The Odd Reflection

“What Jesus would really do is take the list of sins found in the Old Testament and proclaim them all from a mountainside, making all people doubt that they have any hope at all of being seen as righteous before God, and then when he had their attention and their conviction under the law of Moses, he would tell them that God saves sinners who repent. And then he would get on a cross and die for the sake of the sins of world, and raise himself from the dead to prove he wasn’t kidding”. (from here)

The other interesting topic has been the whole youth ministry strategy in the Diocese. It has been good to get more clarifications on the strategy and it is heartening to see an active and passionate advocating to support it, even with a certain pain involved in selling assets to fund it.

Good news for the North. The youth work has been growing rapidly in St Johns and it is reaching into other parishes so extra support to keep up with the growth is very welcome.

A fair bit of the proceedings has been tedious and Paul Chew and I have been seeing who can get through our respective books first. He is reading The Year of Living Biblically, a story of a Jew who tried to keep all the Old Testament regulations. I am reading The Sound of One Hand Clapping by Richard Flanigan.

Listening to a talk by Bush Church Aid Society. A great supporter of ministry in Tasmania and supporting the uni work at St Barneys.

The environment policy was presented this afternoon and it generated a fair bit of debate. It contains considerable detail some ok and some in my opinion based on poor and inaccurate assumptions. But my real beef was less with the detail and more with two principles.

First the policy seems to focus on the environment as an end in itself. The idea of stewardship is not explicit and very loose. But as a Christian Church what we will be held accountable for is not the final condition of the world but our stewardship of the resources we have been given to look after.

Second, reporting on compliance with a detailed environmental policy strikes me as a diversion and distraction from our core business of proclaiming the good news of the death and resurrection of Jesus. We have enough trouble getting people involved in 'core' activities.

That is not to say we should ignore our responsibilities in this respect. But rather than legislating , stewardship including of our natural resources, should be a consequential result of the Lordship of Christ. And practical pointers in stewardship in this area can be helpful.

In the end while the report was received, the pointy end of requirement to report annually on environmental performance was defeated soundly. And I got tp make my maiden synod speech.

It has been a long day at synod. There have been a couple of interesting issues which caused some debate. I was part of the imagine project presentation last night which was good. Fresh expressions is a useful term I think to indicate non-traditional mission in a local church context. A term which was used to describe some of the emerging fruit of those projects is 'green shoots'. Reminiscent of the green shoots which emerge after drought, but still early days.

Also interest was an environmental policy which got me a bit hot under the collar. More in the next post.

About time to start blogging again. And what do I start with but….Christmas again. So this post is dedicated to the Baddelims who goaded me. You would think I couldn’t get enough of it. Actually, while lying on the beach generating my daily dose (or perhaps months dose) of vitamin D, two thoughts struck me (metaphorically of course).

As Christians we could follow the line of forgetting rear guard action when it comes to keeping Christmas Christian. After all it was a pagan festival that was given a Christian flavor so why not just let it go and just have a nice time and a happy holiday.

And really, it is Easter that is the real deal for Christians, there is much less about Jesus birth in NT compared to his death.

And the world has much more trouble with Easter. Yes they may try some altruism and so depending on your predilection, you can choose between the Cross or the Bilby, and commercialism still figures but culturally Easter really does still belong to the Church.

So why not just give up the vain fight to keep Christmas Christian and focus on the real deal where we still have a decent cultural grip, Easter. We don’t have enough troops or resources to spread ourselves too thin in the culture wars so punch a pack on what matters.

And yet, despite the inherent appeal of this line of thinking maybe, just maybe, deserting the culture war that is Christmas is the equivalent of allowing evil to triumph because a few good men do nothing, they retreat.

After all, he (or she) who writes history wins. And while we do not depend on mere mortal histories for our victory which is already secure in Christ, there is a certain imperative as witnesses to Christ to maintain that witness culturally as well as individually. And it does appear that God is interested in mere mortal history, he broke into it as one of us and rewrote it. To redeem us as individuals yes but surely no less to redeem and transform our culture to his praise and glory.

Sort of like watching footy replays, you know the score because you saw it in the paper but it does not change the fact that you sit there and shout and throw things at the screen, tense in anticipation of the finish. Our loyalty, our witness to our allegiance remains as visible as ever. We know the end score, Jesus the Lord will have the victory but should that mean we do not engage in the cultural game, the war, the battle as a witness to our allegiance to Christ and his glory?

And so while it may be the easy option to retreat and do nothing, good men though we may be, if we retreat then what was claimed for Christ is abandoned to the world without a whimper.

Does it matter? Should we be in the culture wars, in the Christmas culture war? I have almost convinced myself it does!!

TV Reviews

It seems everyone is weighing in on how we should think about and react to Christmas. Two that struck me as most thoughtful

RC Sproul

and of course our own Will Briggs

I just couldn’t leave it alone, like a dog with a bone. I was reflecting again on the whole Christmas thing. I have been reading a few other blogs and the like whose authors have been doing their own reflecting on the topic and they range from

I’m not very convinced that Christmas is a very good evangelistic opportunity. Well it is, in the same way that a wedding and a funeral are. Minimal. I do completely believe in the incarnation of Christ, but when we write tracts and sermons asking “What’s the true meaning of Christmas?” I don’t think anyone actually cares.

As for “reclaiming the Christian view of Christmas”. May as well reclaim the pagan view of Christmas. The true meaning of Christmas now is family. And family is good. Christians believe in family too. So I propose: rather than fighting some silly rear-guard acton trying to make people care about the spiritual significance of Christmas, and consequently ruining Christmas day with a church service… why not instead just use the time to love your family, write cards to distant relatives and eat a nice meal?

to

Focus Action has launched a nationwide grassroots campaign to challenge the secularization of Christmas. Called “I Stand for Christmas,” Focus Action is using radio, e-mail and the Internet to ask concerned Christmas shoppers like you to sign a petition calling on retailers to stop purging Christmas.

and

Cancel Christmas – Jesus was born June 17, say scientists. It may not be too late to send the presents back, as astronomers have calculated that Christmas should not be celebrated on December 25 – but on June 17 instead.Researchers tracked the appearance of the ‘Christmas star’, which the Bible states three wise men followed to find Jesus.

to (actually this one was from the local rag)

Anglicare Tasmania chief executive Chris Jones said Christmas was a particularly trying time for the State’s homeless. “At Christmas people particularly feel the anxiety of not having a permanent home,” he said. “We need to be conscious of that, that people do need a home to celebrate Christmas in.”

There are all sorts of takes on what we should or shouldn’t think about Christmas (including a sermon I did last year here) but it struck me that while we (I) get all het up over the detail of what we should or shouldn’t think and do about Christmas as Christians, it really does play a role in the world. In a non specific way there is a sense of “peace”, at least at a macro scale, that decends at Christmas time. Even wars have been stopped for the day, cities basically shut down and most macro hostilities cease as we retreat to our own villages and families.

So, beyond what we as Christians do and think about Christmas, regardless of when the real event happened (irrelevant anyway) and how the meaning may have been twisted almost beyond recognition, Christmas does to some degree and in a very distorted way embody the “peace to men” that was proclaimed so long ago. Of course this is not real or lasting peace which only comes when we submit to Christ, but it is still a peace of sorts for which we should be thankful given that it is an increasingly rare commodity.

It is this that does make it all the more difficult for those who have no family or home, they struggle to participate in this “peace”, they have no escape from their circumstances, they have no village of family to retreat to.

So, despite my previous post, my theme for this Christmas is “peace”. Practising peace and good will to my family, friends, Christian brothers and sisters and the world at large. Proclaiming peace through the cross of Christ.

Warning: if you take offense at Christmas bashing don’t read any further!!! If you must leave comments on my irrationality or missing the point of Christmas, I’ve heard it all before.

We have an interesting time at Christmas. Pretty much like any other holiday week just with some extra effort put into countering all the avalanche of messages the kids hear about Christmas. We don’t have a Christmas tree or do the gift thing and rarely do the Christmas lunch thing (only if we are invited over to someone’s place who doesn’t have family around either).

In part this is because we used to work at Christmas time when we were married and in part because I have this phobia and fundamental aversion to Christmas, at least in it’s western incarnation. Now I know some people will accuse me of throwing out the baby with the bathwater but I really cannot stand the spiral of increasing value reciprocal gift giving (and all the guilt that goes with giving something of a lesser value than you received), the utter “me” focus of so much of what we do at Christmas from the gifts to meals to the glitter and tinsel marketing. And I am afraid to dip my toe in it because as I watch from the sidelines because it looks like a whirlpool, once in, the suction to the center, to conform, just gets stronger.

Some people counter this by making sure they go to church (which is good, we do too and absolutely can be a great opportunity for evangelism), help out at the local soup kitchen, (haven’t but certainly once the kids are older it is a very likely option) have people over who are alone or not well off enough to have a traditional Christmas (we have been recipients of this) but I still struggle with it all and so we just don’t have Christmas, at least not in any traditional sense. We do our normal bible lessons with the kids, head to Christmas day service, tell them that Santa is pretend (and tell them not to tell their friends) and generally just carry on with life.

Maybe one day I will change, but this clip reinforces for me, not just the reasons I struggle with perpetuating the traditional western take on Christmas, but that for those who do give Jesus a fleeting thought, at Christmas or any other time, the tendency to make him in our own image, make him what we want him to be.

So my advance Christmas thought before I just get on with life, may God help us to all see through the “little 8lb 6 oz. perfect newborn baby Jesus, in his perfect golden fleece diapers” and see the eternal God who pitched his tent with us, crucified and risen in glory as the King of all kings.