West Baptist Church

Isn’t it crazy that most of us are so concerned about how many years we will be left on this earth, when we are not even living sensitively in the time we have now?
-Robert Wicks, Seeds of Sensitivity, 50.

This morning we continued our 7 Sacred Days series with a focus on Dying Well.

Wise and thoughtful Robyn Lewis, pastor at Northpoint, spiritual director and follower of Jesus, died last Friday, and has left a significant legacy for us in her writing.  Today four women read extracts from her journals, speaking notes and a personal essay that wowed her marker at the Bible College of Victoria.

You can hear the readings on our sermons page (or contact me or one of today’s readers if you’d like a written copy); below are three of the other things we interacted with as part of listening to God this morning: a classic children’s book, a sonnet and a movie clip.

The Runaway Bunny, by Margaret Wise Brown, pictures by Clement Hurd, is all about a little bunny who wonders about running away from his Mummy.  The Mummy bunny’s confidence that wherever he goes, she will follow, is a profound picture of God’s commitment to us.

The book appears at the end of the movie Wit (based on a play by Margaret Edson), starring Emma Thompson as Professor Vivian Bearing, expert in John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, and cancer patient.

I strongly recommend the movie to you ($1 on Mondays at Blockbuster!); the movie group will be watching it this Thursday at Grant and Megan’s place, 7pm.  You can watch a clip of the beginning (complete with Spanish subtitles!) here.

The poem that guides Vivian through her terminal illness is Holy Sonnet VI (or X in some versions) by John Donne:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which buy they picture be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou’rt slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more, Death, thou shalt die.

Tags:   7 day faith · Books · death · dying · hope · John Donne · listening · Robyn Lewis · Spirituality · The Runaway Bunny · WitNo Comments.

We’re opening tomorrow’s church gathering with this image from my new favourite cartoonist, xkcd.  Thanks, Matt, for the find.

Tags:   hope · Light · prayer · visual worshipNo Comments.

God be with the mother.  As she carried her child may she carry her soul. As her child was born, may she give birth and life and form to her own, higher truth.  As she nourished and protected her child, may she nourish and protect her inner life and her independence.  For her soul shall be her most painful birth, her most difficult child and the dearest sister to her other children.

Michael Leunig, A Common Prayer

And a reflection on the importance of Dads, courtesy Jim Wallis and Barack Obama.

Tags:   7 day faith · art · Barack Obama · father · Jim Wallis · Leunig · mother · parenting · poetry · relationships · SpiritualityNo Comments.

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Martin Luther King Jr wrote this in Strength to Love:

We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women…. When we arise in the morning, we go into the bathroom where we reach for a sponge provided for us by a Pacific Islander.  We reach for soap that is created for us by a Frenchman.  The towel is provided by a Turk.  Then at the table we drink coffee which is provided for us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African.  Before we leave for our jobs, we are beholden to more than half the world.

Tomorrow morning, as we finish our period of Prayer and Self-Denial for tranzsend, the Baptist overseas mission organisation, we’ll be exploring global partnerships like those Dr King was pondering a few decades ago.  Have a sneak peek at Acts 11:19-30 before you come, if you like.

Tags:   7 day faith · Bible · Books · fairtrade · justice · Majority World · Martin Luther King Jr · mission · partnership · Sermons · tranzsendNo Comments.

This is how I will finish my sermon on Sunday morning, so it’s a sneak preview if you’re in early, or will be ready as soon as you’re home from church, if you want to read it again for yourself.

It’s a reflection from a collection of Frederick Buechner’s writings, Listening To Your Life, p2:

I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living on Rupert Mountain opened up onto extraordinary vistas.  Taking your children to school and kissing your wife goodbye.  Eating lunch with a friend.  Trying to do a decent day’s work.  Hearing the rain patter against the window.  There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more compellingly and hauntingly…

If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life.  See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.  In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Tags:   7 day faith · Books · Frederick Buechner · listening · Spirituality1 Comment

What’s your favourite food?

Imagine biting into it, chewing it luxuriously, savouring the taste… mmm…

That’s what we did with Acts 3:1-10 on Sunday morning, in a version of the ancient Christian practice of lectio divina, ‘holy reading’, and it’s something you can do on your own, any day of the week.  Start by imagining broccoli or ice cream (two genuine answers we got to the opening question from kids at West on Sunday), then open a Bible.

We started on Sunday morning, the first day of our annual focus on Prayer and Self-Denial for tranzsend, by asking the Holy Spirit to speak to us through our group feast.  Then we bit off a mouthful of Scripture, reading and hearing the text in a couple of different translations and exploring the groovy Picture Bible comic version of the story of Peter and John meeting a disabled beggar.

We then chewed our mouthful, asking questions about what we read, and what we didn’t read, in the text, and looking at the story from different points of view.

Next we savoured the taste, asking ourselves and each other what God might be saying to us in this story, and then we let the text send us into worship through music, as we responded to what we had read.

If you’re interested in exploring this kind of Bible reading, the practice of lectio divina, you might like to follow these links to some resources:

• a cute, 5-minute video introduction to lectio divina by a hip priest in New York
• Wikipedia’s short intro to lectio divina
• a short intro from a kiwi site with lots of other spirituality resources
• extra for experts from a Benedictine site
• a review of Eugene Peterson’s Eat This Book whose title I stole for the title of this post – he’s the guy who did The Message translation.  I haven’t read the book, actually, but it’s on my reading list and has a chapter on lectio divina.
• the Amazon page for Eat This Book; click on ‘look inside’ to, well, look inside the book
• and the Amazon page for The Picture Bible (click the link above in the fourth paragraph to see the whole thing online at google books).

This coming Sunday we’ll be looking at Acts 8:26-39.  We won’t be eating that text together like we did last week, so feel free to do some chewing of it yourself before you come.  It’ll be a great one to do with kids again, if you have any handy!

Tags:   7 day faith · a tale of two texts · Bible · Books · Holy Spirit · Kids · lectio divina · listening · Sermons · SpiritualityNo Comments.

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The mysterious maths of God, that God is Three and God is One, is what we celebrate and ruminate on each year on Trinity Sunday, the week after Pentecost.

Knowing that our Creator God made us in the image of the Three-in-One, on Trinity Sunday this year we asked God to speak to us through human creativity: poetry, fiction, painting, music.

If you weren’t able to be with us this Sunday or you’d like to reflect further on any of the artworks we explored, they’re here for you to engage with.

James K Baxter, ‘Song to the Lord God‘ (scroll down the page, or follow the whole Midday Prayer service this is part of).

The painting at the top is Henri Matisse’s La Danse (‘Dance’), which doesn’t intend to depict the Trinity, but which seems to me (and to my homie Darren, who put me onto it) to show something true about what kind of life we are invited into when the Three-In-One invite us to be part of the life of God.  Which figure are you, do you think?

Rublev’s Icon of the Trinity depicts Abraham and Sarah’s three mysterious visitors as the three Persons of the Trinity.  If you’d like to reflect further on it and discover the symbolism that was obvious to Russian Orthodox viewers, have a look here for a worship experience or here for an essay.  Or you might like to just ask yourself how it might help to think of the Three-In-One as eating together and sharing Abraham and Sarah’s hospitality.

Tags:   church calendar · James K Baxter · Matisse · poetry · Rublev · Spirituality · Trinity · visual worshipNo Comments.

This is the first in a series of E100 blog posts written by different people in our community.  To kick things off we have Will Mills, whose E100 journey you can follow more closely on his own blog, here.  Click on the text references below to see a copy of the biblical text Will is commenting on.

The first two chapters of Genesis deal with the creation of the world and all life in it. Regardless of whether you believe the ‘days’ in Genesis are literal or figurative, the fact remains that God created the world, all of the creatures of the air, the fish of the sea, the trees and plants and, most importantly, Man.

From reading these passages, there are a couple of things that stood out for me:

Genesis 1:28-30

What’s the first thing God does for the humans He has created? He blesses them with abundance. They now have dominion over all life on the earth. This means that they have no reason to be afraid of any creature, big or small. As the song says, “the Lord God made them all,” and then He put man in control.

That strikes me as a truly loving thing to do. I know that if I make something I usually like to keep it safe. The last thing I’m inclined to do is let someone else have control of it. Even if I make it for my kids I tend to be very protective of it. Maybe I should take a cue from God and let them do what they will. That’s what true love looks like.

Genesis 2:2-3

And here we have the reason that Christians have Sunday as a day of worship. Shame it’s been watered down so much.

When I was growing up there was no shopping after Midday on Saturday, no ads on a Sunday and you tended to spend the day sleeping in and just lazing around. Quite different from today; And I’m not even that old!

Now I can treat Sunday just like any other day and, to my detriment, I tend to. God Himself had a day off and pronounced it Holy. Instead of using it solely to gather together and worship God and hang out with others we have turned it into a day indistinguishable from any other. In our consumer driven society most people now worship at the altar of the dollar.

I’m going to make a concerted effort to avoid shopping and other such ‘daily’ activities on Sundays from now on. I’ll let you know how that works out.

Genesis 2:23-24

These two verses are very dear to my wife and me. When we were married we walked down the aisle together. Also, the celebrant asked who gave US away, not just my wife.

Why did we do this? As a way to incorporate both the traditional and biblical view of marriage. Tradition has the bride being given to the groom, yet this passage shows that it is the man who leaves his family.

I believe this is another allusion to later times. Jesus, the Bible tells us, will return for His bride (the Church). Once again, the man leaves his family (in this case the Holy Trinity) and is joined to his bride, becoming one.

Genesis 2:25

One last thought: These two chapters detail the only time in the history of man where there is no sin. A world without sin would not include emotions such as hate, envy or shame. I find it very poignant that the last time a sinless world is referred to is to highlight this simple difference between the world that was and the world we now live in.

Tags:   Bible · E100 · marriage · Sabbath · SpiritualityNo Comments.