MattGlover.com

A mate of mine runs the unique “Campfire” website, devoted to short films depicting spirituality in all its forms.

There’s a short film festival happening at the moment, with five fascinating films on display. Watch them, then read the responses of people from different faiths - it is intriguing!

Campfire Film Festival
 

So, one of my mates convinced me to do “the Bay in a Day” ride again this year. 210kms around Port Philip Bay in Melbourne. In one day. On a bike.

Ordinarily I’d say this was impossible for me, but I actually managed to complete the same ride about six years ago. I had a great time and was perhaps the fittest I had ever been in my life. It took me ages to finish, and doing it on a mountain bike didn’t help either. It was good fun, so it didn’t take too much convincing to give it another go.

However, there are a few differences this time around.

Firstly, I’m older and heavier. The weight I can do something about. The age I can’t!

Secondly, my time is far more limited now that I have kids. My cartooning career has taken some big leaps forward too, which means extra time at the drawing desk. To do this sort of ride requires some serious training - I doubt I’ll be able to prepare properly.

But hang it all, I’ll give it another go. The aim is to try and do 100km’s a week (at least) from now until October 21st, with at least three single rides well over 100km’s.

I manages 90km last week, so I’m more or less on track. However, A ride of 68km on Saturday meant I could hardly walk up the steps at church Sunday morning….

We had a mid week worship service this week.

One of the ladies in our church put it together. She wanted to have a time of celebration, joy and thanksgiving. She wanted it to be bright and cheery, and so decorated the place with bright flowers and balloons. Plus there was food and lots of of it.

The music she chose was old, but it was her favourite stuff. It was sung beautifully and was scattered between testimonies from a number of people she had lined up before hand. There was lots of laughter, clapping and joy.

But there was still a hint of sadness. For the lady that had organised this service had died just four days before.

This service was her funeral - a time of thanksgiving for her life.

About twelve months ago I sat with this woman as she told me that she had decided not to have medical treatment, favouring quality of life over length of life. At the time we thought she had eighteen months to live, but in the end it was not much more than twelve.

She told me that she didn’t want it to be a sad occasion. She had been ill for years, and so death for her would be a release into a life that was everything she had ever hoped for. Her funeral was to be a time of joy, so those that shared told of the times when this woman had brought fun and laughter into their part of the world.

My message talked about how joy is one of the main characteristics of heaven. A quote from CS Lewis says:

Dance and games are frivolous and unimportant down here; for down here is not their natural place. In this world, they are a moment’s rest from the life we were placed here to live. But in this world, everything is upside down. That which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is most like that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of heaven.

Yes, it was a time of mourning. We will miss our friend in many ways. But through her death, I think she gave us a glimpse at what life could be, should be and one day will be.

Thanks Judith. We’ll see you in heaven.

um…my wife asked me to post this.

Does anybody know how to get a mid-stream urine sample from a two year old that isn’t yet toilet trained?!

I can see a few golden showers coming my way.

This has been on my mind a lot over the last twelve months or so.

As I write this, my senior pastor is away on “stress leave” after struggling to cope with life and ministry to the point where he could not continue. One of my heroes in ministry has suffered a similar fate, and now wants nothing to do with church or ministry desiring nothing more than hide under a rock. The two senior pastors that I previously served under also burnt out.

This is not a good advertisement for ministry. The long hours, low pay, constant criticism and general low regard for what pastors do is bad enough. But to then have so many church leaders crumble under the pressure and risk their own lives and families, well, I can understand why there is a crisis in leadership.

I’m not wanting to get into the debates about whether we should have pastors in the post-modern culture and all that guff just yet. I will in the future - I hope to get back into a blogging rhythm soon and start exploring in a more public way some of the things I’ve been wading through in the last six months or so. But for now, I wonder how we can make our leaders role a bit more enjoyable.

Hebrews 13:17 - Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account. Obey them so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no advantage to you.

Reading that, I ask myself what I’ve done to make my leaders work a joy. To my shame, I don’t think there is a whole lot. I’ve been loyal, submitted to his leadership and defended him when I can, but I don’t think I’ve done anything to make his work joyful in any sense of the word. And then I wonder what I could do anyway…this is something that will be higher on my list of priorities.

In our leadership formation programs over the years, self-care is drummed into us. Maintain your friendships out side the church, involve yourself in things out side of your church, block out time for self and family, have a supervisor and peer group, take retreats, use your leave and delegate when you can. All of these I’ve done, but I’m still a bit frightened about what may lie ahead. Travelling around the State supporting other leaders and pastors, I’m fearful for where we might be heading.

I’m not sure if anybody is still reading this blog after it’s inactivity this year, but if you do, make sure you’re praying for your leader and trying to make his/her ministry something that is life-giving. And if you are a leader, please, please please make sure you are looking after yourself.

Enough said.

Lot’s of things have been happening around the place lately, none of which promote a regular opportunity for blogging. However the college semester starts soon and I now have a laptop…not that I would dare blog in the middle of a class…

Anyway, circumstances have worked out in a way that means I’m now doing the boss’ job as well as my own for a while. This happened at short notice, so I’ve got a couple of extra speaking gigs that I didn’t plan for. So it’s time to dust of the sermon archive and see what I can revive or build on.

As it turns out, the one I’m doing this coming Sunday is one from Romans that I never quite got around to blogging about, but caused quite a bit of discussion amongst those that heard it.

It has to do with subversive love, and in particular, how we love our enemies. The passage is Romans 12:9-21.

Up until this point, Paul has taken his time to lay some careful theological foundations for living the Christian life in a hostile setting. Here he lets fly with a string of short, sharp instructions that are all based around love. It could be summarised by picking out four phrases like this:

Show sincere love

Bless those who persecute you

Don’t repay evil with evil

Live at peace with everyone

This is perhaps the first time we see Paul using very similar language to Jesus. The love your enemies/turn the other cheek stuff must have seemed outrageous, almost impossible, for the disciples. Obviously it hasn’t got any easier in the few years to when Paul was writing.

Paul calls this love sincere. That’s probably an unfortunate term in that we often associate it with being warm and fuzzy. But love for enemies can’t be that - nobody feels any sort of warmth for their enemies. You don’t ‘fall in love’ with somebody that hates your guts, but have to make a deliberate choice that intentionally sees you act with compassion to those that want to hurt you.

What does that look like? Sometimes I’ve heard people wonder if it means you simply lay down and let people walk all over you. At first glance this seems to be what Jesus did when he allowed himself to be arrested.

The deeper you look though, the more to it there seems to be. Another term for the love that Jesus displayed and that Paul talks about is subversive love. This is the sort of love that causes a persecutor to stop their actions for a moment and consider an alternative that is being held in front of them.

When Jesus told his disciples to turn the other cheek, it wasn’t simply an invitation to be hit again. Read in it’s cultural setting with an appreciation for the significance of the subtleties of the story, it actually becomes a challenge to the authority of the Romans. It’s not laying down to be walked over, nor is it retaliating. Instead it is living an alternative that promotes equality and compassion between all.

Ghandi displayed this sort of subversive love when he lead the push for Indian independence form the British Empire. Rosa Parks displayed this sort of subversive love when she refused to give up her seat as segregation laws demanded she do. Jesus displayed this sort of love by giving his life so that all may be given life.

This type of thinking confronts us with all sorts of hard questions (none of which I can answer very well).

Firstly, how can so called Christian countries justify bombing the crap out of Muslim countries and call that an act of subversive love? The weapons of mass destruction never existed; the dictator is long executed; the body count on both sides rises everyday; and nobody can really say why it is still happening? To me, this is not love at all.

But what do we do, then, with those stories of the Old Testament in which God sends his people to war? What do we do when a Hitler starts executing people just because of their race? Getting more personal, if I saw anybody assaulting one of my kids or my wife, there would be no act of subversive love that I could think of - my only reaction would be to pound the snot out of anyone who trying to hurt those I love. And if that meant killing them, so be it.

In the 300’s an Egyptian theologian by the name of Augustine came up with a “Just War” theory in an effort to try and work out when it was acceptable to use violence in conflict. His motivation was to try and work out how far love for enemies really extended. Interestingly, no war that has ever been fought in the history of the world has ever met all the criteria for being classified as a ‘just war’. That’s the reality of how hard this teaching is.

In the end, the only things that I could conclude were these:

We are called to be people of peace.

We are also called to be people of integrity.

We are called to be subversive, even radical, in the way we show love to our enemies.

And we should only use violence as a very, very last resort.

For me, this was a sobering way to finished the message:

As people persecute us, may our prayer be the
same as Jesus on the Cross, “Father forgive them for they know not what
they do.”

And even more urgently, as we live in a country
that oppresses others, pray, “God forgive us, for we know what we do, but
keep doing it anyway.”

A message from a mate of mine, Adrian Rowse, about some “Fight Nights’ in and around Melbourne. We’re hosting the Eastern Region night, so come along if you can.

Just letting you know that there are three Fight Nights coming soon in
Melbourne as part of Roundabout Ministries ‘Fight Nights 07′ Tour. We’d
love your help in making sure your youth/young adult pastors/leaders
know about the night! We’ve made calls to about 300 churches in
Melbourne in the last few weeks so many of your leaders will already
know about Fight Nights! But yeah, check out the info below and
encourage your leaders to take the guys from your group!

Fight Nights are a unique opportunity for Christian youth and young
adult guys from churches all over Melbourne, to get together for a
night of fun and honest sharing about some of life’s toughest issues.
‘Fights Nights: Melbourne 07′ will equip and encourage Christian guys
to stand strong in a sex-saturated world. In particular we’ll be
unpacking the issue of pornography!

The dates, venues, cost, RSVP info is as follows:

MELBOURNE EAST: 25th August 07, 7pm
‘The Factory’ Mitcham Baptist Church, 8-12 Simla St, Mitcham

MELBOURNE SOUTH: Fri 7th Sept 07, 7pm
Bayside Church, 99-101 Argus St Cheltenham

MELBOURNE WEST: Sat 15th Sept 07, 7pm
Werribee Baptist Church, Cnr Heaths & Derrimut Roads, Hoppers Crossing

Melbourne North and Regional Victoria Fight Nights are coming soon.
Check www.thefight.com.au for future events

RSVP is essential for youth groups and young adult ministries.
Contact Roundabout Ministries (info@thefight.com.au or 0404057770) to
RSVP or for further info.

Cost: $15 (includes entry and a copy of ‘The Fight’ DVD resource RRP $32.95)

More info coming soon at: www.thefight.com.au and www.myspace.com/thefightdvd

OK, so I finally got around to changing to Firefox and am using the ScribeFire add-on to do the blog stuff. But it doesn’t have a spell checker!!

Arrgggghhh.

Apparently Firefox is meant to have this automatic spell thingo, but even though I’m using the latest version, it doesn’t seem to do anything. Anyone know if there’s a check box or something somehwhere that I should be using?

Just testing something. Ignore this…

I’ve been a fan of the Dilbert cartoon strip for years - especially when I was working for moronic ‘Dogbert’ type bosses in my previous ‘corporate’ life.

More recently I’ve been enjoying the blog by Dilbert creator, Scott Adams. The guy is funny, but perhaps his best post of recent times is when he tells the true story of an encounter with a fan of his on a plane trip.

Read it here. I promise it will make you smile!