Heart of the Problem

When you meet someone for the first time and exchange initial greetings, one of the first things people ask is, “What you do for a living.” I’ve discovered that when you answer that question with the words, “I’m a Pastor,” it’s an absolute conversation killer. So to try to avoid that sort of conversational suicide, I’ve been trying to think of different ways I can explain my vocation without immediately losing people.

Recently someone said to me, “What do you do for a living?” and, a little experimentally, I replied, “I’m in the recycling business.” They were very pleased with that, people like an environmentally responsible vocation, so the next question naturally followed, “What do you recycle?”

Do you know what I said? “People!” Then I quickly added, “Actually, I don’t recycle people. I work for Someone Else who does.” It got us talking. After he realised I hadn’t been recently released from a mental health institution, he said “I thought when you first said 'recycling', you meant you were doing your bit for the environment.”

“I am.”

“How do you mean?”

I said “Which is the better way to look after the environment, to pick up and recycle rubbish that has already been dropped or go right to the heart of the problem and change an individual’s motivation, change a person on the inside, so that they no longer want to drop rubbish and but desire to treat the world with a sense of care because they have come to understand it belongs to God and they are responsible as one of his stewards?”

Thanks?

Martin Rinkart should have felt God-forsaken. Rinkart lived in Saxony between 1586 and 1649 and was the Lutheran minister in a little village called Eilenburg. During the 30 Year War, which occurred in Europe during that time, this walled town of Eilenburg was surrounded and besieged by the Swedish army. No one was allowed in, no one could get out. Food ran out very quickly. People started dying, disease spread as the Swedish army fired their cannons randomly into the town. Over 800 homes were destroyed. The ministers of the town were under enormous strain as they had to conduct dozens of funerals daily for the poor perishing people of Eilenburg. Eventually Rinkart was the only surviving minister in the town. For about a month he conducted an average of 50 funerals a day and did his best to care for those who lost the ones they loved. This was very familiar for Rinkart because, as part of the siege, one of the people he buried from disease was his own beloved wife.

Eventually the Swedes demanded an enormous ransom, in exchange for sparing the lives of the remaining residents of the town. Rinkart left the safety of the walls to plead for mercy. The Swedish commander, so impressed by the faith, courage and dignity of this minister, reduced his demand to one twentieth of his original figure. The city paid and the siege was lifted. In all, he had buried 4480 people.

If anyone deserved to feel God-forsaken, Martin Rinkart did. Yet when he sat down to reflect on what he’d experienced, he pondered the fact that nearly his entire life had been marked by blessing, love and provision. And he questioned the tendency he found in himself to abandon his own love for God because circumstances didn’t fit with his expectations. He tried to step back and look at the big picture, not only of this life, but of this life in the context of the next life and the promise of God to continue the process of righting wrongs and healing pain and correcting injustices and restoring souls beyond the brief limitations of however many years we spend on this planet.

Rinkart turned these thoughts and reflections into poetry, which in turn became a hymn. In the face of such suffering and misery, Rinkart wrote these words:

Now thank we all our God with hearts and hands and voices
Who wonderous things has done, in whom this world rejoices
Who from our mothers arms has blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love and still is ours today

Fire and Floods

Adequate words are elusive when reflecting on the events of this past last week. The extremes of fire in Victoria and floods in Queensland have physically devastated large sections of the Australian community, but also broken the hearts of most Australians as we watch the anguish and pain of our fellow citizens.

Few could view the news broadcasts without grieving alongside those who have lost family and friends in such tragic circumstances, or tremble with a renewed awareness of our own mortality and the fragility of life. Trying to imagine the destruction of whole communities has left us reeling. In the midst of such despair, one assurance remains: our God, who entered the very heart of human suffering in Christ and experienced the agony of crucifixion, weeps with those who are weeping and mourns beside those whose loss is so great.

Helplessness has been one of my dominant emotions this week. We want to make a difference. What can we do?

Here are some options:

1. Join us for an evening of prayer this Tuesday night, 17th Feb at 7.30pm at Toowong Uniting Church, 82 Sherwood Road, Toowong. As the reality of people’s loss sinks in, they will be needing our prayers for some time.
2. We will be receiving a retiring offering at church, both this week and next week, for the victims of both bushfire and flood. Two vessels, one for each cause, will be available for you to contribute to. The flood money will be sent to ‘The Premier’s Disaster Relief Appeal’ and the bushfire money will be sent to the ‘SHARE Bushfire Appeal’ through the Vic/Tas UnitingCare office.

DOG and GOD

Many years ago when I was teaching in Miles (Queensland country town), I got my first dog as a giveaway from the Miles show: a German shepherd/boxer-cross called Jesse. Beautiful dog, but an incredibly destructive puppy. One work day, I accidentally left the back door open, and Jesse got into the house. I doubt that dynamite would have made more mess. She pulled all the sheets off the bed, chewed up my good shoes, knocked over tables, ate a few pages out of my bible, ripped my good trousers, broke my clock radio. She was a whirlwind!

When I was telling the cleaner at the school about it the next day, (a retired farmer) he said, “If you want my advice, I’d shoot her. Dog like that’s trouble. Need to shoot a dog like that.”

Naturally I was horrified. I said, “I don’t want to shoot my dog, I love my dog.” And as I uttered those words, I realised something about God's love. It doesn’t depend on the one being loved, it depends on the one doing the loving. My love for my dog isn’t about whether she’s good or bad, its about me, about the fact that I love dogs. God’s love for us isn’t about how appealing we can make ourselves to him, instead it relies on him being a loving God, whose very core and nature is love.