we plant seeds

" This is what we are about: we plant seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.
   We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for God's grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own."
-attributed to Oscar Romero 1917-1980

When Jesus returns

 

It doesn’t really matter what we do
in our own finite occupation of planet earth;
so one theory goes.
All the pollution and the global warming
and the depletion of the fishing stocks
and the extinction of the various species;
not our problem.
And all the refugee camps in border regions
and the ragged children on the smoking garbage mountains
and all the repression and the fear
and the greedy corporate exploitation
and all the political lies; about these things
we need have no concern.
Because Jesus is coming back.
Yeah, Jesus is coming back
and he’ll wave his hand,
his magic Holy Spirit hand,
and the new heaven will replace the old,
and the new earth will take over from the old,
and everything will be clean and sparkling
and smell like a pair of shiny new shoes,
fresh out of their box.
Or so one theory goes.

© Ken Rookes

Prophets and other dreamers

Dreaming aloud as the perplexing words
of the strange and mysterious God
dance to their unique rhythms; catapulting
into the prophet’s conscious thoughts and out again.
Words, this time, of hope;
encouraging affirmations of renewal,
with the troubled times retreating into non-memory.
For the once great city there is a promise
of restoration, of joy and delight; and of blessings
that will become for all an invitation to life.
Words of domestic contentment;
people dwelling in the houses they have toiled hard to build,
and granted the greatest of all signs of hope,
the birth of a child.
The words continue their unconstrained dance
singing of enjoyment and satisfaction in old age;
and of planting vineyards
with the expectation of enjoying their fruit.
“You plant grapes for your grandchildren,”
a winegrower once told me.
The words dance crazily
as they tell of wolves and lambs feeding side by side,
and of lions and oxen sharing the same bale of hay.
At this point we know that the dreaming
has taken over from reality,
and that what really counts is the abiding presence
of the God who answers
even before she is called.

© 2010 Ken Rookes

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

How do we live today?

"Consider the poetic beauty of today’s reading from Isaiah. To the people who knew exactly what it meant to lose a temple, God says, “See, I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. So be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating.”

How do we live today when we don’t know tomorrow? We draw strength from God, who invites our participation and endures long after the cities and buildings and stones have crumbled. We adopt a posture that asks not what God can do for us, but calls us to bring the Kingdom of God just a bit closer. We love neighbor as self and we strive for just societies and a stable planet- new heavens and a new earth. We pray without ceasing, and we trust in a mighty God from whom all blessings flow."

http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/stw/2013/11/01/26-pentecost-proper-28-c-2013/

Those are the modern day sadducees!

God is a God of Life.

"Now we could unpack Jesus’ answer as it relates to understandings of marriage, and of the differences between life before death and life after death and how they relate to marrying or not marrying, but the stuff about marriage is not really the main point. The question about marriage is only a furphy designed to ridicule the idea of resurrection, and although Jesus does dignify it with a quick answer, he quickly turns to their main point: “The fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.” Luke has softened Jesus’ response a little. In Matthew’s and Mark’s versions, Jesus begins his reply to the Sadducees by saying, “You are wrong, because you do not understand either the scriptures or the power of God.”

And really what Jesus is doing, in all three versions, is turning the issue to our understanding of God and the power of God. In particular, he is saying that God is a God of life, a God of the living, a God who is all about life, life and more life. And he is calling us to recognise how radically this contrasts with what we are on about and what we mostly think God is on about. Because what the Levirate law really shows, Jesus is saying, and what the way we mostly conduct funerals nowadays is saying too, is that we are obsessed with death and with a fear of what will happen if we die before we have carved out a lasting legacy in the world that will ensure us some kind of ongoing impact in the land of the living."

http://laughingbird.net/ComingWeeks.html

questions that matter

"So here are these Sadducees, learned men who are members of the branch of Judaism that does not believe in a resurrection after death. These Sadducees finally get to encounter Jesus. This is their moment--this is their time in the sun. Yet, this is what they say: Teacher, if seven brothers die in succession and each marries the same woman, one after another, to whom is she married in heaven?

Excuse me? Here they are before the Christ--the Anointed One--and this is the best they can do?

There is a Jewish saying that says, “Rake the muck this way; rake the muck that way. It’s still muck. Meanwhile we could be stringing pearls for heaven.”

How often do we waste our time raking the muck instead of stringing pearls for heaven? How often do we waste our time playing word games instead of seeing the Christ right in front of us?

There’s a character in one of Saul Bellow’s novels who says, “I had boasted…how had I loved reality. But…unreality. Unreality, unreality! That has been my scheme for a troubled…life.” Well, let us ask ourselves if that is our scheme as well? Do we avoid the reality of questions that matter?"

http://day1.org/814-love_the_questions

The Saducees

 

I have some sympathy for the Sadducees,
for whom there was no resurrection.
They believed that this grounding place of dust,
decay, wind and uncertainty,
was where the true action was;
not in some future and otherworldly realm
where the dead are revived,
renewed, resuscitated and raised
to somehow continue the privileged work of living.
When the body dies, so does the soul.
Angels and other spiritual entities?
They simply don’t exist.
Reward or punishment beyond the grave?
Forget it! It’s what happens here that counts.

They, too. were Jews, these Sadducees:
children of Abraham who took their faith seriously.
They shared the Pharisees’ insistence
that the law must be obeyed,
and that the well-being of the nation depended upon it.
In the temple’s courts one day,
these sceptics enjoyed a spirited debate with one, Jesus,
an untrained teacher from the north.
According to the testimony of gospel-writing historians,
the itinerant rabbi clearly took the points.
Nearby scribes, they also tell us,
were deeply impressed by the power of his arguments,
and concurred.
Some of us heretics, however,
are still considering the matter.

© 2010 Ken Rookes

The Saducees' question

The Saducees' question

Having ruled in red ink
a line under life,
some Saducees ask their famous riddle
about the woman, seven times widowed;
the one which has caused great rabbis
and learned scribes to stumble.
This self-styled teacher from the northern extremes
should be easily ensnared
and made to look ridiculous.
But the teacher is already captive
to a glorious vision of life in abundance;
a boundless gift from a limitless
and ever-living God.
Laughing at their keyhole view,
the teacher speaks of hope and freedom
in the coming age of resurrection.
Soaring unconfined, his truth
mocks the Saducees' pitiable attempts to enclose.
Rendered speechless,
there will be no more questions.

© Ken Rookes

The big complaint

 

This was the big complaint,
the one that had them all grumbling:
He has gone to be the guest
of one who is a sinner.
He’s hanging out with the ratbags,
the worthless ones;
the dodgy people that nobody cares about.
Taking seriously his message,
(he says it comes from God),
of life-changing love,
and grace without limit;
he takes it beyond the mere words
of earlier stories
and moves confidently
into disreputable reality.
Apparently unconcerned
by the great offence he has caused
to those who practise polite religion,
he claps his hands,
laughs in celebration
of the unexpected new beginning;
and calls it ‘salvation’.

© Ken Rookes 2013