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

Who should own my poems

Never quite sure whether my 'poems' are prayers or sermons
or  just the yearning  of my heart


Any way this week

We want considerably less

for ourselves

than God wants for us.

We want 

Stuff

God wants us to have

Life. 

But

we are some what afraid

of Life.

God wants more for us 

than we are brave enough

to want for ourselves.

Up early

The stately basilica of St John Lateran was near where we stayed when last we went to Rome

Up early

In the city of Rome

the bell chimes for early Mass

already the second of the day

today I have already prayed

turned on microphones

and opened doors

filled with your presence

I am all too aware

that you were up

long before I even got here

Not funny Huey!

You need to understand where Bali is on this map to get the import of this blog. It is under the great orangey-red splodge above Western Australia.

I bring this to your attention because the medium S Clark (now Mrs Nagy) is in Bali at this present time.

This morning as I drove the youngest S Clark to Music Camp it started to rain. We had been told that SA may get some flash flooding but the weather report assured us it was in the north and east. Places with such exotic names as Moomba and Arkaroola. The rain got heavier and heavier.

As we have all watched devastated what is happening in Qld, I am sure I was not the only one who hoped we weren't about to get a deluge. As I drove through the Goodwood Underpass I said to my passenger.."It's awful when this floods as you have no idea how deep it is" How pathetic am I! Probably 50 cms at most and our compatriots are dealing with metres of water. It is beyond comprehension.

Then, mindful of Mr & Mrs D Nagy on holiday in Bali, I am wondering how they are faring.

It is rainy season and we have remarked when there in the past how awful ti would be if the drains banked up. The weather map and the great red spiral, which we are glibly told is La Niña, swoops down through Thailand over Indonesia, Bali and over continental Australia is what would appear to be the cause of all this.

We can only thank God (as K Rudd did this morning) that it has stopped raining in Qld. And hope Bali is OK, and that we are not too badly affected.

The rain here, in Adelaide, appears to have stopped.

Footnote Incidentally even though the term "Huey" is a colloquial tongue in cheek reference to God...and sometimes referred to as the 'Surf God of the Weather' I wonder whether its origin is much more respectable.

Given that the unpronounceable and unpronounced Hebrew word for the LORD is YHWH (remember that Hebrew script has no vowels)..and in the ancient English texts this was rendered incorrectly as 'Jehovah'...you only have to look at YHWH and realise it could be Huey...particularly when WAW (the letter transliterated W here is sometimes..even often pronounced as U) so it doesn't take much to recognise that YHUH could become some wags Huey. Don't even get me started on Yahoo!

Floods and things

It's always quite difficult to know what to do in the face of what we now call 'natural' disasters, but which once were traditionally laid at the feet of the Almighty as 'acts of God'.

I observed to my friend who is involved with the Country Fire Service that I have found my self praying through the night for the current round of floods in Queensland as I do pray for him and others when ever I hear the awful sound of the fire siren.

My observation to L is that it seems like a fairly impotent sort of exercise sometimes. Though it needs to be stated that feeling impotent is a powerful act of identification and empathy in the face of flood. Prayer often, it seems to me, is not so much about getting God to wave a magic wand as being engaged in a process of solidarity. This may be too subtle for some.

That is also not to say that we are to do nothing. In our society often all we can do is give money and while that is not without its problems for us nevertheless it is worth doing in order to strengthen the solidarity.

One can only begin to imagine the horror of such a thing

Absolutely null and utterly void

Recent publicity has been given to John Hunt who has publicly declared himself to be unbaptised.

It is an interesting sort of issue. In the Anglican Church we baptise infants on the basis of a decision that parents make about what they believe is in the best interests for their child. I am pleased that my parents did this for me and felt this was the appropriate thing to do for my own children. I baptise 20 or 30 kids in this way each year.
It does raise questions for me pastorally as it becomes apparent sometimes that there are questions about whether a parent or godparent is a serious believer.
Indeed some baptisms seem to have more to do with social custom, tribalism and even good old "any excuse for a party". This doesn't particularly bother me, I have always taken care to strengthen the opportunity that presents itself .
This is because I believe it is essentially a Godly event. Our intention will always be less than perfect, so I am glad it does not rely on parents and Godparents being perfect, or on the priest being spotless (PTL).
In the eyes of the Church (which appears to be the position of the Church of England) though an individual may reject the gift from God, this doesn't alter the fact that God has given it. Even when the recipient denies the exsitence of the giver!!
So I am interested to see Mr Hunt's certificate says

I hereby publicly revoke any implications of that Rite

with all due respect to Mr Hunt, he cannot revoke something which is not his to revoke. He can deny that it has any meaning, and does. He can exclude himself from any alleged privilege it confers, and does. And indeed he will not agree that this rite is a gracious gift of God.
But should he, for example, recant (which doesn't seem likely) the church will not and indeed cannot require him to be baptised again.

Personally I am always glad when people give this serious thought, and even when they decide not to go along with it. I have had at least a couple of Godparents decide that they could not commit in the way that was being asked. For each of them there are twenty more who will just say anything.
There are of course those who grow a little through the experience, as I hope I did. And those for whom it has been the opportunity for deeper spiritual relationship with God

Strange idea

A well meaning man rang yesterday to tell me about someone who was sick, but that was not really why he rang (so he said)...he was inviting me to go and pray silently on the steps of the SA Parliament this evening.
As he painstakingly explained the rationale he told me this was about praying for rain. This is not an easy idea at the best of times, but his rationale was that today was the 38th anniversary of liberalising abortion laws in South Australia, and such and such a person had developed a belief that the current drought might be connected with that.
This is a difficult view of God, don't you think? A God who visits drought upon a nation because of political policy...to be sure it has a certain Old Testament quality but it seems difficult to sustain.
I think the real problem with this sort of thing is not that God is not capable of this or that, but that we want extraordinarily simple solutions to what are obviously complex situations.
Drought is much more complex (it seems to me) than God just being a bit ticked off at how wayward this or that government is, and we are being invited to much more profound repentance than just turning round the abortion laws...as unsatisfactory as they might be.
To be fair to this humble sort of chap he was struggling about how to give this some sort of rationale, and he did touch me when he said that the problem with abortion was that "This was all we had to offer people in deep distress." which seems to me a fairly important reflection on a lot of social policy....."This was all we had to offer...."

Intervention

Each day I try to listen to a daily meditation (see here for today) and today's urges us to pray for our rulers and leaders.

Which raises the question about what we expect this sort of prayer to do. The other day at lunch (see the post here) with some of my colleagues from the district, we were talking about (well 'talking' is a rather lame word to describe what wasreally going on as we laughed, screamed and joked with each other)...we were noting what different theological positions we had on a whole range of things. One of which was whether God actually 'intervenes' in our lives, as a result of our prayers or, indeed, at all.

The new bright young thing (who is pretty theologically advanced) made the observation that as soon as we bring God into the equation at all then there had been intervention. We then discussed what we meant by 'intervention' you see it was just a hilarious conversation!

What I am pretty sure of is that there is a strong view of God that sees him as a sort of slot machine. If you put the right coins in and say the right words, pull the handle then God will deliver. Indeed, prospperity theology (which I despise) would say that God is just waiting to give us the jackpot.

As nice as a 'jackpot' might be, it is not my experience of how God intervenes at all. It is almost always never the answer.

I would generally agree with the idea that as soon as you bring God in then everything changes; God won't always move to fix things. Indeed God doesn't seem to fix the stuff that we should fix up ourselves.

God does (it seems to me) make us aware of what needs to be done, and how we might do it. Usually by leading us along, sometimes fast and sometimesslow, so that we deal with the complexity of life rather than pretending it is as simple as right formulas, right coins and pulling the handle.

And, for the sake of anonymity, a person who I shall refer to as W...did warn the participants in last week's lunch that what they say would be taken down in evidence!

Wagering for God

There seem to have been a number of references recently to Blaise Pascal's argument for belief in God often referred to as Pascal's wager.
Like most of the arguments for the existence of God it seems to be useful for believers but not for unbelievers, therefore rather pointless from a polemical point of view, though not from the point of view of building up the faithful.
Basically the argument states (and it seems pretty easy to follow): Adopting a neutral or impartial stance, if you were to wager on God's existence on the balance of probablility then you are better to bet that God exists rather than the fact that God does not exist....because the expected value of believing will always exceed the expected value of not believing.
This might be briefly stated like this .
Two possibilities exist-God exists or God doesn't exist and Two choices exist - You believe or You don't believe

• You believe in God.-
  • If God exists, your gain is infinite because the expected value (salvation) is so
    
  • If God does not exist, your loss (the investment in your mistaken belief) is finite and therefore negligible.(ie.when you're dead you're dead) or
    
• You do not believe in God.
  • If God exists, your loss is infinite because you lose the benefit of salvation.
  • If God does not exist, your gain is finite and therefore negligible.
  • 
    

In both cases you get better value from believing rather than not believing.

This is a curiously self-interested way of viewing belief in God and is not terribly satisfying. In the end it begs the question about the true nature of belief. I would want to encourage people to have a more relational approach to God, and I would trust God to honour that commitment. (Pascal suggests this too)

To be fair to Pascal he only seems to offer this as a way of supporting belief in God and encouraging those who waver to take the plunge. This is, I suggest, the only thing that philosophical arguments for the existence of God have going for them. It's a puzzle to me, too, while there has been suddenly an incxrease in discussion of Pascal's wager.

Now, Pascall's lollies...that's a different thing all together.

God is not a homophobe

If the 20th century gave us the word 'homosexual'then God help the 21st century whioch appears to have given us the word 'homophobe'.
I am an Anglican who happily accepts the traditional doctrine of the catholic creeds. Now the word "catholic" is a precious one. Although we use it denominationally, let us use it literally...to mean universal... God is a catholic God, {not a Roman Catholic God but a universal God, anything less is a nonsense} when we state that he disapproves of some of his creation more than others we are, I suggest, diminishing God (often called blasphemy).
The catholic God does not hate homosexuals, or Muslims or atheists. He universally love us all, because he is catholic. (for an interesting little scuffle see here)

Reflecting the world

My daily reflection time today (listen here)invites me to pay attention to the world rather than my own concerns.
This was a bit disturbing for me. I feel, sometimes, that the list of things about my personal life that I need God to pay attention to is long and complex enough without having to think about Palestine or Iraq!!
This is of course always the problem in terms of getting one's issues into perspective, we are all part of a larger whole.
I well rememeber my spiritual director saying to me "Only you could say that." After a particular time of difficulty we had been talking through various issues and I simply sighed and said "Well it's not as if I'm in Auschwitz!" He laughed, and shook me out of my self-indulgence a bit.
It's not that personal issues aren't important, most of us can only deal with the small stuff on our plate and are not going to be key players on the bigger stage.
So there is a bit of a challenge to be more expansive, to look beyond the back yard and (I suspect) that gives the back yard some proper perspective!