense, as we hear today’s Epiphany Gospel, we are perhaps thereby 'a Church of the Magi’…