What to say ....at a funeral.

It was nice to go out to lunch today ( in the wake of 'retirement') with some friends (from University days....would that be 50 years ago?) and one of us asked the two priest present...how do you cope with funerals and grief.    
It is a question that has taxed me over the years... for funerals have been ever present.
Early in my ordained ministry I was asked  "What do you like about ministry?" and unguardedly I said 
"Well I quite like funerals!"
Looking back it's a curious thing to have s.  But I have thought often..it is true.!!

So, last week I went to participate in the obsequies of J, who had been both ballet dancer and surfer... that's Australia for you. 
Leonie, who was leading us, reminded us of the traditional Hawaiian practice of  Ho’oponopono...she framed it thus wise ( which is more expansive than the narrow way)

• I am sorry, please forgive me.  

• I forgive you....

• Thank you

• I love you

 This calls us to attend to what is important in a person's life

• I have made mistakes...forgive me
• You have made mistakes ..   I forgive you
• Thank you for all the giftedness that  we have shared
• In the end, there is nothing greater than to say ...I love you ...or at the least ...I want to love you

At the very least, I thought this seems to have got it right

Bloody hard

Australia is a rugged country, most people who live elsewhere get this. Perhaps we who live here find it a bit curious, and find that we are not so much rugged or tough, but laid back.
We often say that we are the land of the ‘fair go’. But like so many such statements, the ones who get ‘the fair go’ are those who are doing pretty well already, thank you very much.

One of the things that has saddened me in the more than half a century I have lived here, is that our hearts seem to have become increasingly hardened.
Not rugged but HARD.
We are no longer saying,”If you want to live here then you have to work hard, and pull your weight.”
We are saying stupid stuff like
“We are full!”
“Go back to where you came from.”
“If you come by boat you will never settle here!”
Now, I came here by boat in 1967.But then I am white, I was born in the UK…and though I may have some non-Aryan ancestry…yet of course I speak English ( and a smattering of other languages…looking forward to retiring to brush up on Bahasa Indonesia !)
Curiously we moved into a South Australian industrial town, Whyalla, as did hundreds of other UK citizens in the late 60s. There was a real sense of ‘ghetto’.

I went to the central High School ….I had never experienced ethnic discrimination before …but I did there. I was a Pom!
People laughed at my accent (NW England) as if they some how had the key as to how English should be spoken.
Let me tell you that Maroon …is pronounced MAH ROO N
Not MA RAWN!!!
That it’s perfectly OK to say DANCE with a hard ‘a’ and you can say DARNCE if you want to…but who cares?
To provincial South Australians these seemed like linguistic baseball bats.
We tended to retreat to our ethnic homelands…so my four close friends were from Liverpool, Tyneside, Luton and North Wales.
By the time I graduated with education degrees and became a teacher in the third High School the tables had reversed.
In that school 85% of the students were not born in Australia. Most came from the UK with about 10% a mix of Greeks, Italians, French and others.
While I realise I was subjected to the pejorative “Pom”…in the Eastern school, the Aussies were “Skips” in the Western school …and thought to be as thick as two planks.
This is how prejudice works, not with logic but with the prejudice of the majority mocking the minority.
All of this is of course nonsense.
I was fortunate to have teachers who realised that when I was a minority “Pom”, I had actually probably had better schooling in Maths, Physics and Chemistry before I came to school in Australia than they had been able to deliver. John Lyon my Chemistry teacher was one of the first to spot this.
He gave me an A in my first series of reports even though I had been taught under an ‘old fashioned’ way. He took time help me translate this, and I accelerated with his help.
Five years later, inspired by him I guess, I went to be a teacher in school of which he was Head (Stuart High School). I understand now that he had not only an educational vision, but also a spiritual, philosophical and theological vision of what a school might be. I liked that.
Deeply influenced by liberal Protestant theology. He promoted such epithets as “Freedom to choose!” and “Acceptance of consequence” deeply seated in the theology of Tillich, Bonhoeffer and others.
Made sense to me.

Seeing as God sees

Readings for this week September 8th 2019 (proper 23) Pentecost 13 are taken from the following selection :

Jeremiah 18:1-11 and Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18  Philemon 1-25 Luke 14:25-33

The potter at the wheel

is a very evocative image,

more so to those who would have witnessed it (like Jesus)

in their own backyards.

They would have seen

the craftsman start to make the pot

and then decide

"This is not quite right"

and squash it all down

and start again. 
I remember many years ago going to Bendigo Pottery
the thing that most amazed me 
was not the fine pottery in the top-end Showroom
which is indeed wonderful
but the Seconds Showroom 
which seemed to  go on for miles
(this was the stuff that was not good enough of course they are playing their market a bit )

I certainly found their, considerably cheaper seconds, 
to be excellent
Better than what I can find at Target or KMart.

Often the amateur

looks on with amazement 
as the potter smashes it down 
or chucks it away;

wondering why the work has begun again.

To us it looks OK

to the artist, the craftsman, the master

they see something

that needs more and more and,
yet more work

So, this is a quite a useful image

for you and me

of the way God sees us.

We may think we are OK

or that there is not much that can be done

but God views us rather differently than we view ourselves. 
It is not that God looks at us
and thinks we are a mess;
but rather that God looks at us
and sees more than we see 
God sees that we are good
that we are worthy of love.
As popular commentators have crudely put it
"God doesn't make trash!"
I am not,
you are ,
Garbage!

So Paul revisits quite a lot of his old friendships,

and relationships

...like this one with Onesimus

and finds with maturer and deeper reflection

that things change.
He says to Philemon
"You know you and I used to think of him as USELESS "
The name
Ονησιμος ('onesimos' actually means useful, profitable or beneficial in Greek)
but they had smugly ( as arrogant young men do) nicknamed him 
Useless

Paul was not always given to kind reflections,

but he does not stand still 
"God does not make trash!"

and there is a sense

in which Paul becomes more compassionate,

more charitable 
dare we say
more Christlike

as he grows older.

So might this happen to all of us!

THIS WEEK

• Take a few moments to ask God if you are seeing your life as God sees it.
• Is there something about your life that you are just not understanding?
• Do you have a relationship with another person that needs to be re-evaluated in a more positive light? Are there things that need to be begun again?
• And remember, sometimes what looks or feels like destruction is a new beginning

Change and decay in all around I see

I was ordained almost forty years ago at  a time when the Church was ‘different’.
Within a few years we had been shaken to our bootstraps by scandals that could never have been  imagined. 
Perhaps they should have been dealt with decades before, and it is awful that they weren’t.
Confidence in the Church was deeply shaken.
I can admit , now, on reflection  that I found this difficult. More difficult than I realised

I was ordained  as a trusted community worker.
I became a person whose integrity was completely and utterly challenged.

We were betrayed by a whole range of people who had used their positions of trust and respect to abuse other persons, mentally, physically and spiritually.
Personally I recognise that I went from being a person held in high regard  to one who who was automatically distrusted.
In a few short years we went from the church being an institution where people could be safe to one where people were immediately suspicious.
One of the consequences of this was that numbers dropped quite dramatically.
In the mid 90s I would have expected  that we might have had 200-250 worshippers each week.
It is now remarkable if we have half that number.
Nevertheless, I am still thankful that many people have done more than just reject the church’s ministry. They have recognised that the majority of Christian people continue to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God.
The few, and I think it is ‘a few’ who  betrayed the trust that should have been expected of them, have seriously weakened the Church.
It is probably a good...but it is certainly a painful , thing.
I want to urge any who still are harbouring hurts to come forward and invite the processes to work for their benefit. I pray that I may not have been one who has precipitated any abuse.
For the rest of us, it is good to have had our egos deflated, and our self-importance crushed.

Jesus identifies not with the abuser, but with the abused.  Not with the strong but with the weak. Not with the bully but with the victimised

(this is a reworking of a reflection I made as I left my last parish after 18 years. Much of what I said then bears repeating)