A Christmas Prayer

Lord of all, at whose behest the quiet stars and steadfast moon hang in their appointed spaces and who has bequeathed to us the beauty and bounty of the earth;  God of the unfathomed universe and King of the Angel host, we acknowledge that you are also Lord of our hearts, shepherd of our lives, guardian of our souls and keeper of our treasure.  Ruler of all, we turn our hearts to you and ask you to have mercy on us;  bless us and love us, for we own a fragile holiness.

Under the canopy of your love, O God, we acknowledge your sovereignty, are drawn to your kindness, honour your precepts and praise your integrity. 

We pray for our community, family and friends: 

For those who are hurting today, we pray;  for those who find Christmas difficult.  For those struggling with illness, anxiety, family turmoil or any other trouble.  Grant them peace and the benediction of your blessedness.  We pray for grace and courage in our own trouble.  We pray that we will learn daily, to wait upon you for all things. Lord in your mercy, hear our prayers.

Here, and in all our world today, there are good people who are quietly living out your precepts, against the dark backdrop of godlessness, greed, poverty or violence.  Thank you for these lights in dark places.  Bless and protect these salts of the earth. 

For those who are disillusioned;  who hold their broken dreams in trembling hands;  who have known the pain of undeserved dishonour;  who have been betrayed by people they once trusted.  There are so many of us Lord;  have mercy.

We pray for the world and it's people.  Here,  in Australia, we are encircled round about with peace. We can live our fortunate lives unaccompanied by the noise of war.  We ask your blessing on those places which have not this quietude;  whose very hills are barren from the blows of conflict and tumult;  whose cities are broken by the plunder of warlords and the evil of retaliation.  We pray for those people who live daily with the threat of violence, and for those whose minds are distorted by the indoctrination of vengeance. 

Bless those who are forced to flee all they know and hold dear, because of war or famine.  Bless, we beseech you, with your aid, protection and provision.

For those who face the tumult of battle, today, we ask your blessing.  Let your mercy  fall on the innocent and the evil;  the victor and the fallen.

For those who live with constant poverty, or under the threat of violence;  those who have no home;  whose nights are spent in unsafe places;  who are enslaved in any way.  Have mercy on these Lord.

We pray for those in need. For those who live in the shadow of abuse or suffering.  Lord, provide one person in each of these darkened hearts, who will be a light to them.

For those who find it difficult to forgive, bestow grace. For those plagued by bitterness, bring healing.  For those beset with worries, grant resolution of them.  For those whose God is money, allow release.

We pray for those who mourn:  for lost loved ones;  for children straying;  for broken relationships;  for personal hurts and disappointments.

Bless those who are grieving, who are disappointed, disillusioned;  for those who are tempted beyond what they think they can bear. For those unfairly victimized, give your deliverance.

We pray for Ourselves:

In this Christmas season, we look to the Christ child; light of the world, comforter, counsellor, prince of peace, author of love.

The winds of melancholy blow over us all at times and we can’t sense your presence.  We look for signs and miracles and wonder why you are silent in the face of our suffering, and learn at last that the best of your power is your quiet abiding in our hearts,  and the imparting of your beautiful character to us.  You grieve with us when we grieve and you remake the suffering until our souls are bright with the warmth of your flawless and beautiful character and we are strong and happy.

We still believe you, though we can’t always understand, and it’s this kind of faith which can break down strongholds and summon the angel host.

Make us a blessing to someone else.   Herein lies the path to our own healing.

Give us a heart of contentment with what we have, so that we may enjoy your blessings fully, without envy for what others’ have.  Save us, we beseech you, from greed.  We pray against corruption in every place.

We are thankful for so many things;  a warm bed to sleep in;  the quiet respite of holidays;  a sunny place to read and think.  For things which grow;  for insects which are as essential to the earth as the air we breathe;  for fresh water, enough food, medical services.  For these and all your daily bounty, we give you our thanks.  Thank you for people who share with those who have much less.

Christ, whose countenance is always turned kindly towards our frailty, give us grace to run bravely the race of faith, to fight steadfastly the good fight, to love all who cross our path.   Christ, who has promised a harvest of righteousness to those who sow in peace, give us your holy presence today, that we may see our way clearly, without the shadow of ego and willfulness.

Lord of the wise men and the shepherds, help us this Christmas season to remember that the shadow of the cross fell across your manger. 

You were born to poverty and a single mother.  You enjoyed no status or wealth.  Across our world, millions can relate to your circumstances.  We come with the hearts which are empty without you.

May the love of God rest on our  heads;  may the voice of God be in our ears;  may the beauty of God reside in our hearts and may the holiness of God guard our souls.

We gather our prayers together and ask them in Jesus name whose name is above every other name, whose power is above all other powers, whose face beholds God’s face; whose Will commands the angels and whose light will never be extinguished. Amen.

A prayer

 

O

ur Father,

 

We bring you every facet of our human condition.  We commit our lives and all that they are, to you.  We bring you our failures, our anxiety, our fears.  We also bring you, ever, our frail holiness.  Give us courage to face the wretched parts of ourselves, always bringing them into the light of your mercy.

From the rich storehouse of your goodness, you have given us so much;  we know a measure of every lovely, divine attribute because you endow our surrendered souls with yourself..

Our heads are full of dreams;  our hands are full of chattels.  Lord, we offer to you the things which are most important to us.  Sometimes they obscure our connection to you.  We cling to their importance.  But the shadow of the cross will always fall on us;  we are your people.  Help us to live with a clear, uncluttered vision of the things which you hold dear.  S Starr

 

dc

Prayers for first Nation peoples

I have started watching "The Sapphires", a delightful Australian movie about an Aboriginal Girl Singing group.  I was only 10 minutes into this movie, when it took me to another time and place in my life.....

When I was 13, my father sold his half share in the farm where we lived, and moved to the coast.  I had to leave that beloved place;  the land, the open space and the delight of the rolling hills of farming country, in the Central West of NSW, Australia

We moved to a place on the coast, and my father got a job as a labourer in an engineering/manufacturing business. 

I began school at what was to me, a huge school, teeming with strange people;  so different to the little School I'd grown up in at Eugowra;  a school where I knew all the kids by name - there were, after all, only about 300 of them, both Primary and High School grades. In this new, big High School, I was the little bush kid, with the shy demeanour (I was terrified!) and the unsophisticated ways. (I didn't even shave my legs, for goodness sake!)

So began a couple of years, where I always felt like the outsider;  the alien;  the one who was a bit different.  I tended to gravitate to other outsiders, so for the first few months, I befriended a Chinese girl who was even more different than I.

We huddled together at lunch time;  me with my sandwiches and she with her Chinese equivalent. I was teased, of course;  from the loud boy who would call out rude things to me across the playground, to the coolest boy on the bus who tried to make me his conquest (I realized later, all these boys actually fancied me - strange way to show it lads!) or to the other bully boy, who simply taunted me the whole journey.

A particularly cruel girl invited me to have lunch with her group one day, and then began to systematically ridicule everything about me, either with blistering sarcasm or outright verbal abuse.  I had neither the courage or the words to defend myself.  I was like a little rabbit, thrown into an arena of circling wolves. I simply avoided her and her gang.  I also just began to silently and wordlessly ignore her.  She eventually, bored with me,  found some other poor soul to torment.

But there was one group of girls I was truly scared of.  They were the girls from the Aboriginal settlement.  They lived outside the main town, in a designated Aboriginal village.  This was the 60's and such a place would no longer be segregated in this way, today.  I understand so much more now, of the plight of indigenous peoples of my beautiful country, but in the 60's the white Australia policy was still in people's minds, mine included.  .

If you happened to look over at these girls, at lunch time, to where they sat together, they would shout "whatta YOU lookin' at white bitch?!".  This would often be accompanied by curses and threats. You would never make eye contact with these girls and they always hung out in groups.  They would threaten, with very real intent, to come and punch your face in.

I had had no contact with Koori people at Eugowra, except for shadowy figures in the Salvation Army girls home at Canowindra (another small town some 50ks away), where I often went to Sunday School. These were the stolen children, so powerfully told of in "The Sapphires".  I was ignorant

If only then, I had understood more fully how awful it is to be an alien;  an outsider;  someone looked down upon.  I was, after all, white, "normal looking" and not really that different to most of my peers. I was only dorky;  these girls were outcasts. I realize now, they had probably suffered all sorts of bullying and also, I shudder to think, abuse, violence and who knows what else.  They were threatening, because they needed to be, to self-protect.

If only I had been courageous and simply talked to them.  But I was too scared;  to out of my comfort zone. And even in the middle 60's, there was a great divide between black and white.  We patronised our indigenous people;  we tried to provide for them in our own flawed way.  In the end,  from the stolen generation, and the racism,  the worst we did was try to make them white;  tried to envelop them in our culture;  tried to obliterate theirs.  We segregated them and made them dependent on the welfare system. We took their culture and then wondered why they couldn't instantly become part of ours.

"The Sapphires" movie made me think of  those girls this morning because so much of the movie resonated with what these girls must have experienced. I found myself thinking of them and realizing, after all this time,  how school must have been for them.  If it was scary and uncomfortable for me, a little white girl, how much worse must it have been for them;  alienated, disrespected; made invisible;  picked on; looked down on.  And all in their own country;  the country of their birth-right;  the country which had nourished the soul of their people for thousands of years.  Worse than that even, these girls were what was called "half-castes" (appalling word). They were, perhaps, the result of the coupling of white/black people;  often, I believe at the hands of sexual grooming and outright rape, from degenerate male members of the so-called "civilized" culture).

I prayed for these girls this morning. I have no idea what happened to any of them, but I'm guessing many are lost now, either to death, or alcohol abuse or unwholesome lifestyles.

"Lord of all peoples, I intercede for these women, today;  at this moment.  You know who they are.  Bless them with peace today;  bless them with healing;  give them the help and courage they need to build stable and meaningful lives.

Heal their childhood experiences, as you have healed mine. Bless their parents, their sisters, their brothers, their children. Forgive us, the European interlopers, who so sought to envelop their culture in our own.  Thank you for the grace their people often show, in forgiving us.

Begin in these woman, and those like them, a spark of healing;  raise them up to be leaders of their people.  Begin with them, and bring the redemption and renewal of soul, body, mind and spirit of all the people in our land. Whatever spark of your Spirit might be in them, fan that spark to life;  whatever spirit of overcoming and victory might be still alive in them, breathe your love and steadfast presence on that spark and bring it to life, so that they will live with love and victory, overcoming the scars of their experiences in life.

Heal the hurts which have become bitterness;  ours as well as theirs.  Forgive us when our ignorance turns to prejudice.

I intercede for these girls, now my age, who so long ago and with such frightened vehemence, tried to exist in a world so foreign and disapproving;  I pray for others like me, the little white girl from the bush, who took years to realize that their taunts were the shields against their hurt and rejection. In Jesus Name, who understands what it is to be an outcast and rejected, I ask all these things.  Amen."

Christmas blues

I get a bit depressed at Christmas time.  And it is present on a few levels.  Christmas time, with it's expectation of happy families, trains a spotlight on my broken family.  I am divorced and have been for a long time.  My marriage was not a happy one.  I have also been alone for a long time.

And most of the time, I just accept this and live in the moment;  day by day, moment by moment.  I try not to carry the burdens of the past while I am living in the present.

But it's harder at Christmas time.

I have much to be thankful for; I have my two girls and I am very close to them.  And I have a little grand son now, so most of the time Christmas is OK. But there's always that little shadow of grief and regret which remains.

Another reason for that is because my son died 7 years ago, and now Christmas will never be the same, because he will always be missing. 

And the reasons for the depression doesn't stop there, I'm afraid.  I hate the whole tinsel and Santa in-your-face, let's party and over eat and spend all our money, attitude.  We gorge ourselves on food and drink, celebrating.... what?

As a practising Christian, I celebrate the birth of Jesus and we keep it simple.  We don't go overboard with food or alcohol and we keep gift giving non-extravagant too.

For the life of me, I can't see what the secular world sees in Christmas.  They worship the mighty dollar and Santa I guess.  They spend heaps of their hard-earned cash on expensive presents which their loved ones don't need and often throw away. All the tinsel and ornaments end up in land-fill and domestic violence is the end result in a lot of families.

This spoils it for me too.  I find it so hedonistic, selfish, degenerate and offensive.  I wish we could go back to celebrating the birth of the Christ-child;  he who came to bring Life and peace to those who enter into relationship with Him.  I wish the Christian community could move Christmas to another time of the year and we can reverence and celebrate appropriately.  The rest of the secular world can have "Santa Day" or "mighty dollar day"  or "who can get the drunkest" day.

There's even another reason for my depression at Christmas time.  I have a very modest income, and have had for decades.  So when my kids were with me, it was a difficult time, finding the money to buy them something they would like but was within my small budget.  I always felt like my gifts were not good enough. I know that sounds like I was joining the great rush to buy expensive gifts, but it wasn't like that.  I just didn't have enough to buy quality things, so would have to compromise with junky stuff.  I hated it.

So, while I browse and shop this year, this heavy feeling accompanies me;  I wonder if what I'm buying is what they want, and will it be good enough. It's a kind of left-over emotional stone that still weighs me down a bit.

And as I walk through the shops with all the rubbishy "stuff" and the Christmas music and the crowds, I feel like we are cheating ourselves;  settling for the cheap and meaningless and unsustainable, when we could be entering into relationship with the God who made everything;  with the God who sent his son to be like us, so He could understand our sorrow and walk with us through every journey. 

We've swapped the Creator for the crass.

And I find it all a bit depressing.

It's harvest time where I live in Australia

For miles around, the land is sown down to wheat, canola, some oats, and as summer draws nearer, every farmer from the dryland in the west of the Riverina, to the slightly wetter areas to the east, climbs into his header or windrower and harvests from sun up to sun down, round and round. 

The process is made a little easier these days with gps systems and air conditioned cabins, but it's still a long day.  Some crops this year have been damaged by frost.  This is the 3rd good year, after a 10 year drought in this part of the world. It takes hard work, resilience, ingenuity, resourcefulness, hope and stickability.

So next time you buy a loaf of bread, give a nod to the farmer who planted it, grew it and harvested it, making beautiful circles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEw-yMbU5Q4

What is heaven like?

2 Timothy 4:6-18 New International Version (NIV)

⁶ For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time for my departure is near. ⁷ I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. ⁸ Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.

Personal Remarks

⁹ Do your best to come to me quickly, ¹⁰ for Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me and has gone to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, and Titus to Dalmatia. ¹¹ Only Luke is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, because he is helpful to me in my ministry. ¹² I sent Tychicus to Ephesus. ¹³ When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments.

¹⁴ Alexander the metalworker did me a great deal of harm. The Lord will repay him for what he has done. ¹⁵ You too should be on your guard against him, because he strongly opposed our message.

¹⁶ At my first defense, no one came to my support, but everyone deserted me. May it not be held against them. ¹⁷ But the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. And I was delivered from the lion’s mouth. ¹⁸ The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and will bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom. To him be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

I took the service at Temora Uniting today.  (Temora is a small town in NSW, 80 ks from Wagga Wagga). These are my thoughts on this passage:

This is Paul’s farewell discourse really.  It has lots of personal touches, and advice he gives Timothy for his continued ministry.  He talks about being poured out like a drink offering;  He talks of fighting the good fight and finished the race, and keeping the faith.  The poignancy of this reaches us down the years.  Notice right at the end in verse 18 he says that The Lord has delivered him from the lion’s mouth and will deliver him from every evil attack.  This was a time when Christians were fed to the lions and Paul knew this might be his fate.  Most scholars agree he died a martyr’s death. When he talks about deliverance, he isn’t talking about physical deliverance; he’s talking about deliverance via death, to the world beyond. 

This is what Matthew Henry says:  “With what pleasure he speaks of dying. In verse 6 He calls it his departure; though it is probable that he foresaw he must die a violent bloody death, yet he calls it his departure, or his release. Death to a good man is his release from the imprisonment of this world and his departure to the enjoyments of another world; he does not cease to be, but is only removed from one world to another”(end of quote)

Paul is contemplating heaven.

One of my friends, after a trip to the UK, posted a photo of a beach scene somewhere in Scotland, and this prompted a friend of my friend gave this description of an experience she had recently at the beach.   

She was visiting Loch Aird Gorge on the Great Ocean road. (For those reading from another country, this is a beautiful coastal landscape which is at the bottom of Australia, featuring chucks of land which have separated from the mainland and are called "The twelve apostles" - although there are now only 9 of them;  the others having disappeared into the Southern Ocean)

 

She wrote:  “ I had one of the most surreal experiences of my life there. It was the height of Summer, in Dec '94 and a scorcher of a day, so I had taken my shoes off to walk on the beach. When I got to a cave, I walked in quite a way into the pitch black. There was shallow  water flowing through the cave which was freeeezzzing cold on my bare feet! I remember after a while when my eyes had become accustomed to the dark, I turned around and looked out to see beyond the mouth of the cave... golden sand and blue ocean. It was the weirdest sensation, being in a freezing cold, pitch black cave yet only 20 or 30 metres or so away, it was a roasting summer's day. I've never forgotten that! Venturing in there was a foolish thing to do in hindsight. I didn't have a torch at all, and could easily have stood on something nasty with my bare feet or worse still, fallen down a hole. But I came to no harm and have a lasting memory of a very special experience.”

This experience might describe what our expectation of heaven might be;  our earthly existence is darkened at times, we are so prone to our physical limitations of cold and heat and illness etc; yet we always look out onto the bright landscape of heaven, through a portal. We can sometimes just about see the sunlight and the blue and the promise of that space with God, on eternity's horizon.. There is even the idea that as our eyes become adjusted to the darkness, we develop "heavenly eyes", so that we see more clearly on earth, what is really important (as you could see the dimensions etc of the cave). Our lives are dark sometimes (as in the cave experience), but we always have the promise of passing back to the light, either here, when the grief/pain is overcome, or when we go to heaven.  I think this is what Paul was thinking about.

How do we get to heaven?  Do we have to be good enough?  There are many people who think this way.  If you are a good person, you’ll go to heaven.  But who measures goodness?  If you are a sliver short of a mass murderer, do you get to heaven?  If you live a fairly moral life, will that ensure your ticket to paradise?  But who measures what morality is?  Some people say that if what you do doesn’t hurt anyone else, then it’s OK.  And perhaps if you only have a tiny slip up in the morality department, you still get to heaven. 

If we think in this way about heaven, then we might be tempted to become like the tax collector in the Luke 18. “I’ve never looked at a porn site, so I’m better than that neighbour of mine who is always downloading dirty pictures”.  And I never swear, so I’m better than most people”.

While there’s a lot to be said for observing the moral and ethical guidelines of the Bible, and especially for observing the golden rule;  it certainly makes us stable, kind and happy people - I’m not sure it gets us to heaven.

Some people think that God is only a forgiving God, not a judge, and that means they can do whatever they like in their life and when they die, God will still welcome them to heaven.  I’m not sure that’s right either.

What gets us to heaven, is acceptance that we cannot do it ourselves, no matter how good we are, because our best will still never quite come up to the perfection of God.  We will always be dogged by our humanity.  We ask God to forgive and accept us the way we are.  We believe in Christ’s resurrection, and his promise and ability to resurrect us.

That brings me to my second point.  What will heaven be like?  We can’t really know. We know it will be a place where there are no more tears.  It will be a happy place;  it will have God in it and all will be well.  These are just my ideas really.

It will be a place of reunion, I think, where we meet our family and friends who have gone before.  That will be a great day, I think. Love is the thing that endures.  God would be going against his own divine precept if love born on earth didn’t continue in heaven.

It will complete our life here.  Our questions will be answered;  all perplexities and tragedies will be explained;  we will see our life on earth from the heaven side of our lives, and all will make sense.

I think there will be work to do.  It might get a bit boring otherwise. But it won’t seem like work.  It will be a place of harmony.  No workplace bullying here.  No hunger, no want of any kind. 

There are some lovely verses in Isaiah 65:17-25, which describe a lovely picture of heaven

Verse 17says the former things won’t come into our minds;  no bad memories. Verse 25 says everything harmful will be banished;  verse 18 says there’ll be joy and gladness;  verses 20 to 25 says there will be fullness of life, security, rewarding work, fellowship with God, and peace

But we don’t really know what it will be like.  Even as we look at these Isaiah verses, we can’t really comprehend it.  If we knew all things in heaven and earth, we’d be like God and the knowledge would be too much for our finite earthly consciousness.  It would be like trying to explain our world to an ant.

So here we are, in between these two worlds so to speak.  We await here, living in our physical bodies, and look to heaven to come.  We live in the “promised but not yet” time;  and while most of us, enjoy our life in this “waiting state”, and probably hardly ever think about heaven, we are, still, in a sense “waiting to be called home”.  When I was a girl on the farm, I’d be outside playing with my siblings and we could be a long way from the house.  But we’d always know when it was dinner time because my mother had a cowbell, which she would take outside and ring, when it was time to come in.  My father would hear it, and we’d all down tools and toys and come in for dinner.  We all of us will experience a time when, for us, the heavenly cowbell will ring, summoning us home.  It ought not be an experience to dread, even though we will not know the manner of our going, or the time.  God is in charge of that.  We only have to live, always in the knowledge that this place we inhabit now, in our physical bodies, is not our final destination.

Life is precarious;  it is unpredictable.  The truth is, we could be called home any day, or we could be here for many more years.  So, we should live every day, in a sense, as though it will be our last.  We should give ourselves over every day to the indwelling spirit of God.  This is a lovely way to live;  this living a day at a time, according to the will of God, so that whatever our changing circumstances are, our constant is God, and our peace is knowing that at the end, there will still be God. 

And because his mercies constantly renew us, even while our bodes are getting older every day and subject to decay, our spirits stay fresh and invigorated. Some years ago now, my brother send me a birthday card, with a picture of a young woman on the front, with a hole in the front page, so you could see the woman’s head on the page underneath.  The front cover was a shapely and beautiful young woman (in cartoon style), but when I opened it, the picture was of a hag woman, with wrinkles and everything drooping, and a caption which said “who on earth put my head on this wreck of a body?!?”  Our bodies do indeed start to decay and age, even as our spirit stays the same. God can put a new and vibrant spirit in our aging bodies;  a spirit which enables us to live with love, service, dignity, gratitude, peace in a world which is held in the tension of the promised but not yet;  a world which is changing, uncertain, sometimes very evil, violent, unforgiving.  We are like changelings.  We live in the world of the here and now amongst people whose pursuit of their own pleasure knows no bounds;  yet here we are, with this seed of eternity inside us quietly and patiently and obediently waiting for our “cowbell call” to go home.  , We can rejoice that we are held and valued by God, as we live out his precepts here and now, amidst a world often dark with its own sin. 

We can’t know all the answers about heaven;  trying to understand heaven is like trying to put a huge hot air balloon into a shoebox.  But I’m sure of one thing.  God, having begun a good work in us, and setting our feet on that last, best journey, will not allow us to tumble off it or led off into the abyss. Like Paul, we trust God to bring us safely to His heavenly Kingdom.

Ephesians 1:11-23

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ephesians%201:11-23&version=NIV

The thought that always comes to mind when I read these is that they describe a Supreme deity;  a sovereign deity.  Is God sovereign? 

Verse 11 says “we have obtained an inheritance; we are predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to His will”.  These verses relate to salvation – inheritance, and we won’t go down the predestination path today.

I believe God certainly had a broad and definite plan for our salvation.  He willed it,  he brought it about .  So, if he had such a purpose and will in this regard, surely it would stand to reason, He does so too, in relation to what happens to us in other ways too.  The important words here are “purpose and His will”.  He works all things according to his will.  He doesn’t cause bad things to happen, but He manages it, allows it, and uses it to reveal himself to us.  Romans 8:28 declares this …. All things work together for good, for those who love him and are called to his purpose. So this passage paints a picture of a Supreme Loving Being. In these verses, we find the following:

·        Verse 11 describes God as having the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will.  Accomplishes all things;  he decides it and he does it.  All things, not just the nice stuff, but all things, according to his purpose and will.

·        immeasurable power,  verse 19;  immeasurable;  unable to be measured.  That’s the power of God.  These are dimensions which are off our scale

 

·        he raises from the dead, verse 20.  He used physical death for His purpose ie to raise us to a life far above anything we know here. And if he can raise from the dead, then he must have supreme power over everything.

·        He is seated in heaven, above every other authority;  above every other name or dominion.  Unassailable;  power over all below;  power over all that exists;  power over all that ever was and ever will be.

·        He is above every other name in this age and the next

·        He has all things under his feet.

·        Right at the end of the passage, Paul brings this picture of Supremacy full circle.  The One whose purpose is to save us, fills the earth and heaven, is also the One who can, as in Vs 22, be in His church, his body;  us;  not just in community, but dwells personally in us in all his fullness, through the HS.

So we have a picture of a supreme God, Father, son and HS.  And the hard question is “If he is supreme and loving, why does he allow awful terrible, unthinkable things to happen, especially to the very young, the innocent, the vulnerable.  Why does He allow people to be bullied, abused, oppressed;  why does he allow people to suffer?

It seems to me that the terrible things that can happen to us fall into two categories;  firstly, the things that just happen to us, out of the blue, from a seemingly random, unknown source, and secondly, the things that others do to us, which cause us pain or hurt. 

Last year, one of my daughter’s friends was killed in a car accident at.  She was a lovely young Christian woman, just 21;  married just over 12 months. A huge B-double rammed into her as she turned off the road.  On the same highway, there are people transporting drugs;  there are mafia bikie gangs;  there are crooks and pedophiles travelling on that road;  we can’t understand why this young life was taken in an instant.  Why not one of those others? This is one of those things which just seem to happen;  a freak accident that makes no sense.  We find it hard to believe in a Sovereign God who allows this sort of thing to happen.  I don’t think God causes this sort of tragedy, and  I can’t believe God deliberately sends us awful things, for our own good;  that would make him some kind of cosmic sadist.  And I guess, in the face of this type of suffering,  his sovereignty seems a fettered, beaten thing, just mopping up tragedy after the event, by bringing good out of it.  I have no answer for that, except to say that if God’s power was always used to prevent awful stuff, we would already be living in a sort of heaven.

 The second type of suffering is of the type done to us deliberately, by someone else.  Of the two, I’ve found this type harder to cope with.  The random stuff;  the stuff that seems to be nobody’s fault is less personal in a sense, and it’s easier to put it down to some mystery that God has under his care. But deliberate hurt and betrayal at the hands of someone else, is very hard to understand and come to terms with.

I’m sure, for instance, God could have made sure that one of the very many attempts to kill Hitler, succeeded. We could argue that killing him would be descending to the same level as he was.  But there’s also no denying that if one of these attempts had succeeded, especially early in the 1930’s, millions of innocent people would not have died;  war may have been avoided altogether. 

It was really uncanny how many times Hitler escaped assassination.  Perhaps the most concerted was in 1944, when a man named Claus von Stauffenberg made several attempts.  He was backed by a group of about 9000 Nazi resistance fighters.  All his attempts failed for one reason or the other;  there were other people who tried to kill Hitler too, but no-one succeeded.  Some escapes were really uncanny quirks of fate;  On one occasion, a bomb planted in a conference room went off minutes after Hitler had left the room, and he was unharmed.  On another, a bomb was placed in the lectern where he was speaking.  But he, uncharacteristically, cut his speech short and the bomb missed it’s mark.  Perhaps the quirkiest was when a bomb placed in a briefcase under the table where he was seated, went off, but Hitler was unhurt, because one of the people also seated at the table unwittingly pushed the briefcase behind a leg of the table.  The bomb went off, but the stoutness of the oak table protected him from the blast.  Others at the table were killed, but Hitler was unscathed.

I find this baffling;  that this evil man escaped death so many times, yet this lovely young Christian woman, was killed in a freak accident on the highway. Where is God in these matters? 

Why is it that sometimes evil people can go on and on with their plans, seemingly unaffected by the sovereignty of God?  I have no answer except that God cannot make someone behave with compassion and peace if they have made up their minds not to.

During the reign of Hitler, there were two brothers.  One was Hitler’s right hand man, responsible for setting up the concentration camps;  responsible for killing millions of Jews.  His name was Herman Goering.  Herman had a brother called Albert,  and Albert was responsible for saving many Jewish people.  He hated what the Nazi’s were doing to his countrymen.  He and his brother were close, despite their differences in politics and ideals.  Herman liked to show of his power to Albert and so Albert was able to use his brother’s influence and name, to free many Jewish people.  One of these was Franz Lehar.  He wrote “The Merry Widow”(that lovely operetta)  Another was the wonderful singer Joseph Schmidt.  If you haven’t heard of Joseph Schmidt, he was the Austrian equivalent of Peter Dawson.

We are given the power to overcome evil with good.  We are given a choice as to how we will behave.  God will not interfere with that free will.  God is sovereign, but he would not intervene in Herman Goering’s life, or Hitler’s life, even though it would have saved much suffering by innocent people. 

It must seem to us at times, as though God isn’t supreme. And it seems sometimes that evil people always win.  But it’s not the case.  Seasons of evil always come to an end. Consider these words from Ps 73

³For I was envious of the arrogant; I saw the prosperity of the wicked. ⁴For they have no pain; their bodies are sound and sleek. ⁵They are not in trouble as others are; they are not plagued like other people. ⁶Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them like a garment. ⁷Their eyes swell out with fatness; their hearts overflow with follies. ⁸They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. ⁹They set their mouths against heaven, and their tongues range over the earth. ¹⁰Therefore the people turn and praise them, and find no fault in them. ¹¹And they say, “How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?” ¹²Such are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches. ¹³All in vain I have kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. ¹⁴For all day long I have been plagued, and am punished every morning. ¹⁵If I had said, “I will talk on in this way,” I would have been untrue to the circle of your children. ¹⁶But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, ¹⁷until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I perceived their end. ¹⁸Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin. ¹⁹How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors!

I’ll tell you what I believe.  I believe God is sovereign.  I believe that everything is ultimately under His control, even the freak accidents and the illnesses. I think that nothing happens to us, without his saying it’s OK, or not OK.  And if it’s not OK, it doesn’t happen to us. .  I think the world, spiritual and physical, is a broken place;  almost perfect, but subject to imperfection all the time;  full of good people and bad people;  flawed and faulty, who set up flawed and faulty systems and who are at the mercy of their ambitious human nature.   The world is full of people who chose to be evil or selfish or ignorant or uncaring.  The world is also full of people who chose to be a positive force;  who are willing to help and care for others.  There are extreme examples at both ends of the spectrum, and then there’s us common, ordinary folk, who are in the middle. And even the physical world is subject to this fallen state.  Accidents happen; illnesses strike us down seemingly willy-nilly.

This can seem a short, trite answer to this most anguished question..  It’s a fairly unsatisfactory answer when we are faced with our own personal tragedy. 

But for me at least, it is, after the strident, shrieking voice of grief has calmed a little, the answer which makes sense.  God, even through accident and illness knows how many days we have, before we’ve even lived one of them.  We don’t understand it, but then God is God and we are frail humanity.  Of course we don’t understand it.  Because it’s not for us to decide these things.  God judges our hearts and numbers our days. We, his creation, cannot rule over such matters. He is the Alpha and Omega;  he has control over life and death.  We can trust him with this purpose.

When people hurt or bully us, we want God to be an avenging force, stepping in to give us victory over those who seek to destroy us.  We want God to spare us from hurt and suffering.  We want God to cause them to fall into their own traps. 

But the reality is, He often doesn’t, in any tangible way.  The limitations of our earth-life are sometimes painful and perplexing and damaging to us. Life can be messy, illogical, difficult, challenging, scary, depressing, fragile, unpredictable.  The only way we can get through it with joy, is by inviting Jesus to walk the journey with us. God allows evil to touch us but He never leaves us to cope with it on our own.  God’s power is to be found amidst our suffering;  comforting, triumphant and restorative. He has his own purposes, but He always has our spiritual well-being in mind, despite the pain sometimes of our physical, mental and emotional circumstances

May God himself attend us, as we wrestle with the hard questions of life.  Amen

Jeremiah 8:18 - 9:1; Luke 16:1-13

I’d like to draw rather a long bow between the Jeremiah reading and the Gospel text (The parable of the Shrewd Manager). The one is about grief – the grief of Jeremiah for his erring Israelite people, who have turned their hearts from God and worshipped idols.  This passage might echo the very heart of God’s grief too, when we stray into unholy territory. The other is about a very shrewd business man.

We might feel like Jeremiah sometimes because many of our own people here in Australia have also fallen off the faith wagon;  they have turned their backs on the Christian faith which nurtured our nation in its infancy. And like Jeremiah, we long for our nation to turn back to belief and embrace the grace, mercy and peace of Christ.

But the first, unlikely thing I thought about both these passages when I read them was that grief and redemption can go hand in hand. We can’t ask for God’s forgiveness, until we can see our error.  We first must grieve over our fallen state, before we can seek God’s pardon. But people these days have no desire for all that confession and admitting to a fallen nature. They don’t want the clarity to see themselves as they really are, before God. They have no need of Him;  they do not grieve over their hedonistic lifestyle or their embracing of the very worst of depravity, gambling, pornography and so on.  They see no need for repentance. They have no need for forgiveness.  Perhaps a little shrewd spirituality on our part is called for.

That’s where the dodgy business manager comes in.  In the Luke reading, we have this off-putting story about the Manager who appears to conduct some very dishonest business deals on behalf of his Master, yet still comes out smelling of roses. He manages to keep onside with the boss and his clients, and keep his job at the same time – all with some clever manoeuvring and deals made with the debtors. He was very shrewd and he was definitely thinking outside the box. 

This parable has many layers about our attitude to money, to the poor, to redemption, but in essence one of its main themes is Jesus saying to his followers “If only you lot were as crafty and concerned and as focussed about MY business, as this wily fox was about saving his own interests and reputation. If only you would think outside the box now and then;  if only you would take every opportunity to showcase my Business, as well as this Manager looked out for his.  Take a lesson. Be as frank with yourselves and as clear headed about My Kingdom as these astute operators in the secular world.

I say again.  Grief can be redemptive.  This is out of the box thinking.  When I first heard this notion, I found it very confronting. I’ve proved it to be true though.  With God, any grief can have a redemptive quality; not just our grief when people stray from faith, but personal grief, even communal grief.   Grief and suffering have a spiritual shrewdness about them;  grief can lead to insightfulness;  it can sharpen and refine faith.  The grief someone feels over a failed marriage can lead them to understand why it failed;  it can redeem them from making the same mistake twice.   When God and grief are spliced together, the result is often redemption – redemption of many different kinds – not just eternal salvation.

You will have heard in the media that last month was the 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.  It’s a well-known speech. Just two weeks after that speech, in September 1963, the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed and 4 little black girls were killed.  Birmingham Alabama was no stranger to violence, especially this church, because it was a gathering place for black Christians who campaigned for civil rights.  But the violence was mainly perpetrated on black people by white supremists – this was the case in the church bombing. Eventually, in 1964, Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights bill and this ensured that black people were equal in law, and it banned segregation.  But they still couldn’t vote. And there was another significant piece of oratory, before laws were passed to secure this right.

In 1964, Fanny Lou Hamer, a negress, addressed the all-white, anti-civil-rights Democratic National Convention.  This is part of her description of the violence perpetrated on her and her race..  Fanny Lou told how she had been carried to the county gaol, because she had encouraged black people to be registered to vote.  Play sound clip.   She told how she was put in a cell next to a young black woman, Miss Ivester Simpson.  She described how she could hear this woman being beaten.  Her attackers were shouting at her, calling her nigger and other awful names, and making her say “Yes Sir”.  Fanny Lou told how her screams reverberated through the cell.  She said that after a while Ivester Simpson began to pray, and she prayed for her attackers.  She asked the Lord to have mercy on them, and forgive them for what they were doing.  She was, through her suffering, asking for redemption, not for herself, but for those beating her. Her prayers for them became, eventually, redemptive for the nation of America – redemptive in the sense that it was freed from its evil racism and inequality.

The whole equal rights movement in America began with black Christian people.  It was based, in its purest form, in non-violence and redemptive suffering – Dr King’s Movement had as it’s motto “To redeem the soul of America”. The black people were suffering but redemption would come to America because of how they behaved in that suffering as Ebester’s prayer so powerfully exampled.  I am convinced that this is God’s best, most effective work;  that of turning bad into good, turning grief into joy;  turning wretched ungodliness into redemption. It has power beyond our reckoning or imagination. This is the work of the Kingdom, about which we must be so shrewd.

It is perhaps to draw a long bow to call this spiritual shrewdness, but the parable introduces us to the astute man who became righteous – not by begging for mercy and praying on his knees – but by forgiving the debts of others in the Master’s name. A key component of God’s Kingdom is all about forgiveness, mercy and grace to the undeserving.  And sometimes, as we walk across the bridge of our own grief, or someone else’s, we cross into that most shrewd and unlikely of God’s gifts – that of redemption and grace to help in time of need.  We cross the bridge of suffering, into God’s grace.

Just as the Shrewd Manager was retained, and benefitted from his prudence, Jesus uses this example to assure us that as we are shrewd managers with his forgiveness and grace, He will entrust us with the riches of heaven. As we forgive the debts of others, we ourselves are forgiven;  as we struggle with our own suffering, we become perhaps, the catalyst for another’s redemption, or even our own.

The dodgy manager could have followed the convention and been given his marching orders or dragged through the courts;  instead he made some succinct decisions and thought “what can I do to bring good out of bad;  what can I do for a positive outcome? 

What can we do for a positive outcome in the face of either our nations backsliding or grief?  We can decide to be astute and prudent with our emotional energy and spend it praying for others. We can be the vehicle of redemption through God’s amazing ability to bring good out of bad. Packaged up with grief is opportunity for the Kingdom of God to be passed on to people who may not receive it from a person who is powerful and with well-established social prominence.

It’s not that we want to experience grief or disempowerment.  We don’t want others to have it either, but let’s remember that God is never defeated by grief;   God’s Kingdom was started with grief and suffering on the cross.  God, who is the convener of life and death, the author of redemption, used grief very shrewdly – outside the box of what we think should happen, to bring redemption to us, to others, and especially to those who hurt us.

Forgiveness looms large in this because it’s not the norm – the norm is to hate those who hurt abuse and use us, but like the woman in the cell in Birmingham, we can pray for those who hurt us – God can take that attitude, those prayers, that resolve, to release and grow his Kingdom in very powerful ways.  Oh that we can strive to be this shrewd with his Kingdom to his glory and for the redemption of others.