One of the tasks I inherited as pastor at St Matthew’s Stawell and Pomonal Community Uniting Churches upon my arrival in August 2023 was the responsibility to write a Christian Devotion twice a year for The Weekly Advertiser, our local, free newspaper. The Uniting Churches are responsible for one column each week for each of May and November. As if was in October 2023 the church responsible for that month was unable to fill its quota, so I wrote for October as well. Here are my four contributions, each marked for the week in which it was published.
4 October.
As a minister, and as a man who has been a Christian since I was a small child, it probably won’t surprise you that I have a favourite Bible verse. In fact I have about a dozen favourite Bible verses and I can never decide which one I like most. I can tell you that Psalm 27:13 is definitely in my top five because it reads “I believe I will see God’s goodness while I am alive”. Where a religious viewpoint might want us focus on patiently waiting for death and putting up with suffering and injustice in the meantime, all because “one day we will go to Heaven”, I think that’s a cop-out and a bit “opium of the masses”. If God is good then why should we have to wait resentfully for death to happen before we get good things? God is God and God can do whatever God wants, but this Bible verse tells me that quietly coping with sadness is not what God wants for us, and that hardship is supposed to get better. In Psalm 27:14 it reads “wait for God, be strong and courageous, wait”. The way to have a full life is to trust that God loves us, wants the best for us in this life, and is actively supporting us in our recovery from loss. In times of crises that’s a great thing to know.
11 October.
“Are you religious?” is a question that has always bothered me. As a Christian born in the early 1970s, who was a teen in the mid to late 1980s, and is now in my early 50s, I never known why my answer is important to the person asking me that. Am I “spiritual but not religious”; and if I am what does that even mean when you remember that I am actually a minister? I get paid to be a Christian in public so you should expect some sort of religiosity; but as a paid pastor and a volunteer chaplain I can’t actually do my job if I’m only interested in private Christianity. If you have asked me the religious question because you need my help or want my care, where’s the space for that amongst flowery concepts and dreamy songs? So I suppose I am both spiritual and religious, I think I need to be both, and I am encouraging my churches to think the same way about themselves. As religious people we have chosen someone to worship and love with devotion. As spiritual people we have chosen a path shown to us by someone we trust and follow. As Christians we do both of these things because Jesus is both “The Lord” and “The Way”. Jesus is someone we obey because he is mighty and divine, and because his path is straight, wise, sensible, and leads to a full life and a better future.
18 October.
I was recently in Melbourne, the city in whose suburbs I was born but which I no longer recognise. The city is a lot taller and faster than it was in my childhood. I felt a bit like an archaeologist as the streets and buildings are in the same place that they were in the 1980s, but there’s new stuff in other places, and I had to rebuild in my mind what used to be in a certain place, to orient myself for where I was standing in that moment. My horizons had shifted, and whilst I never actually got “lost”, (Melbourne CBD is a well-marked grid after all), I was caught out a few times in not knowing where to go.
For those of us who have a religion, that set of guiding truths sets principles for our lives. It’s not about having rules to obey or tram-tracks to follow and not derail from, but about having landmarks that we can navigate between and horizons that show us where we are. For Christians we also have Jesus; a wise friend who knows his way around the landscape, and who has also lived in human places and knows what it is like to walk far on hard ground and search for a seat.
25 October.
Last week I told you about my recent visit to Melbourne, and this week I’m reminded of something else I noticed while in our big city. On the Sunday of my visit, (a day off during my conference), I went to the National Gallery of Victoria and spent time in the free galleries walking around and looking at the paintings. At least, I tried to walk around and look at the paintings, what I ended up looking at was the back of people’s heads and phones. A some point I made a decision, based on something I had just heard at the conference, to “choose decency”. So I didn’t puff and swear, instead I deliberately stepped back and allowed the people who weren’t looking where they or anyone else was going, to just go. I walked around them, and I kept out of their way; and because I was doing that I discovered that I was paying more attention to my surroundings and was able to see more of what was there: the art.
I do not recommend walking around Southbank or the NGV on a Sunday afternoon as places for practicing Mindfulness, but by making a choice to be understanding of others I found that I noticed the colours and surprises of the world a lot more than I might have done.
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