Monthly Archives: April 2017

MtE Update – April 6 2017

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Friends,

the latest MtE Update!

  1. This coming Sunday’s service – Passion/Palm Sunday – will feature a full reading of St Matthew’s passion narrative.
  2. The latest Presbytery update (March 28) is here.
  3. The latest Pilgrim college update (March 30) is here.
  4. The latest Synod newsletter (April 6) is here.
  5. Information on the progress of the Implementation of the Major Strategic Review
  6. Palm Sunday walk info; UCA members are invited to gather in front of Wesley Church, Lonsdale Street, at 1pm where the Moderator will speak, before proceeding to the beginning of the walk from the State Library by 2pm.
  7. Nomination forms are now available for this years Synod meeting (Box Hill from 8th to 13th September); speak to Craig if you’re interested in attending.
  8. Our Mark the Evangelist luncheon is coming up — Sunday April 23; Wes Campbell will be our guest preacher on that day.
  9. Our Easter services are as follows:

    Passion Sunday April 9, 10.00am with Eucharist

    Maundy Thursday April 13, 7.30pm with Eucharist

    Good Friday April 14 10.00am

    Easter Vigil Service Saturday April 15 8.00pm

    Easter Day Service 10.00am with Eucharist

  10. There is an ecumenical service at St Paul’s cathedral on ANZAC Day, 11am.

 

Other things of potential interest:

A Tenebrae service at Auburn Uniting Church

UNITING CHURCH IN AUSTRALIA MEDIA RELEASE, 1 April 2017

The President of the Uniting Church in Australia Stuart McMillan has asked Church members to lend their support to UCA appeals for communities suffering in the aftermath of Cyclone Debbie.

 “Our Church will be there to support people in need and help Queensland and northern NSW recover,” said Mr McMillan. “Please continue to pray for the safety and the welfare of all affected communities, as they come to terms with their losses.”

“I ask all UCA members to please try to support our appeals, which go to support ministry in these communities.” Cyclone Debbie made landfall on the Whitsunday Coast as a Category 4 storm with winds of more than 260 kilometres an hour on Monday 28 March causing extensive damage. Five days later water, shelter and communications are still limited into towns of Ayr, Bowen and Proserpine. Torrential rains from the weakening cyclone have also seen rivers in south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales reach record peaks, causing major flooding in Beaudesert, Lismore and the Tweed Valley. Tens of thousands of residents had to be evacuated.

Counsellors from Lifeline UnitingCare Community in Queensland are working in the disaster-affected communities to supports locals to deal with the trauma of the last week. Disaster relief chaplains in NSW are working at evacuation centres in flood-affected areas in Lismore and the the Tweed Valley. National Disaster Recovery Officer Rev. Dr Stephen Robinson says all communities face a long road to recovery. “What’s most needed now are our prayers and support,” said Rev. Dr Robinson. “Your donations will support the recovery of those affected by providing personal and practical care to people, many of whom might otherwise fall through the gaps of formal support.”

 “The Uniting Church is well-placed to provide this kind of support, because we’re part of the affected community, and we’ll be there alongside the community into the future.”

 In the weeks ahead, the Synods of Queensland and NSW/ACT will be sending trained peer supporters to come alongside church leadership as the process of recovery begins. Rev. Dr Robinson will be following up with affected presbyteries and congregations and working with Synods to assist the recovery effort. Queensland Synod has launched a Disaster Relief Appeal.  The NSW/ACT Synod is encouraging its members to donate to the Moderator’s Appeal.  The Assembly’s National Disaster Relief Fund remains open to receive donations, with funds to be drawn on by Uniting Churches and agencies supporting recovery in affected areas. https://assembly.uca.org.au/national-disaster-relief-fund/. Donations of $2 and over are tax-deductible.

From Andy Calder, Disability Inclusion

Director, Uniting CPE – The John Paver Centre

“The most extraordinary, precise, deep and beautiful account of blindness I have ever read. It is to my mind a masterpiece.” – Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks

Jan Dale has written to let us know about a wonderful film which was made about Prof. John M. Hull. Their father was a Methodist minister, Rev. J.E. Hull, his last ministry being at Elsternwick Methodist around 1960. John went to live in the UK in the late 50s and was considered one of the most influential religious educators in the world.  He held the first full professorship in Religious Education in England (at Birmingham University).  John became blind in mid-life after a history of eye problems.  John kept an audio diary recording his struggle with loss of sight and subsequently published it in a book “Touching The Rock: An Experience of Blindness.”   The filmmakers discovered the book and decided to make a documentary and then discovered that the original diary tapes still existed.  These, along with recent interviews with John and his wife, are used as the film’s dialogue with actors lip synching. Sadly John died as a result of an accident just after the filming began.  The film has won many awards and received extraordinary reviews.

There is to be a special screening on April 26th at Cinema Nova at 6.30 but only if enough tickets are sold by 17th April.  The screening is the first time it has been available in a cinema in Australia. https://tickets.demand.film/event/1522

There is an app available for visually impaired people through MovieReading which automatically synchs with the film and gives an audio description of scenes, writing on the screen etc. in between the film’s dialogue

I commend this film to you and your networks

With thanks, Andy.

Commission For Mission
130 Little Collins St Melbourne 3000
t  (03) 9251 5489  |  f  (03) 9251 5491  |  m 0417 562 556
e  Andy.Calder@victas.uca.org.au
w  victas.uca.org.au

Posted in MtE News, UCA News and Other Upcoming Events

April 4 – Martin Luther King, jnr

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These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

 

Martin Luther King Jnr, martyr & social activist

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a product of southern black Baptist Protestantism in the United States. The son, grandson, and great-grandson of Baptist preachers, he was born in Atlanta, Georgia.  Driven by an “inner urge to serve God and humanity,” he accepted the call to ministry and was ordained at age nineteen. From that point, King committed himself to an active and well-rounded ministry, a ministry that was spiritually satisfying, intellectually sound, and socially relevant.

King’s exposure to a social gospel began at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, a congregation pastored by both his maternal grandfather, Adam D. Williams, and his father, Martin Luther King, Sr. While at Ebenezer, and later at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, King studied the gospels and the entire biblical revelation, and concluded that biblically and theologically inspired Christians had a responsibility to pursue freedom, peace, and justice in the social, political, and economic realms of society.

The lessons King learned at Ebenezer and Morehouse were reinforced and provided more of an intellectual structure during his years at Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University, where he immersed himself in the writings of the Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch.  Rauschenbusch advocated redeeming individual and corporate life by applying the biblical principles of love and justice to the church, the family, the state, and other institutions, and King found here “a theological basis” for the social concern he had already embraced during his upbringing at Ebenezer Baptist Church and studies at Morehouse College.

King’s application of Social Gospel principles began with the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama in 1955-56, his very first attempt at organized social protest.  In Montgomery, King combined the teachings of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount with the nonviolent methods of Mohandas K. Gandhi, thus forging both a personal ethic and a social ethic that would guide him throughout the thirteen years of his leadership in the struggle for civil and human rights.

After the successful outcome of the Montgomery bus protest, King led civil rights demonstrations throughout the American South, achieving varying degrees of success. His efforts led to the elimination of structures and patterns of racial segregation, and also the achievement of basic civil and/or constitutional rights for black people.

From 1965 to 1968, the last three years of his life, King consciously shifted his focus beyond basic civil and/or constitutional rights for blacks to issues of economic justice and international peace. He called for a radical redistribution of economic resources for the benefit of the poor in America and abroad, and for a world without war and the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction.  At that point, King’s call for “a new South” and the fulfillment of “the American dream” had become thoroughly intertwined with his vision of “the great world house,” in which humans must learn to live together in peace and harmony despite differences in race, nationality, religion, and culture.

King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968, while involved in a strike with sanitation workers.

Lewis V. Baldwin

Posted in LitBits, LitBits - People to Commemorate

ANZAC Day Service 2017

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ANZAC DAY 25 APRIL 2017

11.00 AM, ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL MELBOURNE

Truly, we will remember them.

An Ecumenical Service of Lament, Repentance and Hope for the Centenary of the First World War, especially in 1917, the Battle of Passchendale, those who said no to war, the Aboriginal wars.

This service is sponsored by St Paul’s Cathedral and Pax Christi Australia, the Victorian Council of Churches, the Uniting Church in Australia, the Anglican Social Responsibilities Committee, Social Policy Connections, and the Anzac Centenary Peace Coalition.

Posted in UCA News and Other Upcoming Events

2 April- The light and life of the world

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Lent 5
2/4/2017

Psalm 130
John 11:1-45

At the heart of our gospel reading this morning we hear Martha’s gentle rebuke of Jesus: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” It is, at the same time, in its own limited and back-handed way, a confession of faith which declares that when Jesus – God – is present such things as this will not happen to those whom he loves.

If we are already persuaded that God is somewhere, then we quickly find ourselves pressed to account for God apparently being absent at such crisis moments. Perhaps most common among believers is the thought that God’s absence is a matter of punishment. This is implied in the pitiful cry, What have I done to deserve this? Here I have made God go away; God’s absence is my fault. This is quite problematic in itself, yet there’s no suggestion of punishment being applied in our text this morning and so we’ll leave it alone for today.

To do justice to what we’ve heard this morning we have to take seriously the possibility that God is absent simply because he chooses to be. Yet this is offensive to piety. For if God exercises his sovereign will in a choice to be absent – even in our time of need – the result seems to be that we, with Lazarus, die.

The offence we might take at this reason for the absence of God is compounded by what Jesus says and does in the story.

“This illness is not unto death… Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awake him out of sleep… Lazarus is dead;  and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe.”

There is no sense of urgency, no sense of lost time, no sense that his absence from his friend’s side at the hour of need is a matter of concern.

This attitude – perhaps even this coldness to what is happening – seems to change when Jesus meets with the grieving family and friends. Our translation this morning read,

When Jesus saw [Mary] weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. … Jesus began to weep. … Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb.

It’s been usual in the church to sentimentalise this response of Jesus as an emotional one which resonates with the grief of those around him. And yet, the language is actually much stronger than this. Some scholars and non-English translations have translated the Greek very differently from the familiar English translations:

“Jesus was angry in the spirit, and distressed” (Luther); “Jesus became angry in the spirit and was disgusted” (Zürich Bible) ; “he was inwardly angry and became enraged” (Heitmüller).

The sense here is not sentiment but wrath. Jesus has taken offence at something. And most likely the explanation is this: Whereas the grieving friends and family are distressed and in tears on account of Lazarus, Jesus himself is distressed on account of the friends and family themselves. He is not feeling sorry for them but is angry at them.

So, first Jesus does not answer the sisters’ prayer that he come and tend to Lazarus and then he’s angered by their very understandable response to the consequence of his inaction! What are we going to do with that?!

At the heart of the matter is the revelation of God’s sovereign freedom in the face of all that would seem to overshadow it and us. Jesus’ anger with the mourners, his disturbed response to the situation at the tomb, reflects a frustration that, at the end of an intense ministry those closest to him still do not recognise that in him all things have their redefinition and so have to be re-thought: I am the bread of life; I am the light of the world; I am the good shepherd.

The raising of Lazarus, then, is neither a favour for a friend nor a sorrowful correction of a wrong done to his grieving sisters, but simply the sign that in this Jesus we encounter a sovereign indifference to the powers that threaten us, and a sovereign desire and capacity to confront those powers on our behalf: I am the resurrection and the life.

In last week’s reading we saw that the focus was not so much the healing of the blind man as it was identifying who truly is blind. So also, in today’s reading, the question is not death and life as they are dealt with by our hospitals but about what is true life and what is true death, and the ways in which God is absent and present to such death and life. If the story of the blind man put to us the question, Are you seeing clearly?, the story of Lazarus puts to us, How are you dying? [Would it not be an interesting twist on our casual greetings to each other to ask not, How are you going? but How are you dying?]

Someone has characterised Christian discipleship as “the art of dying well”. This is not a case of growing old gracefully, or dying with dignity, or being stoically indifferent to death, or any other way we might learn how to die from all the advice available on the subject these days. “Dying well”, in this Christian sense, has to do with our approach to death in the light of God’s sovereignty – God’s sovereign absence and God’s sovereign choice to be for us, over against the world which threatens us with death. It is God’s choice to be for us which colours his apparent absence, not the other way around; faith says No to the darkness, because dawn is coming.

In the story, the free and sovereign choice of Jesus to be absent from Lazarus in his illness his hour is the same sovereignty he then exercises over death in raising Lazarus: he is life, whether present or absent. This is to say, the demonstrated presence of God is not as important for the people of God as is the confidence that when God does come, he comes to reverse the effects of decay and death which have been active in our lives. The proof of this in Jesus’ response to the news of Lazarus’ illness; it is just that proof which is lacking in Lazarus’ friends and family, and Jesus is angry.

We could say, then, that God is unhurried by the threat of death which hangs over our head, not because he doesn’t care, but because he is the God who raises from the dead and so the God whose coming to us is always the promise of life in or out of death. Jesus says to Martha,

“I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.

The reality of death – our physical “stopping” – is not denied: “those who believe in me even though they die, yet shall they live”, for God is sovereign over death; but then also “they who live and believe will never die”, for God is sovereign over death, so death will not ultimately be death for those in Christ. Those who die and yet live, and those who live and will never die, are the same people.

What is promised is that when God comes, death will not be death for us. And so all that is offered to us – and it is rather a lot! – is the possibility of living life without the shadow of death darkening the way.

Such a view of the power of the threat of death is to reduce it, in the end, to nothing – not because it disappears or ceases to hurt, but because it is penultimate – secondary to the greater power of the God who is coming to us because he loves us.

[To finish up!:] At the beginning of today’s reading there’s a little exchange between Jesus and the disciples which we’ve not yet acknowledged.

Then after [two days] Jesus said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them.”

The freedom by which Jesus overcomes death for Lazarus is reflected in his own ability to move regardless of where death might be lurking in his own life. Like Lazarus, Jesus is himself “ill”, in the sense of being confronted at least with persecution and possibly with death. Yet unlike the mourners at the tomb, Jesus lives and walks by a light which they do not see. And so, as real as the threat to his life apparently is, he is nevertheless able to do what needs to be done, because the light by which he sees reveals to him that what threatens him – real and painful enough though it might become – is less than the one who will appear to be absent and yet who is coming with his light and life.

The question the text puts to us, “Are you dying well?” is then also the question, “Are you living well? What are the shadows which cause you to jump back in fear and yet which the light of the gospel would wash away? In fact, our lives are filled with such things: deathly claims on our time, relationships, money, ambitions, our very being. And we seek to ward off the encroaching darkness of such things with mere candles which do little other than cast yet more looming shadows, only now that they also flicker and jump and are all the more frightening.

Dying badly is dying of fear, which is living in fear, hands cupped around that little candle lest the wind blow it out.

Dying well is living and walking by the light of the one who is himself the life which is light for all (John 1.4).

Let us seek so to live.

By the grace of God, Amen.

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