stfrancischurchtairuanz

On the Other Hand …

I recently heard a news commentator say, “We’ve lost the ability to disagree.”

The perceptive 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof examines issues like tradition and the mixing of competing values; the place of love in long term marriages, and the repression of Jews. Characters are forced to examine the views of outsiders, and how their own views need to change and accommodate – often to compromise long held beliefs.

“On the one hand,” reflects Reb-Tevye, in several monologues, “[This is how I see it …] But on the other hand, …” On the last occasion, his “other hand” comparison was (and shouted in despair), “There is no other hand!” It was just too much to ask. He can’t bring himself to accommodate, and he banishes his daughter from his house forever, at heart-breaking cost.

What would you do if your (Jewish?) daughter wanted to marry a gentile communist activist, or a repressive Russian soldier? On the one hand, you wish for nothing more than your daughter’s happiness. On the other hand, you might find yourself totally opposed to what her suitor stands for, and his lifestyle, and doubt the young couple’s ability to live together successfully.

Is there ever a third hand?

Questions without answers! Such is rhetoric. But such competing values occur all over our world, especially in the online universe. [Not so much in the public media, because the public media line seems to coalesce into an agreed, politically correct stream – that sells newspapers. They no longer seem to debate all sides.]

But we, the middle people, need to learn to discern ‘other hands’, choose accommodations or compromises, and disagree gracefully and graciously. In public. Unseduced by conspiracy theories. And without fear of being banished forever.

Proposition: Let’s say I believe strongly in Alpha. You believe as strongly in Beta.
You and I disagree, obviously, even to the point of row. We argue, debate … You begin to realise (perhaps through the strident case I make, or perhaps through wider reading and listening) that most of the world believes Alpha! Your Beta is unpopular, in some quarters despised and vilified. Maybe even you alone hold the Beta view. What are you going to do?

More importantly, what am I going to do? I smugly hold the higher – interpret, more populist – ground. I can rubbish Beta. I can rubbish you. I can humiliate you publicly. Will I?

I might hope that you come round to Alpha. I might try to forcefully persuade you.
But the imperative is that I don’t scorn you, or, worse, banish you forever. I might actually consider your Beta. The majority is not always right. (Arguably, it is seldom right.) Or maybe there’s a ‘third hand’! A common ground, and point we can agree on. And points we can agree to disagree on. With respect.
The love principle guiding us is more important than the (often trivial) black-white-grey principle we disagree on.

Give us public debate without rancour or mutual destruction. Give us respectful, if heated, discourse – online, in the media, and with our friends and neighbours – even in our families. Give us unresentful and reasoned peace, above all difference.

Let us get better at disagreeing.

Ken F

God’s grace is sufficient

by Joan Fanshawe

(Based on Mark 6:1-13, Ezekiel 2:1-5, 2 Cor 12:2-10)

“Hear O Mortal” — if I heard God’s voice like Ezekiel did way back then I would certainly know there were going to be some directions to follow.

A few days ago the blog on hearing God’s voice, posted on our St Francis webpage, was a good intro into the scriptures set down for this week. Also we have had a little discussion this week about how the readings might relate to each other. This week it’s easier to find links than some. First we have the prophet Ezekiel’s dramatic recounting of hearing God’s voice and being sent to the Israelites, in the fiftieth year of their Babylonian exile – a nation of rebels who have rebelled; they and their ancestors have transgressed. The descendants are impudent and stubborn. Ezekiel hears the instructions, “You shall speak my words to them, whether they hear or refuse to hear; for they are a rebellious house. You shall say to them, “Thus says the Lord.”
Things were not going to be at all easy with these people but “they shall know that there has been a prophet among them.”
Strong stuff!

Six hundred years later we have Paul recounting his experiences with the church in Corinth, also dealing with an uncooperative group of people that he feels have ‘gone off the tracks’ since he left them – perhaps much closer to a scenario that we can understand – a world that rates success and celebrity. Corinth is a very cosmopolitan city and it seems the church has been infiltrated by ‘super-apostles’. There has been much academic debate about this but it might be easiest to think of these as sort of first century ‘tele-evangelists’. Certainly they set high store on the quality of their ‘spiritual experiences’ to justify their authority, and had an admiring following in the new Corinthian Church.

Paul, who has a poor opinion of his own speaking ability, responds almost angrily and using a rhetorical technique recounts the vision experienced by a person – commonly held to be Paul himself – who “was caught up to the third heaven … into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.” An astonishing experience, as we know from the account of Paul’s conversion on the road, but Paul goes on to say he is not going to brag about this, “so that no one will think him better than what they have heard or seen of him already.”
He’s not taking the ‘super apostles’ on head to head on ecstatic experiences; it isn’t the basis of his authority. In fact, he claims that, to keep him from being too elated, he was given a “thorn in the flesh” to torment him. His message revolves around what he heard from God when imploring that this impediment be removed. Three times he begged God – but heard this:

“My grace is enough; it’s all you need. It is sufficient for you. My strength comes into its own in your weakness.”

Paul makes it clear that he does not rely on his eloquence (he knows he isn’t eloquent) or his experience of ecstatic visions for his authority. His power and authority are totally different from that claimed by the ‘super-apostles’. In fact his power does not come from himself at all, but from the gospel he proclaims; and his authority does not rest on what he has experienced in an inward private way, but in the manner in which he is living the gospel in their midst.
And despite so many hardships ahead – what a mission Paul is committed to. Together with his helpers – moving around to early Christian communities, and letters going to Rome, to Corinth, Galatia and Ephesus, to Philippi, Colossae and Thessalonica.
These epistles, which are collected in the New Testament, written to the earliest Christian churches, have provided unimagined inspiration through the history of our Christian faith. Did Paul envisage this? Almost certainly not.

But what he did know was, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.“

So there we have Paul and Ezekiel, Apostle and Prophet, both hearing God’s voice and being sent out to proclaim a message to people who don’t particularly want to hear what they have to say.

Which provides a good segue to our Gospel story of Jesus who meets opposition in his own home town when opening the scriptures and teaching at the local synagogue. Their rejection gives rise to the well-known quote from the passage:

“Prophets are not without honour, …. except in their home-town, and among their own kin, and in their own house.”

There’s a wealth of sermon material in this aspect but we will move on a little because we know that Jesus has heard God speaking to him (at the time of his baptism) and we know that he has already been teaching and healing; he has stilled a storm and raised a small girl from apparent death. Now he is moving about, teaching in the villages, and we hear that he’s called his disciples to go out as well. Sending them in pairs but with the clear instruction that they’re to take very little with them. Many may not have had much anyway as these were just ordinary men, as we know, fishermen and artisans. But it wasn’t going to be easy. They had instructions to move on when not received well – shaking the dust from their feet.

Maybe some were also known and hassled in their own home-towns.

As with Ezekiel and Paul there was resilience required to go out with the Good News about the coming reign of God, and living it, Mark tells us, with healings and exorcisms and setting free the oppressed. They were sent by Jesus to be bearers of good news in word and deed.

You’ll have to wait two weeks to hear how they got on because Mark interrupts his narrative at this point with a shocking story.

For us, in our own time, we need to talk about how we too hear God calling us, to be, and to share the Good News that Jesus made clear and makes clear. That blog on discerning ‘God’s voice’ on the website offers a very good opportunity to reflect more on that.

Mark’s Gospel of Jesus is very much about ‘the Way’: the way of the Lord, the way of Jesus and what it means to follow that way. We know that many desire to be on that way with Jesus. That we are each here today to worship God as part of a community is a sign of hope and faith in being on the Way. Here we can support each other in learning and encouragement. And to be equipped to carry on in spite of history showing us it’s not an easy path. We won’t be perfect and we won’t succeed in all we attempt. But when we hear that call we must step out in faith and trust in God’s grace.

Recently I came across a resource that’s being promoted in the Episcopal Church of the United States – that’s the Anglican Church there. It’s a seven step process that endlessly repeats – creating a rhythm and template for the Way of love!

It begins at 10 o’clock.

TURN Pause, listen, and choose (to follow Jesus).
LEARN Reflect each day on Scripture, especially Jesus’s teaching.
PRAY Dwell intentionally with God each day.
WORSHIP Gather in community regularly to thank, praise, and dwell with God.
BLESS Share faith and unselfishly give and serve.
GO Cross boundaries, listen deeply and live like Jesus.
REST Receive the gift of God’s grace, peace, and restoration.

To conclude let’s recall what Paul reminds us: it‘s not about him, and it’s not about us, it’s about God; it’s about forgiveness and love and fullness of life. For Paul, God’s grace is as much a ‘given’ as the air we breathe – it’s a grace that prevails over weakness, hardship and apparent failure.

May God call us with the same message.

“My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”

Amen

God’s voice?

How to hear the voice of God? That’s the question stirring today. Uncharacteristically. These blogs are usually of a general (and random) nature, seldom addressing ‘religious’ topics. But discerning the voice of God surely enters everyone’s thinking, even the non-religious. If we’re honest, most of us are often listening out for guidance on big decisions, etc, from somewhere in the cosmos! Some seek it from tea leaves or crystal balls, but the more discerning would seek the voice of ‘God’.

Easier said than done. And worthy of more words than this piece can offer.

But signposts are posted for the discerning and focussed traveller, and I offer the following three helpful quotes.

John Wesley (learn of him here) proposed: “When a person is ‘born of God’ … their whole soul becomes aware of God … The Spirit of God breathes life into the new-born soul … Their ears are now opened and the voice of God no longer calls in vain. They hear and obey the heavenly calling. They know [his] voice … All their spiritual senses are now awakened, they have a clear course of communication with the invisible world … they know more and more of things which before their hearts could not begin to understand.”

Frederick Buechner (see here) posited: “… the word that God speaks to us is an ‘incarnate’ word – a word spelled out not alphabetically, but enigmatically, in events, even in the books we read and the movies we see … [but] we are so used to hearing what we want to hear and remaining deaf to what it would be well for us to hear that it is hard to break the habit. But if we keep our hearts and minds open as well as our ears, if we listen with patience and hope, … deeply and honestly, … we come to recognise that, however faintly we may hear him, he is indeed speaking to us, and … his word to each of us is both recoverable and precious beyond telling.”

And King David (in the music of Psalm 19) said: “The heavens declare the glory of God … day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the end of the world.”

‘Incarnate’ is an interesting concept. It means (according to Merriam-Webster) “made manifest or comprehensible”; as if to say, we need to be looking for signposts or impressions less than obvious or not part of our normal noise, but listening sensitively and with God-ward focus to something unobvious, but somehow made manifest or comprehensible.

Easy. (Not.)

But practise. Look for those signposts, and discern what God’s voice would say to you in your current circumstances. Write and tell me about it.

Ken F

Two Kinds of Faith

by Barry Pollard

(Based on Mark 5:21-43, Psalm 130, 2 Cor 8:7-15)

Mark’s gospel reading today gives us two stories in one. The first is the story of Jairus’s daughter, who is dying, the second is the story of the woman afflicted with non-stop bleeding. Each is a story about faith.

As I pondered them, and what they could mean in my life, I ended up with more questions than answers.

Jairus was a leader of the synagogue, presumably steeped in Jewish ways and faith, yet he appeals to Jesus, who was preaching to a crowd of disciples and the curious. This tells us a couple of things: knowledge of Jesus was spreading and having impact, people starting to believe that he had the power of healing, probably as they learned of his other acts of healing and miracles. And people with no close relationship with Jesus were seeking him out.
This was a feature in the second story of the woman. In various accounts she is referred to as a “zaba”, literally meaning “oozer”. She must have had knowledge of, and faith in, the one she sought. She had experienced “remedies” and treatments from many doctors over a long period of time and no healing had been effected, no relief given. Yet she had enough faith in what she had heard about this man Jesus that she sought him out, believing that even to touch his robe would be enough to be healed. Something to remember is, desperation can lead to deep faith.

The touch was enough but it drew a response from Jesus that gives us a clue about healing power, for the healer and the healed! For Jesus there was an awareness that healing power had gone out of him. He hadn’t initiated it. The woman had. I assume that there must have been a sudden drain in energy that he sensed; and for the woman, she had a physical awareness that her bleeding had stopped and her body was put right.

This type of sensing I can identify with, having dislocated a shoulder. After visiting the A&E department for it to be put back, I suffered through two weeks of physio trying to get it to do what it should. A follow-up visit to the hospital led to the job being done properly and the relief I felt was instant! It was back where it should have been and functioning pretty much as normal.

But Jesus called the woman out. He wanted to identify who had been healed. His disciples didn’t give much encouragement in the search, but he kept looking and eventually the woman came forward and fell at his feet, admitting that it was she who had touched him and been healed. Jesus’s response publicly identified what had brought about her healing – faith!

Remember that the story of the bleeding woman is told within the story of Jairus. Jairus has asked for Jesus’s help in the first instance and they were en route to his house when the woman intervened. The healing of the woman and his follow-up teaching had brought the procession of the crowd to a halt. Jesus was not to be hurried and took the time to explain what had happened for the benefit of not just the woman but the crowd watching on.
But as the healing of the woman was concluded the attention turns back to Jairus and the daughter in need.
As Jesus was sending the healed woman off, messengers from Jairus’s house arrived to announce the passing of the child. Jesus heard this news and turned to Jairus to encourage him. “Don’t be afraid. Just have faith.” Remember, like the woman, Jairus has sought out Jesus to heal his daughter.

The crowd was stopped, and Jesus proceeded to the house of Jairus in the company of disciples Peter, John and James. As you would expect, the scene on arrival at the house was one of weeping and deep sorrow at the passing of a loved child. Something else to remember is, desperation can lead to deep despair.
Not put off, Jesus announced to everyone gathered there that the girl was not dead, simply asleep. Disbelief was rampant and he was mocked openly. But, undeterred, Jesus proceeded into the house with Jairus, his wife and the three disciples to raise the daughter back to life. Holding her hand and saying, “Little girl, get up” was enough!

You can imagine the depth of amazement in the room, as a child that had been declared dead was suddenly up and walking around. Jesus, ever practical, tells those in attendance to refrain from telling others what they had experienced, and to get the child something to eat!

At this point I admit that I have more questions than insights about Jesus and what he was doing in these accounts. Perhaps you’ll ponder these along with me:

He was alerted to the presence and actions of the bleeding woman by sensing that power had left his body. If healing had that effect on him, how much more might he have felt bringing Jairus’s daughter back to life?
And, why did he order those who witnessed the resurrection of the girl to say nothing about it, yet he publicly identified and spoke with the suffering woman?

Has anyone heard of the television series on the life of Jesus and the disciples called The Chosen? It is a crowd-sourced television production depicting the life and impact of Jesus on those he called to follow him, the disciples. Watching it, I have come to see and understand another side of Jesus. He is wonderfully portrayed as a smiling, engaging man who exudes love, compassion and goodness to all others. If you have ever struggled to come to terms with who Jesus really is – man and God – this show might give you a better appreciation, as it has me. I would have loved to have been in his company! He was funny, intelligent, friendly, and purpose-driven, and, yes, he appears to have enjoyed feasts and the odd wine!
Anyway, the idea of healing power leaving his body was a theme used in one of the shows. In the episode Jesus was leading the disciples through the wilderness, and the crowds who have heard of his healing power turn up en masse to be healed. The show focuses on the disciples going about their work, preparing food, erecting shelters and so on, but all were concerned for the welfare of Jesus who is engaged throughout the day, without breaks, healing those who keep turning up before him. The day ends with the evening meal being served and Jesus staggering into the encampment and heading straight for his bed roll, saying he was too tired to eat and talk. He was drained. The power had been going out of him all day long! [You can view the various episodes here.]

This provided further insight into the life of Jesus for me – selfless and serving – and explaining the draining effect of healing others.

The leading characters in our two Gospel stories, Jairus and the bleeding woman, both demonstrated deep faith. And in each story Jesus acknowledges the depth of their faith – by miraculously raising a loved daughter to life for Jairus, and healing the body of the woman who had carried her affliction for more than a decade. Their faith was rewarded.

And for those who have ‘read ahead’ and researched the accounts in Mark’s Gospel, you might be thinking about the taboos Jesus was breaking down: it was forbidden for rabbis to touch the dead (in the case of Jairus’s daughter) and it was forbidden to have contact with a menstruating woman (in the case of the zaba). These were significant steps that Jesus was taking, to break down the strictures of the law, providing instead his grace alternative.

In today’s Psalm, the message I heard was that the despairing can have every hope in the Lord, because he is faithful. The psalmist acknowledges that God is upon high, and petitions for a hearing. He confesses that he is a sinner but knows that God forgives. He counts on the Lord, longs for the Lord, hopes in the Lord. He sees God as unfailing, redemptive love!
The psalmist definitely has faith in a faithful God!

The reading from Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth builds on the idea of faith. The message I heard is, if you have faith (and Paul acknowledges that the church of Corinth was a faithful community), you need to demonstrate it in practical terms. Imagine a church where the faithful sat around and did nothing. Would that have appeal, would it draw others in? Is it sharing the Good News? It is not exactly how God envisaged us ‘living out our faith’.
The Corinthians were grappling with the issue of supporting other churches, particularly those in need. Paul’s letter was to encourage them to continue to be generous in their giving, according to what they had. His point was that while they were in a position to help, they should, because there may be a time in the future when they might need the help of others. Paul uses the Jesus-comparative in verse 9 to emphasise his point: “You know the generous grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty he could make you rich.”
By heeding Paul’s advice, the church of Corinth would further the theme of faith and generosity.

This brings up my next set of questions: What about us?

As in the case of the psalmist, do we see God as faithful? Does he ever change? Do we believe he is the same today as he was yesterday and will be tomorrow?
Are we faithful? Is our faith as unshakeable as that of God? Do we seek him out only when we face crisis? Or do we turn our backs on Him in our time of desperation?
Do we live out our faith? Do we take thought to action? Do we act in equitable ways?

For each of us the answers will be different. And will be according to situation, according to experience, and according to belief. As we mull these things over we may face a reality check or two. I know I did, and do.

A worry I have is that we may see faith simply as a transactional thing – I desire this outcome, so to bring it about I’ll believe more, live out my faith more, and so on. If we take the face-value message of ‘faith equals a great reward’, we are likely to fall way short.

If faith isn’t transactional, what is it? Faith is moral and spiritual, and it is relational. In fact, the very heart of faith is about relationship to God through Jesus Christ and, through that, relationship to others.
Jesus was always pointing us to faith in him. If our faith is anywhere else, we have missed his point.

Our challenge this week, and I hope you’ll take it up, is to spend time examining our faith in relational terms. Set aside time and make it a ‘waiting on the Lord’ time. Be honest in your assessments and commend them to God. Expect to hear his response!

Hear from you next week?
Let us pray: Healing God, you are indeed life and wholeness. Transform our brokenness by the power of your life-giving love, and deepen our faith.
We ask this through your faithful Son, Jesus, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen