Even in the church

Haiku of restoration.

Words on Jesus’ lips:

how the church should respond to

sinful behaviour.

We all make mistakes

do the wrong thing, hurt others;

needing forgiveness.

Even in the church

we fall short. How to react,

that is the challenge.

Save embarrassment

with a quiet word, hoping

to be reconciled.

Everybody

doesn’t want to sort things out.

Do the best you can.

If you get nowhere

don’t sweat on it. Let them go,

but don’t stop hoping.

He is surely here

in the grace and forgiveness,

as the gathering.

© Ken Rookes 2020

Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki

Haiku for founding a church

We went there last year:

Thessaloniki, sun-drenched,

oozing history.

Coming among them,

the Apostle convinced some,

offended others.

They couldn’t find Paul

or Silas; they grabbed Jason,

dragging him to court.

Much consternation.

Seditious accusations!

They get out on bail.

Somehow the word stuck;

planted in turmoil, the church

produces much fruit.

Paul writes them letters,

commending their love and faith;

they are examples.

Their love and welcome

prove that they have truly heard

Jesus words’ of life.

The deeds are noted,

their faith is celebrated

throughout the region.

People are watching;

by our fruits, we too, are known.

Better get it right.

© Ken Rookes 2020

Posted in response to the Narrative Lectionary Readings for the fourth Sunday in Easter.

The temple deserving of destruction

"... The woman’s devotion is undoubted. But we have taught her, in part, to increase her poverty in the name of God. “They kill the widow and the stranger...” (Ps 94:6) Families are destroyed by husbands at too many meetings and working bees, or wives working too long in the church office. Except it is not the husband or the wife, it is the church. Young women are destroyed by the structures; it has been happening all my life and I am only finally seeing.

.... In this picture of a more fundamental corruption, those “inadequate people seeking power” (Loader) are often tolerated, and even encouraged,  by other inadequate people seeking an inadequate God. Great is their rage and destructiveness when they see they have idolised God and gotten only a poor minister.

And in the middle of it all those who are true become the “collateral damage” of the church; the ones we deny we have destroyed.

I once saw a man stand firm under fire and give everything he had. What an appalling thing if the widow was doing this, too, with her two coins, and it turned out we had built a temple which turned her love into a lie!

It would deserve its destruction."

Andrew Prior (from https://www.onemansweb.org/theology/a-difficult-day-of-the-lord-mark-13-24-37/the-trickle-down-theory-of-church-mark-12-38-44.html)

Jonah's hard way

Several years ago Michael Lerner wrote a book called “The Politics of Meaning.” Lerner said that too often we give up on our deepest held values of compassion, caring and community because they do not seem practical in the real world. Instead, an ethos of selfishness and materialism prevails by default. These are the values that we settle for when our deeper values seem out of reach. Selfishness and materialism erode community and make it less possible to live the life we want. It puts us more out of purpose. Jonah’s way seems easier at first, but in the end we will get thrown overboard and end up in the belly of the whale.

And so we lose our perspective so easily on what God is really calling us to.
In the church there is a relentless battle for the orthodox high ground. Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans and Presbyterians don their traditional  denominational colors to joust back and forth.
The most contentious issues relate to baptism (when and how), the nature of biblical inspiration and authority, the limits of the atonement, the creation debate, not to mention sexuality .
Somebody said of Church people that “we would rather be right than nice,".
While I'm not sure being a Christian equates with "nice," the point is well-taken. Although Paul maintains that while faith, hope and love abide, "the greatest of these is love," I believe that many Protestants have decided that the greatest of these is actually faith—as in "orthodoxy" of one sort or another—and that little else matters, least of all incarnation.

S.T. Kimbrough suggests that evangelism is increasingly difficult not because our pluralism, consumerism or attention span makes us resistant, but because we fail to incarnate the love we preach. We can't persuade others that we are people of peace because there is so much strife and contention among us—and we are often more eager to be right, or to win, than to be loving. We offer forensic invitations to discipleship—come think like us—instead of a mutually transforming hospitality: come be with us; let's learn together.
https://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2009-01/greatest-these-being-right

Be in agreement

Haiku of the disappointing

Sinners in the church!

How could it be otherwise?

Flawed humanity.

Work through your issues;

quietly if possible.

Maintain fellowship.

Try to practise grace,

forgiving one another.

Sort things out with love.

Rules are enacted

to limit bad behaviour;

love doesn’t need rules.

Accept correction

from your sisters and brothers

as a caring gift.

Agree together

on your Father’s purposes;

advance God’s kingdom.

Where two, three gather

in my name, to seek my will,

I am with them there.

© Ken Rookes 2017

A tough passage

"This is a tough passage, and its not easy for us to hear Jesus speaking like this, and I don’t think it was so easy for the disciples either. If you look at the context in v41 – Peter is asking – um – all this stuff about being ready when the Son of Man comes – is that for us, or just for others –‘them’, the hoi polloi? And in answer Jesus tells another tough story about slacking on the job and getting a beating for it…. And you can imagine the look of horror on the disciples faces….. and I can just sense Jesus tearing his hair out, and losing it with them

 

“Look you morons, here am I, terrified of the baptism of death that faces me and all you can think about is whether or not you’ll get special privileges and dispensations! This isn’t a picnic you’ve chosen. Following me is hard. Its costly. Its not all sweetness and light and choosing the good bits, and the safe options – its about fire roaring through this world – cleansing and purging. Its about division and the sword. This life with me is a crisis point for you and for the world. It is so significant that it will cause major divisions within families and communities. Read the signs! Get real and stop playing!”

.....There was a popular book in business circles a few years back called “Surfing the Edge of Chaos”. It was written by a group of business people who observed nature as a way of understanding how best we can learn to organise ourselves. One of the key things they saw was that in nature – equilibrium – ie a stable state, is the precursor of death.

Only a system that maintains significant internal variety can withstand the threat of external variety. So the inter-tidal zone is the most fertile context for spontaneous mutation. This is a region swept by extremes – inundation and flood followed by drought and desiccation, and this amazing variety forces the system to the edge of chaos, and  demands that organisms adapt or die.  It is here that fish grew legs, and roots learnt to breathe. It is in the place of extremes that life comes forth.

 

Businesses and churches have to learn that equilibrium is life–threatening.  If we do not embrace risk and change, if we do not encourage extremes of experience and ideas, we will die. The birthing of peace, and all good things, is forged in the crucible of life lived on the edge of chaos; life that is open to risk and to new possibilities.  

 

And I think that this is what Jesus is talking about in this passage.

 

No wonder that churches are struggling to survive. We do not welcome change. We don’t like hearing people we disagree with. We don’t move much beyond our comfort zones, so we don’t nurture much internal variety, and then we are surprised that we are threatened by changes all around us!"

Nathan Nettleton - http://laughingbird.net/ComingWeeks.html

How are we defined?

Guerrillas of Grace.

For those who don’t know me too well, I am an avid gardener. A few years ago I heard about a new movement in gardening called “Guerrilla gardening” which is the practice of finding a public space which has been left to go to ruin and resurrecting it into a beautiful new garden. The ‘guerrilla’ part of it is that it is done without asking permission of local council’s etc. One of the catch cries of the movement is “Let’s fight the filth with forks and flowers!” The idea appeals to the rebel in me but also it attracted me on a spiritual level. I feel that it is a very ‘God-centred’ action to play a part in turning ruin into beauty.

I also love to buy books of poetry and prayers and I recently ran across a prayer book by Ted Loader called ‘Guerrillas of Grace – prayers for the battle’ (book which was originally printed 20 years ago). In the foreword he says “The notion of guerrillas seems to be rooted in the ancient Judeo-Christian tradition. The Old Testament prophets can easily be conceived of as guerrillas doing battle with the established powers of their day… Jesus was the pre-eminent guerrilla of grace; he confronted repressive institutions and liberated captive minds and hearts with his words and his life.” In reality I believe that there is nothing more subversive than the power of grace. Grace is taking the loving action in an unexpected place and time.

And there are so many issues on which can today be guerrillas of grace as Christians in the modern world. When the churches stand alongside the refugee and pronounce the church building as a place of sanctuary, or when we make a public stand in protest against government policies that turn away genuine asylum seekers, then we are being guerrillas of God’s grace. When we pray for our enemies instead of taking on the public rhetoric of hate, we are being guerrillas of grace. When the church resists being just another institution, but instead seeks to be place of honesty, integrity, of vulnerable open hearts seeking to live lives of compassion, mercy and justice; then we are being guerrillas of God’s grace.

And internally, within the church; when we live our lives differently with each other and seek to become a community who truly love each other, despite our differences, our imperfections and our brokenness; a community that sees Christ in each other; then we are being guerrillas of grace in perhaps the most difficult place. As Leunig says in one of his prayers, “Love one another! It is as simple and as difficult as that.” In my experience, the church is a place in which we need this more than ever.

In this Lenten time, when we are called upon to examine ourselves a little more closely, perhaps we have the opportunity to try out being Guerrillas of God’s grace. Come-on! Be a little subversive!

Blessings

Rev Gordon Bannon 

fresh expressions of church

For many years we have been looking for strategies that will get people to “come to church” without much success. Many different schemes have been tried and plans offered, Messy Church being one of the latest. There have been after school and holiday programmes for children, contemporary services with bands instead of organs and café services where all sit around tables and sip coffee. People may come for a while but then move on. Like Hannah, many in our congregations are weeping because we have no children or young ones to follow us. We sometimes blame ourselves or our ministers and are taunted by the sight of young ones at mega Churches, even though we do not see God as they do. Like Hannah we have become distressed and wept bitterly to the Lord, pleading for new life to come to us. We have promised God all sorts of things if only our congregation does not die.

Some members of the body of Christ have heard the promise that new life is coming and are preparing for it. They are developing fresh expressions of Church outside of and away from the traditional buildings. Instead of fruitlessly trying to get people “into the Church,” they are going to where the people are and meeting Christ there. They are showing God’s love in trying to bring justice for people of other faiths and for refugees. By facilitating rallies and candlelight vigils in public spaces, they have engaged with young people who do not normally come ‘to Church’. These events, at the same time have made meeting ecumenically easier than going to your Church or mine provides.

...

We are challenged by the God who dwells within us to decide what it is that our hearts are leading us to and how we may work towards fresh expressions of Church away from our buildings and understanding worship as far more than a Sunday Hymn Sandwich. Jesus said that he came to bring us life in all its fullness and so it is reasonable to think that in these fresh expressions will be opportunities to develop and use all our skills and talents in encouraging others. We do need to meet together as the reading from Hebrews points out, to show our concern for one another and stir and encourage each other to respond in love and good works. [Hebrews 10:24 paraphrased from New Jerusalem Bible]

In answer to the disciples’ enquiry about the end of the Temple, Jesus spoke of war, earthquake and famine indicating the very beginning of new birth. There is a way still to go, and the way may be painful, but no woman who has ever given birth would consider giving up at the first signs of pain because it will be worth all the pain in the end; so with new birth for the Church. May your pain be eased by hope for the outcome.

Rev Julianne Parker  (for full sermon see sermon's page)

The challenge of God's law within us

In the Gospel reading, we heard Jesus say that unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth it remains a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit. This could be another way of expressing the idea that the primary goal for Christians is not their own comfort and advancement but to do everything possible to encourage others to life in all its fullness. We know that the seed falling to the ground does not die. In fact, if it did die, it would produce little except a minute amount of nutrients for another plant. What happens when the seed falls to the ground is that it comes in contact with the ground of all being which enables all the hidden potential of the seed to be released and to flourish.

Christians for the main have aspired to move away from earthiness rather than towards it. Why has the Church thought that grand buildings were what brought glory to God? Does a great cathedral, which was built at the cost of many lives both in the actual building and in the cost it was to the poor people of the district show more of God’s glory than a single sprouting seed? It depends on how you see glory. Do we see the glory of God’s humble goodness or is it the power and wealth of Empires we see? Such buildings show how clever humans are rather than the glory of God..

Being prepared to lay down our lives is about acting humbly rather than showing how great we are. The world by now might be quite different if the Church had remained an example of the humility of God rather than its idea of the glory of God? If we had taken note of what God told Moses about the glory of God being goodness, if we had heard the prophets telling us that God hated the way the people worshiped and that what God wanted was justice, mercy and humility, the whole world might be different.

God has made a new covenant with us and put God’s law with in us. God has given us many gifts, fruit and abilities to enable us to become more Christlike. We have the responsibility  to trust these are sufficient for us to behave as Jesus behaved and calls us to do.

Rev Julianne Parker

(for full sermon see sermons page)

Demonic powers

"The unclean or demonic powers are primarily encountered in the places of religious teaching and worship, and it is the teachings of Jesus that expose them and cause them to rise up in frenzied opposition to him. And this points us further into just what it was that Jesus was teaching and challenging. This contrast between the clean or holy and the unclean or demonic is at the heart of what religious teachings and institutions claim for themselves. They are the places that determine and regulate who and what is considered holy and who and what is considered unclean, unacceptable, defiled and to be rejected. But when Jesus begins cleansing the “holy” places, you can quickly see that he is declaring that these “holy” places have in fact become havens for the demonic. All the way through the history of religions, including Christianity, our supposedly “holy” systems have mutated into forceful systems of control. They claim control of people’s fates, they prescribe rules, they limit freedom, they judge who is clean and unclean and who can come in and belong and who can’t. They confine and stifle and squash and oppose. And Jesus doesn’t just speak against them. His critique of these stifling holiness systems is balanced by bold actions of liberation and renewal in God's name. He makes it abundantly clear in word and deed that God’s love and mercy and joyous welcome will not be bound and regulated by our demonic systems."

Nathan Nettleton from http://www.laughingbird.net/ComingWeeks.html

It is is not clear-cut like that

"On the first day of creation, as the story is told in Genesis 1, God was in the darkness and brought light into that darkness. God saw that the light was good and gave the world light, but only in equal parts with dark in the form of day and night. With so much artificial light, we may think that the split is around one third dark and two thirds light. From the beginning of the practice of Daylight saving there have been jokes about the extra sunlight, but ozone holes and global warming aside, there is still only the same amount of sunlight as there has always been.

Almost from the beginning, we have seen light as good and dark as evil. There is nothing in these verses to suggest that darkness was anything but good also. In and of themselves they are neutral. Both can be good in some ways and both can be used for evil. We have also spoken as if there is a sharp distinction between them, that there were no grey areas. It is only on the Equator that this is a sharp division between night and day. As we move further from the Equator so the time between dark and light, night and day, lengthens. Dawn and twilight take up more of each day. Could this be what the words “And there was evening and there was morning, the first day” mean?

We speak of some people for whom everything must be seen as black or white, who cannot tolerate grey areas who find uncertainties about God difficult to live with. We believe God sent Jesus to give us more certainty about the nature of God and how God cares for creation, especially people. However, we get caught up in trying to put things into categories of right and wrong, night and day, light and dark. If there is one thing we can see in the life of Jesus, it is that it is not clear cut like that."

Rev Julianne Parker

(for full sermon see sermons page)

Che Jesus

Che Jesus,
They told me that you came back to be born every Christmas.
Man you're crazy!
…with this stubborn gesture of coming back every Christmas
 you are trying to tell us something:
That the revolution that all proclaim begins first of all in
 each one’s heart,
That it doesn't mean only changing structures but changing
 selfishness for love. hat we have to stop being wolves and return to being
 brothers and sisters,
That we…begin to work seriously for
 individual conversion and social change
That will give to all the possibility of having bread,
 education, freedom, and dignity.
That you have a message that’s called the Gospel,
And a Church, That's us!
A Church that wants to be a servant of all,
A Church that knows because God became human
 one Christmas
there is no other way to love God but to love all people.
If that’s the way it is, Jesus, come to me this Christmas,
Come to my country,
Come to the world of men and women.
And first of all, come to my heart.
Anonymous,
Cordoba, Argentina at Christmas, 1970

Making the path easier

In the Gospel reading for today [Matthew 23:], Jesus had seen that by their actions, those who were supposed to be leading the people were in fact restricting them, imprisoning them in unfair laws, limiting their movement by laying heavy burdens of unnecessary requirements on them. The Church has placed burdens on people in the way it has interpreted and taught the Bible and rules it has made.

For some years some in the church have been shedding some of the burdens placed on them by past expectations and understandings of Scripture. Many old perceptions have died or have been left behind as people have been freed to understand things in new ways or have come to know the historical Jesus better. At the same time there has been much wandering in the wilderness. We have been burdened with the upkeep of grand buildings sometimes built as a display of wealth and skills rather than to the praise of God.

Many laments for congregations that have been lost.

There is debate about whether sudden death is less painful than anticipated death. Is it better for death to come suddenly or for it to take months or years. I do not know. I think it is good to have time for good-byes.

Paul worked hard to avoid being a burden to the people he cared about. We can put burdens on people who are grieving by telling them they should be behaving in a certain way, according to a certain pattern. We can burden them with guilt by asking if they had done something differently might their loved one still be alive. We can burden them by putting our understandings of God, Christ and the Bible on them by saying things like, “God took him,” or “His work on earth was finished.” These kind of things aren’t always the comfort that is intended.

Can we make the path easier for others by acting with compassion and love, n helping to rid them of burdens.

Rev Julianne Parker

see sermons page for full sermon

A litany of all the Saints

A Litany of All the Saints

Holy ones present at our beginnings:

Stand Here Beside Us!
Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel and Leah,
makers of the covenant, forebears of our race:

Stand Here Beside Us!
John and Charles Wesley, preachers in the streets;
all whose power of speaking gave life to the written word:

Stand Here Beside Us!
Louis, king of France; Margaret, queen of Scotland;
Gandhi the mahatma, reproach to the churches;
Dag Hammarskjold the bureaucrat;

all who made governance an act of faith:

Stand Here Beside Us!
Mary Magdalen, anointer of the Lord's feet; Luke the physician;
Francis who kissed the leper; Florence Nightingale;
Albert Schweitzer; all who brought to the sick and suffering the hands of healing:

Stand Here Beside Us!

Holy ones who made the proclaiming of God's love a work of art:

Stand Here Beside Us!
Johann Sebastian Bach; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart;
all who sang the Creator's praises in the language of the soul:

Stand Here Beside Us!

Holy ones haunted by the justice and mercy of God:

Stand Here Beside Us!
Joachim of Fiora, prophet of the new age;
Johnny Appleseed, mad planter of Eden;
Sojourner Truth, pilgrim of justice;
all whose love for God was beyond containment:

Stand Here Beside Us!

Martin Luther King, shot in Memphis:Oscar,  Romero, shot in San Salvador: Janani Luwum, shot in Kampala:

Holy ones of every time and place:

Stand Here Beside Us!
From earth's wide bounds, from ocean's farthest coast,
Jesus our liberator, creator of all:

Stand Here Beside Us!
Jesus our liberator, the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end: wisdom, for creativity, for energy and for liberation to new life.

(Prayers are shared or prayed silently)

for all this and for ourselves,

We pray in faith, O God. AMEN

(Source unknown)

Romans 12: constructive nonconformity

I love Martin Luther-King's sermons for their passion and depth of thought. In this sermon he takes the first couple of verses of Romans 12 as inspiration. (forgive his exclusive language; a product of his time). I think this is a message for our time as well in relation to a Christian stance on asylum seekers, global poverty and war.

"Men are afraid to stand alone for their convictions. There are those who have high and noble ideals, but they never reveal them because they are afraid of being nonconformist I have seen many white people who sincerely oppose segregation and discrimination, but they never took a real stand against it because of fear of standing alone I have seen many young people and older people alike develop undesirable habits not because they wanted to do i t in the beginning, not even because they enjoyed it, but because they were ashamed of saying “no” when the rest of the group was saying “yes” Even the Christian church has often been afraid to stand up for what is right because the majority didn't sanction it. The church has too often been an institution seeming to crystallize and conserve the patterns of the crowd. The mere fact that slavery, segregation, war, and economic exploitation have been sanctioned by the church is a fit testimony to the fact that the church has too often conformed to the authority of the world rather than conforming to the authority of God. 

Even we preachers have manifested our fear of being nonconformist. So many of us turn into showman and even clowns, distorting the real meaning of the gospel, in an attempt to conform to the crowd. How many minister’s of Jesus Christ have sacrificed their precious ideals and cherished convictions on the altar of the crowd? How many people today are caught in the shackles of the crowd? Many of us think we find a sort of security in conforming to the ideas of the mob? 

But my friends it is the nonconformists that have made history, Not those who always look to see which way the majority is going before they make a decision not those who are afraid to say no when everybody else is saying yes, but history has been made by those who could stand up before the crowd and not bow The great creative insights have come from men who were in a minority It was the minority that fought for religious liberty, it was the minority that brought about the freedom of scientific research In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist Now let us make it clear that nonconformity in itself might not be good There is a type of bad nonconformity. There is no virtue in being a nonconformist just to be a nonconformist. Some people are nonconformist just to get attention and to be different. So Paul gives us a formula for constructive nonconformity which is found in the second half of the text. In order to discern the true will of God and become constructive nonconformist we must accept a new mental outlook. We must be transformed Jesus’ phrase for this experience was the new birth. And so only when we have been born again can we be true nonconformist. We are called upon to be transformed nonconformists. This is our eternal challenge as Christians.

The spiritual strength and moral courage of Jesus amid the temptation in the wilderness is our eternal challenge. Jesus was born at a time when the majority of people thought of the Kingdom as a political kingdom and thought of the Messiah as the one who would restore this political kingdom with all of his power and pomp and riches And all of the temptations that Satan offered Christ were temptations to

fall in line with this type of material political kingdom. In other words he was urging Christ to conform to wishes of the mob. 

Who will take the attitude of Jesus and be a sincere nonconformist? Today we stand on the brink of moral and physical destruction and the great need of the hour is sincere nonconformist men who will stand amid a world of materialism and treat all men as brothers, men who will stand up in a world that attempts to

solve its problems by war and declare that he who lives by the sword will die by the sword"."

The Keys of the Kingdom

The keys of the kingdom have been lost.

We know that Peter had them,

but he swears that he hasn’t seen them

for a long while.

Rumour has it they ended up in Rome.

There’s been quite a succession

of claimants to the role of custodian,

but some of us aren’t convinced

that any of them really knew

where the keys were.

Traditionally they hung from a ring

on the keeper’s belt. In recent times

they were apparently stored away,

and brought out on ceremonial occasions

with incense, robes and choirs.

Big and bronze, the keys clinked and rattled,

but were mostly only used

to regulate and control.

They did that effectively enough;

until recently.

They’re gone; not much doubt.

Doesn’t matter though,

and there isn’t any real point

prolonging the search; it’s widely thought

that the locks have all been broken

for some time, now.

© Ken Rookes 2014

The Sounds of silence

The silence of the Church in the 21st Century is deafening. Perhaps the silence rises and grows because the call from the liberal church for inclusive, distributive justice is drowned out by the fundamentalists’ exclusive, retributive message, which the media have assumed defines “Christianity.”
No wonder old Elijah emerged from the silence in such a negative state that God had to act to replace him.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon God they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning,
In the words that it was forming.
And the signs said, the words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls.
And whispered in the sounds of silence.

Christian “faith” has become believing in magic: walking on water, calming storms, curing terminal illness, finding parking places. While there are no magic wands or crystal balls, the cross has nevertheless conveyed magic power.
Christian “faith” is not just about Jesus coming back from the dead, nor is it about avoiding death altogether. Christian “faith” is trust in God as the source of Mercy, Hope, justice and compassion that holds sway in the Universe, despite us and sometimes through us.
Similarly the story in the gospel today about Jesus walking on the water is not about magic, even God’s magic, it is about the deeper truth that, even when we feel like we are sinking, or that God is absent or silent, God is still present to us and our distress and will walk with us and hold us up.

The news everyday is telling us that all is going to rack and ruin, but the gospel message is that God in Christ is moving all things to reconciliation and renewal.

And it is in the strength of that, with the strength of that vision that we continue to do the things we do.

The church’s call is to be that fellowship of reconciliation and renewal. 

All things made new?

"But how we delude ourselves! I've been around the Church a long time, and let me remind you of something: in the Church we generally do not like new things! Why, it's the new things that are so often the battlegrounds for church political life!

It'd be fine if the Church stuck with replacing only those things which we want replaced. There's always something we want made new. We want new acolyte robes or new paint in the parish hall. We want the preacher to preach about something new. Sometimes we just want a new priest entirely. But a new sanctuary? Of course not! A new way of praying? No way. Sing to the Lord a new song? No, no, the old ones suit us just fine. The old towers suit us just fine, too.

"All things made new" is one of the most unsettling and downright controversial themes in the Christian Church. Most of us, I daresay every single one of us, whether we are liberal or conservative, whether we are rural or urban, whether we are large church or small church, everyone single one of us have some special image of what church and religion means to us. We definitely do not want that to change. That image is what we inwardly long for when we show up Sunday after Sunday. That image may be what we think we had some time long ago. And it's that image, more often than not, which prevents us from experiencing God."

http://day1.org/2380-all_will_be_thrown_down

A tale of two boats

Last year  I shared in the leadership of a few retreats which had me thinking about the state of the church, about our need to be honest, to face truth, and to face our feelings. I was led to a sort of playful image, a tongue in cheek symbol. Given the difficulties the church is facing, our aging church, our diminishing numbers, and our dismissing status and role in society, the symbol I chose was of feeling like we were up sh*t creek in a barbed wire canoe without a paddle.  I know it's not an optimistic vision, but it feels real. It fitted in well with the ancient image of the boat as a symbol of the church. Robin prior actually made a model of this symbol and gave it to me after one the retreats.

And that was one boat, and it is real.

But I also have another story.

I have dear friend who is a potter. His name is John and he has the soul of an artist. We regularly have lunch, share veggies and sing a few songs together. He is not a Christian, but he is a deeply spiritual man.

Sometime late last year, he began having a dream of a golden boat, and then dreamed of making such a boat. He sketched, made models, practiced the form and shape over many months. Then a month or so ago, at one of our catch ups, he proudly showed me the finished work. 

I was very impressed and moved, but it took me a couple of weeks to really begin to listen to the message.

Here, in this symbol, was something that stood in stark contrast to my barbed wire canoe, and I began to hear the divine voice speaking to me through it.

This boat is gold, and, unlike the canoe, it has many oars, it is going somewhere and has many workers, and at its centre ....is the cross, a sign of the power of grace and love and the presence of the divine at the heart of our life."

So which is the greater truth?

It is important for us to know who we really are and what we are really facing, and that is powerfully represented for me in the symbol of the barb wire canoe, but the golden boat reminded me that there is more to the church than that.

In the golden boat I am reminded that the church at her best is a precious carrier of the message of God's love and the power of grace and compassion.

So there it is folks. The tale of the two boats. I guess one of them may give us one sense of the reality of our situation, but the other, for me, is a mysterious gift of God. One which is a gift of hope and perhaps a greater truth.

Make of it what you will, but may God bless our journey together, and may just such a golden vision inspire us to be together what God would have us to be.