unworthy servants

Luke recounts a surprisingly edgy story that Jesus told. Actually it was more of a "get real" life example. As we know the disciples were rather obsessed with self importance and were even caught out on a squabble about which of them was most important! The mother of two of them lobbied Jesus for preferred positions for her boys in Jesus' new cabinet. Jesus pushes this to the limit and imagines a scene where a servant has finished his daily tasks and Jesus asks if his master is then likely to invite him to sit at the table, relax and enjoy the evening? He points out that this would be a ridiculous scenario and that at the end of the day the servant is prone to say "I've done all my work and I remain your faithful servant, unworthy that I am."
          We spend much of our lives pursuing our sense of purpose and meaning - in fact our sense of importance. What is "my place in this world" as the song puts it. Do I matter? Does what I do matter? Does anyone notice? What's the point?
          What was Jesus getting at in this scenario? And hadn't he recently told a story about a satisfied master who in gratitude for his servant's watchfulness, in fact, did invite the servant to join him at the table? Jesus was surfacing the brilliance of his own demeanour and powerful presence. In John 13 we have a commentary that is profound. It is bound up in the simple word "so." John tells us "Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist." The genius of Christian piety is humble servanthood that arises from a Godly grasping of our identity and destiny - who I am and where I'm bound. In fact Whose I am is the key. I do not seek meaning or importance from lesser truths than my identity and a child of God, a friend and follower of Jesus whose treasure map is of a distant land.

The Stories He told - second chances

Did you ever need a second chance? Did you ever have to ask someone for a a second chance? While such a request may take a great deal of courage and may be accompanied by some soul-searching and regret over past actions or failures, when it is met by a listening ear and a ready heart with a positive reaction, it is like a tremendous breath of fresh air to your soul!

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the stories Jesus told is the surprise twist that he often wove into the plot. The story about the unfruitful fig tree is like that. Here we hear of a gardener who looks for figs on his tree for three growing seasons without any success. So he decides to do the obvious which is to have the tree cut down. He orders his gardener to make it so. The surprising plot twist is that the gardener protests and asks for second (well, actually fourth) chance for the tree. He promises to cut it down if it doesn't yield figs by the next year. He says he will give it special attention, fertilizing and looking after it. We're not told anything about the outcome - figs or none? So we wonder what the point of the story is. It is beginning to appear that Luke's purpose in his selection of stories is to present a caricature of God that Jesus presented through his life and teaching that is distinct from the common image of the religious leaders of the day. We might say that there was no "second chance" in their vocabulary or practice. 

Parables don't seem to need worrying down to the meaning of each detail - they tend to be simple stories with one point. The point of this story is that if you need a second chance then the best person to ask for it is God!

Meeting Jesus again for the first time.

In these days of tremendous flux and change we long for some constant, unchanging realities to fix our lives on. We seem to have abandoned the middle and polarized to extremes right and left in so many areas - politics, religion included. What if in our religious thinking and believing we could meet Jesus again and for the first time. What if we could peel back the layers of our religious history, accumulated over thousands of years, and meet Jesus as though it were for the first time? Would our thinking, unaffected by the structures of church, politics, economics, sociologies be the same about him or quite different? Jesus’ friend John helps us to remember one of the interesting ways Jesus presented himself. He often used the words “I am..” Who is it that we’re meeting when this is his chosen introduction? Here are some of his words: I am the bread of life. I am the light of the world. I am the door of the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I am the resurrection and the life. I am the true vine. I am the way, the truth and the life. In the next few blogs we’ll drill down on these ideas.

talkback

The 1.19 rule comes from James 1.19 and is the rule we are claiming must be followed when we are in conversation and debate with one another about controversial subjects. The first part of this series at Southside has been about our gender identity, we will soon move to our sexual identity and then to our spiritual identity, folders in which we place many conversations. We have outlined the complementarian and egalitarian views of gender participation in local churches. Our stream of thinking has come from Genesis 1.27 through Genesis 3.16 and to Galatians 3.28. Our Biblical conclusion is that "there is no status/access/privilege advantage to a distinction of gender. Spiritually and ontologically the two are fully equal." We saw that the beautiful complementary aspects of God's image constituted in our maleness and femaleness have been restored to equality in Christ. However, we have some aberrant passages in which the Apostle himself seems to break rank with his own assertions and does seem to restrict access for women. The conversation that we could have here is: In what circumstances could it have been necessary to limit women's access to ministry in Corinth and Ephesus. In what circumstances could it be possible today to make any such restrictions? Thoughts?

Who bent the world?

Q has a back story that he allows to appear gradually throughout the book of Ecclesiastes. It is more blatant towards the end, but a careful read discovers hints. For example he says that it is a grievous task that God (interestingly Elohim) has given to the sons of men (1.13), thus turning the flow of his thought from a human perspective as though we initiate the question What does life mean? to some sense of an assignment from God to us that we find grievous. We tend, if we have some sense of deity, to pose questions like "why?" to this being. Whereas here Q may be proposing that it is God who is posing the questions. Later he says that God has been testing humans (3.18) And when he turns his thoughts to pleasure as a candidate for the answer to the question What does life mean? and we expect him to "test" pleasure (expecting that this is his method for all candidates) he surprises us with "I said to myself 'come now, I will test you with pleasure." (2.1) It's as though he speaks for God rather than question God, and this is further exasperated by his assertion that "what is crooked cannot be straightened" (1.15) and "Consider the work of God, for who can straighten what He has bent?" 97.13) What sense can we make of this?

the Wisdom of Q

What does life mean? This is the searching question posed by Qoheleth in the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. The Message version calls the author "the Quester."It seems to me that the most important question to be asked in this world is this timeless one. How would you answer?  Q says that with a brilliant mind and great wisdom he (presumably) presses various "pretenders" to show that they are the answer to the question. But none of them escapes his scrutinizing reaction "ha! like chasing the wind." Worse, in the Message the paraphrase is "like spitting into the wind." This is even more insulting than trying to chase or grasp the wind - it involves the mockery that returns at the end of the pursuit. It seems to me that the effect of the "Fall" - the brokenness of our world, which seems much like a roof caved in by our own doing and the wreckage falling randomly on and around us, is experienced differently by different people in different times. But perhaps the most common experience of that wreckage is a profound sense of meaninglessness in our lives. And how do we manage this? We tend to live deliberately unexamined lives. We choose an agnostic option that we perhaps have not been offered that mentions the possibility of god but feels no obligation for the integration of that possibility towards a meaningful existence. Q wants to talk!

Maundy Thursday

Last Supper, Maundy Thursday

The term "maundy" comes from a Latin word meaning "commandment" and refers to Jesus' new commandment given to His disciples after washing their feet - "love one another." This is certainly the core commandment and ethic of our Christian faith. It is a simple idea and yet a difficult practice. Love, in the New testament is clearly not simply an emotion, it is a code of behaviour. In 1 Corinthians 13 Paul describes love's behaviour: Love is patient, kind, doesn't envy, does not boast, is not proud, doesn't dishonour others, is not self-seeking, in not easily angered, keeps no record of wrongs, doesn't delight in evil, rejoices with the truth, always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres, never fails. A pretty good check list, isn't it? Love one another. As we gather for worship this weekend, as we gather as families this weekend, as we cross paths with the world of people I'm sure we can fulfill this commandment. Let's keep it in mind.