Never any doubt

Haiku for the faithful.

Temptation stories:

will his mission be derailed?

Jesus is not swayed.

This devil fella,

who invited him into

these Gothic stories?

Angels and devils;

do they still make sense to us,

must we yet believe?

If you are God’s Son . . . ?

Great question! What quality

makes Jesus God’s child.

What makes me God’s child?

Is it that I am baptised,

or because I love?

The superpowers

hinted at in these stories;

will they capture him?

Or is he defined

by denial, declining

any privilege?

Refusing comfort,

and captive to his calling

he chooses his path.

Worship only God

and do what God requires.

The choice for us all!

 

© Ken Rookes 2020.

Temptation

Angels in the wilderness

This edition of the River of Life we are focussing on the journey towards Easter that we call Lent. Our scripture at the beginning of that Lenten journey is the Gospel story Jesus in the wilderness (often called the Temptation). This story has always been one of my favourites in scripture. It is full of danger and temptation, but underneath it all it is a story about the quest for meaning. Jesus is being faced with the core question that faces us all… ‘How will we spend our life?’ The temptation story is full of power and passion, danger and potential violence. The story in Mark only rates one verse but we are familiar with the expanded versions in the other gospels which make it clear that in the wilderness he faced the darkness of the world embodied in the Devil or ‘the Tempter’. And so in Lent we have often also focussed on our own temptations and out own darkness. Yet in all these years of reading about Jesus in the wilderness I missed the angels!

Jesus spends a self-imposed, agonising time of self-examinatio

n in the wilderness but he is accompanied not only by his lonely questions but he is also attended by angels. In fact in our version from Mark the angels are just as present as Satan. Unlike the other gospel writers Mark rarely refers to angels at all yet they are important in this story. Lent can be a time to take stock of our lives, to come clean about the things that tempt us and the things that scare us. It can be a very helpful time of self-examination but in the midst of this deep time the angels are a reminder that we are not alone. God promises to be with us in the wild, lonely places of our lives and God promises to bring us blessing out of these deep times.

I must say also that many people regard parts of our beautiful presbytery as being wilderness. For me Loddon Mallee contains a lot of wild open spaces, big wonderful skies and vast horizons and, if we choose to accept it, spaces to reflect and be. And that our Presbytery is ministered to by angels I have no doubt. I meet them all the time, but I need eyes and a heart to know them. I invite you to make this Lent a time to recount the angels you have known and the ones who currently attend you, the ones who attend you in your wilderness times. I read an article recently that referred to the angels, in the words of William Sloan Coffin, as the one who remind us that there "is more grace in God than sin in us."

So this Lent I invite you use the time as a time for an inner journey of reflection and the search for meaning, but be reminded that in doing so that you too, like Jesus, are being ministered to by angels, both human and Divine.

Rev Gordon Bannon
painting by Cheryle Bannon at https://cherylebannon.com/

love and right and wrong

“The trouble with you is that it’s never your fault.” The words hit her like a slap across her face. “Well, it rarely is.” She spat back.

Carol is a pretty mixed up sort of person. As a child she had been abused in multiple ways. She had received mixed signals about things like love and right and wrong. This influenced the way she behaved. Some might have put it that she was more prone to sinning. She was chronically depressed and her marriage wasn’t happy. There were emotional, social and financial pressures. She blamed her inability to cope with all this on her parents. They had made her who she was. It was the influences of her childhood which led to her adult choices. 

If we look at the situation Jesus was in and at the behaviour he modelled when he was being tested, we see ways which may help us. Self -awareness is one key to resisting temptation. At weight loss groups, they advise you to not go food shopping n an empty stomach. You are more vulnerable to temptation when you are hungry. This requires being aware of your hunger. We don’t only hunger for food. We hunger for attention, love, acceptance, status, and material goods.  We will be more able to see temptation for what it is we hunger for when we are more self- aware.

Each of the temptations which Jesus faced were about things any of us could hunger for. The first was for food, the second for loving care and attention, especially from our parents and the third for possessions and power. When we look at the advertising that surrounds us, we might even say, envelopes us continually, we can see it falls into these same three categories.  Fast food advertisements may not be about the food as much as the caring, promoting so called ‘family meals’, or the comfort and fun chocolate can give. Car and house ads are about prestige and the power associated with them.

What do you want me to do?

Gospel writer Mark

is a man of few details;

he invites us to employ our imaginations.

He gives us a wilderness Jesus,

no longer under pressure

from demands of family or carpenter’s shop.

Perhaps he left the trade behind,

as well as the family,

when he moved to Capernaum.

Time to think; to weigh his options.

I picture him as a frugal man,

of independent means, at least in the short term,

with a modest sum set aside

for the purpose of taking a bride

and embracing family life;

he had certainly reached the age.

Still single at thirtyish, the mid-life crisis

had been nagging away for some time,

and the recent changes in his life

showed that its course was far from fixed.

Since childhood he had felt a persistent

sense of mystery, of a divine something

that seemed not to disturb others

in quite the same way.

He had often asked questions of this spirit,

and sensed it interrogating him;

his head shouting silently

through the sounds of hammer, saw and plane.

The answers were elusive

and the questions persistent.

Now, driven into the wilderness

after the baptism event with John,

the debate increases in tempo

as the shoutings move outside his head

to echo in the desert night,

“What do you want me to do?”

© Ken Rookes 2012

Wilderness questions

Every day for forty days,

or thereabouts, the wilderness Jesus

awakens among the rocks and the dust

to face his ever-present question.

He yearns for the divine words to come,

for the answer to be chiselled among the rocks;

to either confirm his crazy notions

or to set him free.

Then he might return to his friendly

mallet, plane and carpenter’s bench.

and his dreams could embrace

the possibilities of an ordinary life,

with the more regular adventures

of home, wife and parenthood.

As the pangs of hunger grow

his senses sharpen in intensity;

and the testings build.

It is the wild thoughts,

the uninvited ones that have intruded

for some time now

(or have they always been there?)

that force their ascendancy

over the good and respectable ones.

The wilderness Jesus sighs,

not with regret,

but with an aching determination.

It will be difficult;

it might even be lonely.

© Ken Rookes 2011

and a new one!

But I can be tempted

In checkout-counter lives

thin red light beams

scan codes of curious lines

and compute the total

from the self-serving selection

in my full trolley basket,

(never quite under my control);

and the swiping eftpos plastic card

makes the painless payment

for the saturated-time pleasures,

high-comfort indulgences,

and gratifications

that will not be kept waiting.

At thirty-day intervals, approximately,

the statement from my soul shows

that I have little in reserve,

neither cash nor kind,

to feed the hungry or help the poor,

or to stand up for what is just;

and the words long ago spoken

by another who was tempted

return to remind me

that there are other ways to be.

Ah, but I can be tempted.

© Ken Rookes