Many Threads: One Place of Welcome

Why are we building a building?

The safe, left-brain answer: to house our Kerikeri congregation.

The not-so-safe, right-brain answer: to pursue our mission. Not so safe because it is different from what's been the case. But it is what we feel called to do as a distinctive way to serve, to be Christ-shaped people for the well-being of this place, Kerikeri, and its people.

Our building will in fact house our congregation. Home for us and open home for others. As our home we will be at the heart of the building as kaitiaki, tending the “home fires” keeping it warm and welcoming.

As a church (that's us the people) and as a body with charitable status, we are here for the sake of others. To maintain our identity as such (with God) and our status as such (with the government) we have to keep the focus beyond ourselves. Our new building is to be one way of doing that, and the decision to involve the community in the planning right from the beginning is a reflection of that. We continue that process asking this question:

What would enable our building to be a place of welcome for all kinds of people? A spiritual space. A place where God's Spirit speaks to all who may enter. In particular, what visual possibilities.

We will be church within this space, not shying away from who we are. One user group among the others, we will have the responsibility of provide the distinctive values and the spirit that can make sure that the building is a safe place, a nurturing place even, for all who come. We want it to embody the unconditional love that is our core belief as Christians.

Almost like an alternative realm to the prevailing world that we are all caught up in: a realm of welcome and belonging in the midst of the realm of consumerism and expendability. A place for seeking spiritual sight in a culture of the blind pursuit of more. A place of imagination and of spiritual growth.   

Requirement of Rules or Response of Love

Mark 10:1-16

We're still in the midst of Jesus' teaching about who he is and what he's here for. To understand this it has to be realised that it is suffering and death that point to the reality of God, to real life-creating, life-giving power. That's the context, with children again positioned to challenge misunderstanding.

Mark's Jesus fights constantly the tendency amongst his fellow humans to create systems in order to feel we have a handle on things, to sort everything in terms of rules.

For example, relationships.

The Bible sees everything that is as given – gift of God. It's all God's dream, this proliferation of creatures and things and it's declared good. Good because the Creator delights in it. Creator and creation in relationship. A few chapters later when things are not good – deemed a total mistake and almost wiped out (by the flood) – it all stems from a breakdown of this relationship.

God's dream is the ideal, the vision, a.k.a. the Kingdom. For Jesus carries this same vision. He lives the ideal, he's rooted in Kingdom ways.

Kingdom ways lead to well-being, justice, peace – that is, right relationships (righteousness in traditional translation). When words like marriage (which I define as faithful, intimate relationship) are used by Jesus, this is the perspective he is taking. The ideal of what can be, the horizon to head towards.

When he's asked a question about it, he knows that his questioners are thinking not ideal, but rules and legal proceedings. An issue of justice – notably for women – is being hijacked and Jesus is not amused.

Jesus is being very bold here, more than we might think. Mention of moving into the territory of Herod at the start is significant. This is Herod the divorcer, Herod the murderer (remember John the Baptist?). Jesus is clearly calling Herod out for a life that is a million miles from God's kingdom.

Regarding marriage, God's dream is for nothing to break this holy relationship, when it is such, nothing to get in the way of it. Definitely not politics (as with Herod). Would that this most intimate and vulnerable of all relationships be faithful and true – right relationship; give it every chance to be God-like in that respect; don't let other things cause it grief or pull it apart for reasons that disregard the well-being of the people involved.

Jesus is making it clear that the Kingdom of God doesn't pull back from the ultimate of unconditional loving relationship. The ideal.

In practice – because of hard-heartedness, that is humanity at its hard core – there are ways of regulating or moderating how breaks happen, because they do happen and for well-being that can be the best. The measures for regulating and moderating are for the purpose of making as much good as possible in a bad situation. Saving what can be saved; keeping the eyes on well-being and justice. Jesus has a primary concern for justice for women. Note that he speaks of a woman dismissing (divorcing) her husband. That's not Jewish law but it is Roman law. A not so subtle dig here that the Romans' law got one thing better – if you have divorce, it must be able to work both ways.

But he then makes clear that the end-point, the pinnacle of justice and well-being, relates to children. Children must be in the centre. Relationships must not be about adult power play. Children are a reminder of that.

What to do when relationships crack and break. We know that question from experience. And we know that keeping children in the centre makes for a better future. They are the touchstone.

This is a vignette about marriage but there's a broad relationship message here that it is pointing to for everyone. For good marriage is only one kind of “deep community”, as one person puts it. Deep community that can go a long way to completing us as human beings. This is the community of love, so to speak, that can grow between ourselves and another or others.

The broad message here is a warning on how the love basis to this kind of right relationship gets subverted by our tendency to think about law and limits. In day to day living, in politics, in debates over right and wrong, we keep being pulled back from the ideal to see things codified in rules. Rules for friending and unfriending are not how relationships work. What's expected of friends, what counts as forgivable, or not, keeping a balance in gifts, in invitations, and so on. True, rules are useful, as boundaries and guides we adopt to keep on track with the ideal. Law is useful in describing what good action looks like. But if we want to live the way of the ideal, it is has be driven by love, not law-keeping.

To be a good Christian, to be Christ-shaped, is a response in a particular situation, to a particular context – a love-based response.

And a practical way to remind ourselves what it feels like to make a love-based response is to put children in our midst.

They remind us that it is an act of grace – by grace that we are moved and motivated, and let ourselves be Christ-shaped.  

Thanksgiving

Our friend Ross died on 4 September 2015. It fits the character of the man that he ended his days with us well past best medical estimates. But if ever the comment was made to him that it was his determination that had him still enjoying the sound of the birds each morning, he'd say, not me, but God. (He'd own up to being bit stubborn, or cantankerous as he'd put it.)

There was not to be a funeral. A memorial service made him uneasy too. Focussed on him, that wasn't the point. It's about God. What about us getting together one Sunday, in his memory, honouring God and the wonders of creation? Yes, that would be okay, but keep the focus where it belongs.

I appreciate a reminder like this, and a clear and forthright one at that, like all of Ross' input. It was not something we could ignore, and to respect is our surest way of respecting the person it comes from. Years back there was a minister who'd retired to Clyde in Central Otago who spoke to me of his funeral instructions. He had an envelope with instructions outlined: hymns and readings, and the note “there will be no address”.

No eulogy. No speaking about the person. Just praise and thanks to our God.

I appreciate the reminder because I think we can get out of balance. As a really positive response to the needs of people in grief, funerals have become more personalised. We speak about what has been special for us. We share memories that draw all who are present into the experiences that make up a human life, this one in particular, but often connecting with our own experiences. We gain insight into our shared life as it has been, which in large part has made us who we are.

But it's important that we remember for the purpose of giving thanks. That's the attitude of faith, however it is expressed in detail. What makes us spiritual beings is that we don't focus only on the facts before us. We think about them, we evaluate them. We think about what makes life good, gives strength, makes us positively human. We catch again the vision to be nurtured in the generations.

We look beyond the facts to the source. The wonders of nature, of creation, the joys of family, in thinking of such things what strikes is their sheer givenness and how extraordinary these gifts are. Acknowledge this and we're acknowledging what's totally beyond our own powers and ability to produce.

Praise and thanksgiving to the Creator of life is first and foremost this: it is an act of wonder and gratitude. It is not a scientific statement about the nature of reality – that's another arena of human activity. To speak of the Creator is not locking us into believing there's a man in the sky or any particular thing that goes by the name God. Who or what God is is beyond our kind of knowledge, so I'd say let's not go there. But let's keep going in the direction that looks well beyond ourselves when it comes to celebrating life on this planet earth, and how amazing it is that it actually is.

Rangimarie Peace Shalom, Robyn

Attitudes to the Bible

August/September newsletter

Recently at church we were talking about attitudes to the Bible in today's culture. I'd made the comment that, in the view of the pervasive culture around us, “either you are rational and reject the Bible or you are irrational”. The church's track record of expecting blind, naïve acceptance of the Bible is part of the reason for the level of rejection in the western part of our NZ culture. Over generations past the church has promulgated what is called a grand narrative – a story to explain everything and not open to question. It has done harm – exclusion and violence – which has been motivation enough for recent generations to turn away from it altogether.

I put the case for a third alternative, which in fact is what we all seem to be working with, even if we're not aware of it. We're not naïve about the Bible in the sense of never questioning it, never challenging all too human events and behaviour which these stories of old contain. We don't go with face value, but weigh it up relation to other knowledge and with the character of Jesus. The Jesus we meet in the Bible shows us what I call Christ-shaped living, and in turn we read the stories of the Bible through that lens of Christ. And through that lens we see treasure in the midst of very human – and messy – stories.

A comment was made: the church is not doing very well at presenting this third option – remaining rational and reading the Bible to find insight into God's truth for living.

My thought: the “church” that is going to do this is us, the people who are the church.

It's up to us to introduce this other option, of reading the Bible, brain well engaged, and uncovering real food for living well. One reason for this is there's no theory for how this is done, no instructions to publish and promote. Because it's in the practice that it happens. The Bible's narratives speak to us: it's in the listening that the discoveries happen. As we're listening our brains are ticking over with their questions, what we know already adds its bit, and our hearts are asking too – what we long for, hope for, struggle with. And to our surprise maybe the stories make a connection, and we have a response, an insight, a new direction.

We realise that the Bible contains narratives and not pronouncements, stories carrying truth not dogma pinning it down. When we read it on those terms, something happens in our souls. Like an experience that moves us, a conversation that energises us, something in us is touched and changed.

The hard part is to speak about this to others. It's much easier to fall back on standard religious words – or say nothing. How do we express the real experience that the original basis for religious language? How do we tell another person what it is that the word “God” points to for us?

We can only do it by trying. Starting with trying to put it into words for ourselves.

Ask yourself: what keeps bringing me back to Bible stories? What would I be missing if I didn't, if I didn't ever gather with others who share experiences and chewed them over alongside Bible texts?

What will be missing if we don't find ways to share these stories with children?

Let's keep talking about this together. Sundays at church are definitely a time and place for doing that, being church together.

Church as I know it hasn't thrown out the baby with the bath-water. The bath-water was “the Church” of years past, the institution with its doctrines and its laws that the Scribes and Pharisees would have been impressed with. In that bath-water the Bible got submerged with the real story of freedom in Christ out of reach. The baby is that story of freedom. We access it whenever we read the Bible with open minds and eyes on Christ.

Rangimarie Peace Shalom, Robyn

Really Jesus?

An imaginary dialogue with a troubling text.

Mark 6:1-13

First, Jesus, you're rejected. Then you send your disciples to do the same work. Thanks a lot, they'd say. We would. Is this what we are to look forward to as followers of the Way?

Your homecoming really does argue against all those songs and images handed down to us: Come home. “Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling ... you who are weary come home.” Home to a reception like you got? Another home altogether might work perhaps – I guess that's how it's mostly be dealt with – home in another world. But here in the Bible, you are not talking about another world, a totally separate place. You're talking about God's kingdom for real here where we are.

You seem to have been surprised by the home town scepticism – amazed at their unbelief. I guess you were still learning as you go. Not so much learning to be God's son (Mark's key point, we realise): you knew how to do that, to show us who God is and what God is like. But you were discovering for the first time how people react to God's way being put into action.

Because, no, it was not your failure that the healings didn't happen among the home people. Healing, you have taught us, is a relationship. We experience that with good nursing and good friends. Healing that helps make well in the physical sense and that bigger sense of healing – restoring meaning regardless of how the body is and will be.

God's power, what God is like and how God-power works, that's the really hard thing to catch on to; and therefore what it's like to be home with God. Not the expected security and slotting into the family dynamics in whatever role we each might have (e.g. the hero, the rescuer, the scapegoat, the loner, the doer, the clown, or the saint). I can feel for your family. In conventional (non-Kingdom) terms, you were not playing your part. And you were embarrassing them with your free spirit, your God-centredness, rather than family-centredness which normal people expect.

When you went to other communities, you were welcomed as a visiting expert. They are easy to cope with. But a local, someone dependent on the local community, and still a local in terms of his human genealogy: hard to see as worth listening to. We're inclined to get stuck with our own preconceptions about who or what can bring knowledge and really life-changing options. Not the person next to me surely.

And on top of that regular blindness to “prophets among us”, you were falling foul with the powers-that-be, the powers we depend on for living an ordinary life. You don't help us at all to get on better in life, to access the power the world works with. And we can't imagine doing anything, improving anything, without the standard requirements of money and influence etc etc.

Would I be among those you then sent out into the local community to do exactly as you had been doing? Will I say yes?

The Great Reversal. That's what they call your mission in this first half of Mark's gospel. I must remember it: the Great Reversal. This is the Kingdom Way. Upside down values, and understanding that's upside down to the world's way. I need to remind myself that the world's way is in fact bankrupt. Bankrupt and dealing death more than giving life.

If I do as you ask and go out among our own community here, travelling light, not protecting myself from rejection, I sense that I'll learn what you learnt: that God's kind of healing – God's loving – depends on the other in a relationship. It works through simply living compassionately in interaction with others. Slow living it's been called. Local, vulnerable living.

Your ancestor David was a pretty good king. He was a shepherd but then as a king he got mixed up with the powers-that-be and was as much the wolf as the shepherd. The power of armies and taxes. Weapons of destruction. You, son of David, got it right – at last. The power of relationship, and the most powerful “weapon” of all – conversation.

Jesus, you know that God speaks through God's creation and the language used is love. You're doing it. So, yes, you're calling us to speak that way too.  

Questions of Healing

We've crossed the lake with Jesus – a stormy crossing you'll recall. On the other side – foreign territory – a total outcast is healed, a crazy man living among the tombs. Jesus breaks through boundaries of all types, including when he gets back across the lake onto home territory again...

Mark 5:21:43

This is a text with two distinct narratives. But could you have one story without the other? If you'd just had Jairus and his daughter then Jesus would have got on with that healing more quickly and likely avoided the drama of the father hearing his girl was dead. But isn't that part of the power of the narrative? Assumptions, limitations and interruptions.

Mark's primary task in his whole gospel book is to answer the question: who is Jesus? Establish his identity, namely, show us that he is the son of God. That is, show us who God is, how God acts, and what God is like.

About the interruption to the mission with Jairus: God's power of healing love works with interruptions all the time. No boundaries, no fixed procedure, no-one needs to be side-lined for more important things.

These are two stories that belong together: woman and woman-child healed; an aging woman's healing interrupting the healing of a girl on the cusp of child-bearing (she was born in fact the same year that the woman's trauma began).

Two people who risk: the father risks reputation – Jesus is already a target of his synagogue colleagues; what's more, as a father it is risky to love so much a child (and a girl at that) when 60% of children die before their teens. The woman risks extreme censure for touching Jesus in her untouchable state; what's more, she dares to hope against hopelessness. Now that's the riskiest thing of all surely.

One person despairs so much that he crosses boundaries of emotion and honour and gets first hand experience of what God's power of love can do. His despair pushes him to a point of openness to faith.

The other person dares to hope and is healed by the faith revealed to be already part of her being. Her hope is the spring of her faith.

This is a text between fear and faith: each of them fear, yet are able/driven to step out of fear into the place of faith. And for us who read it, it asks us to imagine what we might do.

This contrast of faith and fear means Mark is guiding us to think of faith's opposite not as being simply no faith. What's significant here is not absence or otherwise of faith, but getting through the fear. Getting beyond the fear to be able to do something – for daughter or for self. It can be despair that drives it. That's where Jairus is, desperate and in despair which triggers him to act and try to do something for his daughter's future. But it's even stronger place to be already when it is hope that drives it. That's where the woman is, desperate but holding on to hope. She already knows who Jesus is. She trusts him as agent of God's power to heal.

Both Jairus and this women reach out to where God is – presence, power, strength, wholeness, healing.

But at this point the story also stirs questions about faith and healing, and about prayers for healing. About miracles (and we'll talk some more about that later, if you like), about hope for healing and praying for healing against the odds.

Why isn't everyone we pray for healed, that is, made better? Even when they have faith?

GoTellbyVinceAmlin

Last November, my wife and I went to our 19-week ultrasound and found out that our baby was only measuring 15 weeks. After a series of tests, we were told we would lose her.

But through eight weeks of repeat scans, she held on. Then through five weeks of hospital bedrest. Finally, Nola was born, a scrappy one pound, one ounce.

She spent 12 weeks in the hospital. Her life is still full of challenges. But yesterday we celebrated four months with our daughter, who now tips the scale at five pounds.

I won't say that God saved Nola. There are too many other beloved children who don't make it. But I must say that God has saved me again and again through these long months. God has sent a legion of angels to my side…

…the anonymous person who left a fully-decorated Christmas tree on our porch, when we didn't have the energy to celebrate…

…the ten-year-old girl who prayed for Nola every day of her winter vacation…

…the church member who struggles with anxiety but sang "It is Well with My Soul" on my voicemail…

Vince Amlin connects this to a couple of verses from Psalm 107:

Give thanks, for God is good. God's love endures forever. Let the redeemed of the Lord tell their story—those God redeemed from the hand of the foe… Psalm 107:1-2

He comments:

Psalm 107 charges us to share our good news. Those who wandered lost…those who sat in darkness...those whose ships were nearly sunk…tell your story!

And he ends his reflection with these words and prayer:

So many angels. So many stories to share. God is good. God's love endures forever. Give thanks, and go tell yours.

Prayer 

Yarn Spinner, write your story of love in me. Send me as an angel to those who are lost and sinking. And bless sweet Nola.

New Family New Culture

Mark 3:20-35

Some quotations on families:

"When your mother asks, 'Do you want a piece of advice?' it's a mere formality. It doesn't matter if you answer yes or no. You're going to get it anyway."  Erma Bombeck, 20th century 

"After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relatives."  Oscar Wilde, 19th century 

The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. Richard Bach, 20th century 

Why are Jesus' family troubled so?

At that time, family was the basic unit for effectively everything. The economic base: within your family you found your livelihood, e.g. as part of a fishing family; you worked within the family occupation or, if you couldn't work, they supported you as they were able; they were the safety net; the family gained – or struggled to gain – livelihood together, and without a family you had nothing.

Family was also the social base, within which the primary code was honour and shame: you had your place, and knew your place, within the order and authority of the family; the most important thing was never to do anything that brought shame to the family.

So you can see why Jesus was a problem and a worry to his family.

Now what's this talk about Satan? Jesus is labelled by the scribes as this deviant named Satan, labelling being their scheme to get rid of him. He was threatening the order and authority of the religious family.

Jesus responds with a question: “How can Satan cast out Satan?”

Let's reframe that in our kind of terms:

How can negativity cast out negativity?

How can force cast out force?

How can compulsion cast out compulsion?

How can violence cast out violence?

How can coercion cast out coercion?

How can manipulation cast out manipulation?

How can bullying cast out bullying?

There are plenty of contemporary alternatives for the word “Satan” and this is the question: how can you get rid of harm using harmful means?

Jesus tells a story of a raid on a house. It will only work if the power controlling the house is first put out of action. To deal with the powers that harm, you have to first – somehow – tie up those powers, put an end to their controlling influence. Hold onto that thought and we'll come back to what this can mean for us.

Before that we need to clarify what our equivalent of family would be, i.e. what Jesus would be talking about in our context. In part, it is our actual family, but that does not have the all encompassing social and economic role that was the case in Jesus' time. We can have a viable life apart of our family and, in fact, we see it as important that we have some level of independence.

The family equivalent for us now is our overarching culture. What Jesus would speak about is the system, the whole social, economic, political, technological, environmental system, in which we make our way as best we can; within that, we find our place or we struggle to survive. Within that, we adhere, or not to our jeopardy, to norms of a kind of honour and shame.

For example, it's somewhat shameful:

not to be in favour with those you mix with;

not to be concerned about providing for yourself;

to make choices that aren't concerned either with achieving more (e.g. more income) or pursuing pleasure and thrills;

(now you might think that's not so much you, but that is the dominant culture we now live in, and some of us don't really measure up, that's just a fact. Old-fashioned, a killjoy, a bit of an embarrassment to family members perhaps.)

It's somewhat shameful not to want new and better things.

And it's definitely an embarrassment to try to live the Way of the Cross. We keep quiet about it.

It is really important that we recognise the powers in the midst of this. Call it Satan: Jesus would. A kind of power or controlling influence that means we think and act differently from what we know Jesus would. Subtlely taking over our thinking and choosing. Even if we're not to the extreme of popular culture that says, e.g. “Winning is not the most important thing: it is everything”, we are still under the sway of motivation and purpose that is totally not God's kingdom way. The world we live in simply makes Christian values of compassion, generosity, unconditional love, total non-violence (no war) impractical. We can't be completely to blame ourselves for that: it's the world we live in; it's the powers and the principals that are in charge.

We've under-estimated the grip this has on good people and we've made it harder to recognise by throwing out the baby with the bathwater as happened when Satan and the devil became no longer acceptable as a topic of discussion. We've said evil is not real; we can live good lives; it's up to us to just do it. But left to our own resources we remain under this powerful influence of society and its cultural norms, its economic rules, its social persuasiveness. To be more or less like everyone else is a huge pressure; to find our place to belong, to be successful or at least to get by.

Jesus offers an alternative culture. In the terms of his time, he offers a new family. For us he offers a new culture that is under instead the powerful influence of the Spirit: the culture of kingdom values. Put yourself in the midst of this and you tap into a totally different way to respond to the evils listed earlier – bullying, compulsion, negativity, violence...

Speaking of Jesus here in this passage in Mark's gospel, Mark Fry writes,

They wanted to restrain him and send him to the asylum. It was too hard to bear, too dissonant a voice. The cry of the living God was inviting people to shed the burden of self-concern, to let go with complete abandon, and to venture out into the wilds of God's kingdom armed with nothing but a passionate vision of life lived fully awake in love.”

They eventually did restrain Jesus, on a cross, and when he asked his Abba to forgive the men who were executing him, they were stunned. “He really is crazy,” they thought. But the experience of the crucified Jesus left them marked, and they would never be the same again. No one walks away from that vision unscathed. Even restrained on the cross Jesus was widening the circle of his mothers, sisters, and brothers.

The circle is open to each of us. Come, find your place in the family – the culture – of God's kingdom Way. Your place at the Table.