December 2011 - Hope and Expectation

Dear Friends

Advent

Our new Church Year has begun with our celebration of Advent Sunday last week. We have begun a new journey of Faith on a well travelled road; a journey of reflection and expectation. We will journey this year with the Gospel of Mark, a book built around the arresting conviction that there is no keeping God at a distance. The writer of Mark’s Gospel asks us to reflect on where God is to be found, and suggests that God is not to be found in the expected places: in heaven, in church, in special and magical events. It is not that God is not in these places, but that God is not confined to these spaces, and that these may not in fact be God’s favourite spaces. Now there’s a thought!

Mark’s Gospel, the Good News, is that God is in the ordinariness, the everydayness of life.

I am not sure I want to meet God in the everyday; I suspect I’d be more comfortable keeping God for those special moments in life, when I need God to be GOD. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with God being in the midst of a family disagreement, or in the intimacies I share with my wife. I am not comfortable with God being around when I succumb to road-rage, and share a few choice thoughts with the taxi driver who has just – suddenly – stopped in front of me. Am I comfortable with God being “around”? I’m not so sure.

But I find myself asking, “God, where are you?” Where are you when the person I love is murdered violently? Where are you when I NEED you? Where are you when my loved one is ill? Where are you when natural disasters kill thousands? Where are you when war wracks our world? Where are you when the collapses of national economies make the world sneeze and catch cold? Where are you when famine and civil war overtakes our continent? WHERE ARE YOU, GOD?!

“I am around ...”

Hope and Expectation

God is around, in our midst, incarnate, with us. Advent is lived in the expectation that God will act because God has acted. The incarnation (God born in human form in Jesus) took place over two millennia ago, and seemingly paradoxically – believing as we do that God is already with us through the presence of the Holy Spirit – we prepare for his return. Our Church Year is based around the re-enactment, the remembering of the restoring acts of God in history. It will again, but unique to the present context, remind us that God is with us. And so as we prepare this Advent: what are our expectations; what is our hope? There is always the temptation to demand that God act as we want him to act. The challenge is to allow God to truly be God, and to open our lives to that reality, and to seek God in the brokenness of our lives and society, in the everyday, in the ordinariness of life.

Christmas & New Year

If the speed with which this year has sped by is any indication, Christmas will be here in a blink of an eye! And the New Year will be in swing before we know it. Our Parish Christmas Tea was a huge success last Sunday: a little early, perhaps, but an opportunity to come together as a community before we all head off in different directions for the Christmas break. For those who will be around, please join us for our Christmas Carol Service on Sunday 18 December 2011 at 6pm where we will explore something of the history lying behind some of the better known Carols. There will be the traditional Crib Service at 6pm and Midnight Mass at 10pm on Christmas Eve, followed by a said Christmas Mass at 7am and the Christmas Family Eucharist at 9am on Christmas Day. If family or friends are visiting, please bring them along! For those travelling over this period, please drive carefully and responsibly; and return safely to us in the New Year.

A very blessed Christmas and New Year to you all!

Blessings

Mark

November/December 2010 - What is God doing?

Dear Friends

What is God doing?

Our identity as Christians is profoundly locked into this question, “What is God doing?” I have begun asking this question as we draw together in worship, and particularly as we reflect on the lectionary readings for the day. What is it that draws us together as God’s people, the Body of Christ? Is it an interest in what God is doing? Is it also a desire to be a part of what God is doing?

“The Lord be with you!” “AND ALSO WITH YOU!”

What has struck me as I’ve asked people to turn to each other and share what God is doing is the brevity of the discussion. It is not long before the room is quiet again.

When Jesus is asked the question, “Who gives you authority to do what you are doing?” his answer is to reflect that he does what he sees the Father doing. What is our answer? Why are we doing what we are doing? ... and what is it that we are doing?

It is not long before the room is quiet again.

“What is God doing?” is profound because it asks us to focus on God; it asks us to disengage from our self-focus. Suddenly it presents me with a new reality: life is not about me. And I am challenged – we are challenged – by a simple question that has wide-ranging implications; and seemingly no easy answers. We are quiet as we watch and wait and reflect. “What is it that God is doing?” – in my life, in yours; in our diverse daily communities, in our society? Where does God place us daily, in the morning, afternoon and evening? Is it our homes, our workplace, our schools, our friendship circles? What is God doing in these places? What is God doing in these relationships?

It is not long before the room is quiet again.

We ask this seemingly simple, innocent question. We ask it as we reflect on the Scriptures of the day, as we reflect on what God has done as he interacted with ancient generations of people. We ask it as we reflect on our own situation, our own context. We ask it as we draw ancient Scriptures together with the realities of today, the here and now. And tomorrow.

And the room is no longer so quiet.

The room is no longer so quiet because, perhaps – just perhaps – the God who interacted with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, with Moses and the Prophets, with King Saul and King David, with Jesus, with the early Apostles and with Paul, also wants to interact with us. And the hum and buzz in the room reflects a growing awareness, a growing expectation; an expectation that perhaps – just perhaps – we too may be part of what God is doing?

And the room is no longer so quiet.

Our time of worship begins to become a time of celebration: God is doing something. God is alive. God is present. God is relevant. Deep within we begin to realise that we want to be a part of what God is doing. And so we enter into the liturgy: receiving God’s forgiveness, reflecting on his Word, sharing the needs of our world in prayer, encouraging each other that we are not alone as we share in the peace, receiving the very life of God as we share in the sacramental bread and wine, reminded of God’s blessing as we prepare to return to our lives in the wider world. We reflect on where we will be as we return from this time of worship – this experience of celebration – into the fullness of our lives beyond the walls of our meeting place. And we begin to ask an equally profound question, “What is God wanting to do?”

And the room is quiet no longer.

As the Deacon’s call rings out, “Go into the world to love and serve the Lord!” we respond, excitedly, noisily, “IN THE NAME OF CHRIST! AMEN!”

And the room is silent. The Church has dispersed into the world, to do what God is doing, to do what God is wanting to do.

Blessings

Mark

Easter 2009

Dear friends

The Nature of our Easter God

In reflecting on our recent Clergy Retreat where we were challenged to not just expand our spirituality, but to seek greater depth, I realise that I need to re-explore my understanding of God. The complication is that I am comfortable with the ‘limited’ God I believe in; the God defined by Christian doctrine and Anglican tradition.

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refuse to worship the ‘God’ of plaster and gold – imposingly 27 metres high and almost 3 metres wide – created by King Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 3); and I ask why did Nebuchadnezzar find it necessary to create such a God? His anger at the three’s refusal to bow down in worship seems to have little to do with the ‘God’ and more to do with his own desire to control: “Who is the God who will deliver you out of my hands?” Nebuchadnezzar asks. He clearly believes this wondrous statue has no power, yet demands its worship.

And so I reflect on my ‘limited’ God, as magnificent and wondrous as my Christian faith and Anglican tradition proclaim God to be; and I wonder how much I truly believe, how much I –like Nebuchadnezzar – seek to use God as a form of control in a world increasingly chaotic?

I do not question God, exactly, but the limits we have placed on God. Can God be defined? If so, what drives us to define God? And if not, why do we place so much effort into doing so? And then what is the basis for our Easter hope?

Scripture and human experience point to God being both absolute and infinite.

That which is truly absolute and truly infinite cannot really be defined by what it is or is not (define ‘0’ for me …), but only, perhaps, by what it is greater than. To do otherwise is to declare it finite, and what is finite cannot really remain absolute. And so, because I am limited in my use of words, in my ability to fully imagine an absolute and infinite God, I – like Nebuchadnezzar – create a ‘limited’ God, designed to my own specifications, empowered by my own need and human limitations, and I become unhinged when you challenge my creation.

I am thus challenged to begin to believe in God who is always substantially greater than my ability to define ‘God’, who is continuously ‘beyond’ my understanding, who remains absolute and infinite ‘mystery’. Anything and everything else is anathema, without substance, without power, without true existence; unless it is embraced in the absolute and infinite mystery of God. A reminder, too, that all that I am, all that I have, is through the grace of God: absolute, infinite, mysterious.

I’ve always been attracted to the Baptismal Creed (An Anglican Prayer Book 1989, pg 59) because of its simplicity, its willingness to sacrifice the complexity of belief described by the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. What better describes God than ‘Creator’, ‘Redeemer’ and ‘Life-Giver’? What better describes the absoluteness of God than declaring God to be ‘One’? What better handhold to the absolute, infinite mystery that is God than these concepts?

And yet we insist on defining God further, on making God like us, on using God for our own ends. Idolatry is, then, not the worship of other gods, but the worship of God diminished by our own attempt to define the absolute and the infinite, to demystify the mysterious. And then what is the basis for our Easter hope?

Our limitation of God is most visible in the religious rules and regulations we adopt. We see Jesus in his own context lifting two laws out of the plethora of Jewish rules that define not God, but our response to God: love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind (Deuteronomy 6:5); and love your neighbour as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). And so our Easter hope begins to find value in our active response to God and neighbour.

Our Easter hope is manifest in the activity of the one and only, the absolute and infinite God: Jesus’ death and resurrection reveals God’s faith in us, and God’s gift of abundant life unlimited now by sin or death.

All things become possible because I have faith in God who is beyond my ability to comprehend.

And I respond by caring for my neighbour.

Easter Blessings

Mark