THE 'NOTHING' OF EASTER SATURDAY

 

‘Nothing’ is often something. How many times has God been accused of “doing nothing”? Even Christ’s disciples seemed to accuse Jesus of this when He was asleep in the boat in the midst of ferocious storm. But what appears to us to be ‘nothing’ may actually be the very thing that needs to be happening. The late Eugene Peterson tells in his book, The Contemplative Pastor, when he was invited to a basketball game to watch the Chicago Bulls  – in particular, to watch Michael Jordan. Pastor Peterson’s host had been raving about Jordan and how he could do what no other player had thought possible. But when they went to the game the pastor saw Michael just standing there doing nothing. What’s the big deal? he thought. “I could do that – and I don’t even play basketball!” Then suddenly the ball came down the end of the court where Jordan was and in a flash MJ sprung into action with a slam dunk. Peterson later reflected, I want to do nothing just like Michael Jordan does nothing! 

I think we live in a world were “busy” is a badge of honour. “Been busy?” “Yeah, flat-out!” we reply. I suspect that we think far too little about nothing. (Try answering that same question with, “No, I’ve been doing nothing lately” and notice the puzzled look that comes over the questioner.) Time was when nothing to do was the seed-bed for children’s imaginative play-time. Time was when there’s nothing I can do about it now opened up a world of creative innovation. Time was when several hundred stranded Allied soldiers on the beaches of Dunkirk faced the prospect that there was nothing the British government could do to rescue them from certain annihilation but King George VI persuaded the reluctant Prime Minister Winston Churchill to call the entire nation to a day of prayer because nothing was impossible for God.

Gardeners are busy in spring. Flowers bloom. Trees bud. Vegetables grow. But winter is a different story for gardeners. It’s as if nothing happens in a garden during winter. If you ever should try to tell an experienced gardener that, they will think you’re joking. They know that while it appears that nothing is happening in their gardens in winter, beneath the surface of the soil there is a hive of activity taking place. All of this ‘invisible’ activity is the very thing needed for the spring harvests and flower shows! Many of life’s most precious moments are also invisible which gives the impression to some that nothing is happening. Some of these precious moments are when a childless couple who have longed for a baby and must endure a season of nothingness. Even the initial stages of their long-awaited eventual pregnancy can go unnoticed – as if nothing was happening. But there was a day when it seemed to everybody that nothing had happened. But everybody was wrong.

On the first Good Friday, in the wee hours of the morning, Christ was tried, condemned, crucified, executed, and buried in a hewn tomb. Despite the next day – now known as Easter Saturday – the first “Easter Saturday” originally seemed to all to be a day of dashed hopes, gutted dreams, and terrifying consequences. It was a day when it appeared that nothing happened. Yet, while Christ’s body lay shrouded in that garden tomb, Christ was travelling through two other dimensions: hades and heaven. In Hades the Apostle Peter tells us that the Lord Jesus preached to those traitorous, fallen, former-heavenly superbeings (1Cor. 3:9). Then, in heaven, Christ entered into the real Holy of Holies and presented His blood to the Father as the redemption payment for our sins (Heb. 9:24). After this ‘nothing’ Saturday, the Holy Spirit brought the soul of Christ back into His battered and crucified body – now riddled with rigor mortis. The Holy Spirit then re-filled Christ and began the task of restoring, repairing, and re-energising Christ – and then refilling His cardiovascular system with fresh blood. His heart began to pump this new blood. His parasympathetic nervous system drew the oxygen of this blood and began to fill His previously pierced lungs with air. Bio-electricity began to re-ignite the neurological system in His cranial lobes allowing His brain to engage His hearing, His eyesight, His olfactory system, and His nervous system. As this was happening angels came to roll the two-tonne rock away from the entrance of the hewn tomb and delivered fresh clothes for their Lord and Captain. In the early hours of the first Easter Sunday morning these angels stood to attention beside the quickening body of Christ as He eventually lifted His arms and removed His face cloth. As Christ sat up on His stone bed and folded His face cloth and grave clothes.

And the face cloth, which had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself.
John 20:7

I hope you can now see why the First Easter Saturday was not a nothing day! I hope you also might come to see that in those moments when it seems that God is doing nothing in response to your prayers, there is a very good chance that you are wrong. And when you come to realise this, I hope it causes you to realise that the way you take your seat now in “heavenly places” is by praying with confidence for Christ to be glorified in our community through everyone coming to repentance and surrendering love for Christ as their Saviour.

Happy Easter.  

Your Pastor,

Andrew

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"HE WAS A DEEPLY KIND AND CHARITABLE MAN"

 WHO WAS KENNETH TYNAN?

You’ve probably never heard of Kenneth Tynan. I hadn’t. I was introduced to him while conducting some research for my current PhD program on C.S. Lewis. In Prof. Alan Jacob’s 2005 book, The Narnian – the life and imagination of C.S. Lewis, he tells the little known story of Kenneth Tynan’s interactions with C.S. Lewis during his days at Oxford University as a student of Lewis. Prof. Jacob wrote, “One of the most extraordinary figures of the British theater in the last century was Kenneth Tynan, a flamboyant, irrepressibly gifted man who electrified almost everything he touched” (p. 309, HarperCollins. Kindle Edition). Tynan had risen to prominence in 1950 when, as a twenty-three-year-old, he begin writing about the state of the British theatrical landscape which led to him being offered a position with the Spectator Magazine as their ‘drama critic’. By 1963, Tynan was appointed as England’s National Theatre Company’s Literary manager. Alan Jacob described the young Tynan as someone who, “From adolescence onward, [he] was both flamboyant and delicate” (p. 310). Although Tynan was married twice, Prof. Jacob goes on to describe him as “all his life he was sexually adventurous and promiscuous.” Previously at Oxford he had been known as one the great “characters”. Despite his fame and prominence in Britain, then later Los Angeles where he moved to, it was his life-changing interactions with C.S. Lewis which was largely unknown, until his funeral in 1980 after he had died at the age of fifty-three.

In the same way, let your light shine before others,
so that they may see your good works
and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.
Matthew 5:16

 

KENNETH WAS A LONELY,
CONFUSED, TRAUMATISED, YOUNG MAN.

Kenneth Peacock Tynan was born in Birmingham, April 2nd, 1927. In 1940 during an air-raid by German bombers where “parachute” landmines were dropped in which the eight-year old Kenneth was “within inches” of being killed. The bomb which landed in his street destroyed six houses and the Tynan family had to remove pieces of the bomb's parachute from their own chimney. This traumatic experience combined with all of the uncertainties of the war-years left an indelible mark on the young Kenneth. He was always a delicate, sensitive, somewhat sickly, young man. He entered Oxford to study English literature. Many years later during an interview in 1974 in which he was quizzed about his interactions with C.S. Lewis. The interviewer was hoping to write a new biography about Lewis. Kenneth later wrote in his journal about this interview: “If I were ever to stray into the Christian camp, it would be because of Lewis’s arguments as expressed in books like Miracles.” (C.S. Lewis’s book, Miracles, is a profoundly difficult book to understand in which the first half is about how to think and how to test any truth claim.)

In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God…For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
Second Corinthians 4:4, 6

A few years after Tynan had commenced his Oxford studies, in 1948, Tynan says:

“Once in the summer of 1948 I came to him in despair: Jill Rowe-Dutton had jilted me on the eve of what was to have been our marriage, and I had spent most of the term in and out of bed with bronchial diseases that I was sure would soon culminate in TB [tuberculosis]. I brought my troubles to Lewis, asking him whether I could postpone my final examinations until Christmas. To this he at once agreed: after which he got on with the Christian business of consolation. [In an interview Tynan added that he had told Lewis that he saw no reason to go on living.] He reminded me how I had once told him about the parachuted landmine…But for that hair’s-breadth—a matter of inches only—I would already (Lewis gently pointed out) have been dead for eight years. Every moment of life since then had been a bonus, a tremendous free gift, a present that only the blackest ingratitude could refuse. As I listened to him, my problems began to dwindle to their proper proportions; I had entered the room suicidal, and I left it exhilarated” (Jacob, p. 311).

What is remarkable about this journal entry from Kenneth Tynan is that he goes on to say that he met with C.S. Lewis who patiently assisted him with his course work without any comment about his lifestyle, or sign of judgment. Not any point did Lewis try to convert him to Christianity. After Tynan sat for his final exams, he did not attain the first-class honours degree that he was striving for. C.S. Lewis then wrote to him and told him not to be disheartened by this. “Don’t let it become a trauma! It signifies comparatively little” Lewis wrote to him. With this encouragement wrote the book about England’s theatrical scene that ultimately led to him rising to such prominence in Britain. 

The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say,
‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’
Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.”
Matthew 11:19

THE SEEDS OF DEEP KINDNESS
WERE DEEPLY PLANTED IN KENNETH TYNAN

It was only after the years had passed and Kenneth had been reading much of what C.S. Lewis had written about Christianity that he became aware that in his darkest hour in 1948 that C.S. Lewis himself was going through a much darker hour. Doctors had become increasingly concerned with the deteriorating condition of Lewis’s heart (which would eventually fatally fail him in 1963). Added to this, Lewis was being heavily emotionally and financially taxed. His war-time vow to Paddy Moore to look after the late Paddy’s mother, Jane, if Paddy should die (which he did) was made all the more difficult because she had become an invalid needing of Lewis’s full-time care. As if this wasn't enough, C.S. Lewis’s live-in brother, Warnie, had become an alcoholic. The revelation of this dark season in Lewis’s life must have had a powerful impact on Kenneth Tynan as his health began to fail through the 1970s and eventually lead to his death in 1980. This is evident from that journal entry in 1975 where he wrote of C.S. Lewis, “He was a deeply kind and charitable man.”

Interestingly, although Tynan read most of what Lewis wrote – including all of his apologetic arguments God and Christianity – for it wasn’t these arguments that particularly impacted Tynan. It was, Tynan wrote, that “C.S.L. works as potently as ever on my imagination.” We also get a clue as to what was going through Kenneth Tynan’s mind when we read his diary entry, “As ever, I respond to his powerful suggestion that feelings of guilt and shame are not conditioned by the world in which we live but are real apprehensions of the standards obtaining in an eternal world.” It was thoughts like this from the writings of C.S.L. that Tynan didn’t always understand — but what he did understand was the vision that C.S.L. gave his imagination of goodness and beauty.

On July 26th, 1980 Kenneth Tynan died at the age of fifty-three. It was his last request for his body to be buried in the grounds adjacent to the College where C.S. Lewis was his tutor. In a note he left for his wife Kathleen he also included a sentence in French: Âme étonneée, et receuvez-vous dansle sein de votre miséricorde (“At the hour of my death, may You be the Refuge of my astonished soul, and receive it into Your merciful breast”). 

At his funeral at Holy Cross Anglican church, Oxford, the rector, Austin Farrer remarked about the impact that C.S. Lewis had had on Kenneth. He said in his sermon that Lewis had an ability not merely to give proofs for God and His Kingdom, but Lewis had an ability to describe God and His Kingdom in a way that it felt like home and made his readers feel like it was their true home as well. At the graveside where Kenneth Peacock Tynan was buried his thirteen-year-old daughter, Roxana, read three sentences from C.S. Lewis’s last sermon, The Weight of Glory:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
Jacobs, Alan. The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis (p. 314). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Did Tynan respond to C.S. Lewis’s invitation to turn to Christ as his Lord? We may never know. But one thing we can be sure of is that the life, the character, and the devotion to Christ exhibited by C.S. Lewis who faithfully attended his local Anglican church every Sunday made a deep and lasting impression on the confused, lonely, and traumatised Kenneth Tynan. And, who knows? Every Sunday when your next-door neighbours see you leave to go to join your church family, what impact does it eventually have on them? Perhaps it might actually be having a deep impact? We can only wonder and imagine.  

Your Pastor,

Andrew

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ADVICE WORTH MORE THAN GOLD OR A MOUNTAIN OF CASH ABOUT HOW TO USE REJECTION TO BECOME AN EVEN BETTER, WISER, STRONGER YOU!

 

For several reasons I am qualified to help people deal with acute and chronic pain. Some acute and chronic pain can be resolved medically. Some pains can go a long way to being resolved with the help of a psychologist. Some pains can be resolved with a hug from mum. But there is a pain that a doctor cannot cure, a psychologist cannot counsel, a mother’s hug cannot alleviate. It is a pain that goes deep – beyond the defences of our integumentary system, our neurological system (including our para-sympathetic nervous system), our muscular system, our skeletal system, our lymphatic system, our renal system, gastro-intestinal system, our respiratory system, our cardio-vascular system, our hormonal system, and our half-share of a reproductive system. It is a pain that wounds: our memory, our sense of self, our estimation of our worth, our confidence, and our ability to connect meaningfully with others (our ability to love and be loved). It is the pain of rejection. It not only effects who we are (our identity) but it also leaches symptomatically into each of these ten-and-a-half biological systems which every human being possesses. I am going to offer all those who have experienced the pain of rejection how they can be healed from its wound, and actually become stronger, wiser, more confident, as a result.

 

A UNIVERSAL EXPERIENCE

We have, or will, all experience rejection. Rejection is painful. But its pain ranges from slight to intense depending why we are being rejected and by whom. Sales-people are trained to process rejection. Not every potential customer will buy. Good sales-people understand this (great sales-people learn from this). If you are a Christian, you and your message will be rejected (Matt. 5:11; 10:14). Mature Christians understand this and learn from it. 

 

YOUR IDENTITY

Your identity does not come from those who reject you—and neither does it come from those who accept you! We are each created by God to belong to a community. This begins with our father and mother – biological family. It is this foundational connection with others that contributes to our identity. Sadly, not everyone is blessed with this kind of beginning. Yet, the truth still stands: Your identity does not come from those who reject you—neither does it come from those who accept you. Perhaps it will take years of processing for some to understand to this. In the meantime such vulnerable people are susceptible to the lie that their identity is defined by who accepts them.

 

THE PROBLEM WITH YOU IS…

In preparing couples for marriage I spend a lot of time with them helping them both to understand how to argue.This involves certain rules including: Identify the issue as the problem, not the person as the problem. This rule also goes to the heart of how to deal with rejection: Don’t confuse rejection based on your lack of abilities with rejection of you. One of the most powerful examples of this is the story of José Hernandez. He suffered rejection after rejection after rejection. But each time, and with great help later on from his wife, he was able to understand that he wasn’t being rejected – but his limited abilities for the task were being rejected. He then made a list of each of the criticisms he received as to why he was being rejected by NASA for their astronaut program and set about to gain each of the skills that NASA said he didn’t have. It is one of the greatest examples I can think of that illustrates how to process rejection in a healthy way.

YOU CAN NOT APPEAL TO EVERYONE

You could be the nicest, most caring, most loving, most helpful person in the world, and still be rejected! Jesus was.

He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.
Isaiah 53:3

And He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things
and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed,
and after three days rise again.
Mark 8:31

One of the most injurious things you can do to yourself is to begin to define who you are by what those who reject – or accept – you, say you are. Follow Christ’s example instead. His identity, who He truly was, came from His heavenly Father – and so does ours!

 

PROCESSING REJECTION AS THE PATHWAY TO BECOMING A BETTER, MORE CONFIDENT, WISER, STRONGER, YOU

Here are five principles for processing rejection well:

{Read W. Somerset Maugham’s THE VERGER}

There is of course one overarching principle that must also be employed to process rejection properly: forgiveness. It is one of the main ministries of a pastor to help people to firstly receive forgiveness, then secondly to extend it to others. The words of Christ in Matthew 6  which come immediately after The Lord’s Prayer should startle every unforgiving Christian. Sometimes the pain of rejection hurts so much that we forget these sombre words of Christ and the eternal jeopardy they forewarn:

¶ For if you forgive others their trespasses,
your heavenly Father will also forgive you, 
but if you do not forgive others their trespasses,
neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
Matthew 6:14-15

This warning comes from Jesus who has experienced rejection like none other:

He came to His own people, and even they rejected Him.
John 1:11 NLT

May God grant you the grace that you need to process rejection, to offer forgiveness and thereby grow wiser, stronger, more confident and become a better you. 
Amen.

Your Pastor,

Andrew

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THE MYTHICAL PATHWAY TO HAPPINESS

I’ve accidentally found myself enrolled in a Ph.D. program. I kind of blame Associate Professor Stuart Piggin for this. A few years ago I was having some serious discussions with him about doing a Ph.D. in Historical-Theology with Macquarie University focusing on the contribution of Dr. F.W. Boreham. But I found myself unable at that time to proceed. In my discussions with him last year about my health prognosis and what I wanted to be able to do in the remaining time I have left, he suggested focusing instead on Philosophical-Theology and enquiring with Monash University about doing it with them. I took his sage advice and did as he said. This week, after six months of enrolment processes, I actually formally commenced with Monash as a part-time extension (distance) student. The result was that after my first zoom meeting with my supervisor I am now having to delve into an arena which requires me to be able to convince a critical secular audience that my proposal about the Bible’s truth claims are reasonable. Oddly, in order to do this, I have to explain in some depth what C.S. Lewis meant by the word, myth. And to do this I have to draw even deeper on the writings of a now dead French philosopher who is regarded as the greatest exponent of what a myth is! Therefore, I am going to tell you something quite shocking. It might be advisable for you to go and get a strong cup of tea, then return to this screen, and read on while sipping your tea, to absorb some of what I am going to tell you.

 

SOME MYTHS ARE WIDLEY BELIEVED

I used to believe that a ‘myth’ was simply a pointless made-up story that was obviously not true. There are indeed myths that are false but are still believable (this is verified by so many people do believe them). An example of this may be the myth about Galileo and the Roman Catholic Church: In 1633, Galileo was summoned to the Vatican to defend heliocentricity (the Earth and planets revolve around a relatively stationary Sun at the centre of our Solar System). It is believed by that this was a battle between religion and science. But this is a myth. It was a battle between the ‘official’ settled science (based on the unchallenged teaching of the revered Aristotle) and the science based on the new evidence from the recent invention of “telescopes”. Thus, it was not ‘religion versus science’, it was ‘untested-claims versus evidence-based-science’.

There are other false myths, especially when it comes to how to be happy. For example, it is a myth that happiness comes from putting yourself first. (You can actually use the Galileo principle to test this myth.) 

¶ For the despondent, every day brings trouble;
for the happy heart, life is a continual feast.
Proverbs 15:15

 

NOT ALL MYTHS ARE FALSE!

As I began to study the philosophy of myths I have learned that ‘myths’ aren’t necessarily false. A myth is also the term used to describe God intervening into the affairs of humankind. The telling of these moments of divine intersection into human history can be called myths. These stories sound fantastical because they necessarily involve supernatural beings doing supernatural things. When C.S. Lewis (Jack) was a young lad, tragically his mother died of cancer at the age of 45. Lewis’s father emotionally retreated from his son. The young Jack retreated into the world of books – especially mythological books. He appreciated Irish mythology; he liked Greek mythology; but, he loved Norse mythology. By the time he turned 18 he had long abandoned his upbringing as a Christian. Thus, he entered Oxford University as an atheist and graduated with a degree in philosophy. After graduating he was appointed as a tutor in philosophy at Oxford and became friends with several Christians who challenged his atheism. One of those friends was J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis was already beginning to question his atheism as a result of his conversations with his Christian friends, including Tolkien. But it was eventually when he and Tolkien took a famous stroll together that Tolkien asked Lewis, “You enjoy myths don’t you?” “Yes, of course!” Lewis responded. “Have ever considered that Christianity is a myth?” asked Tolkien. “Yes I have” said Lewis. “But have you considered that Christianity is the true myth?” asked Tolkien. The question jolted Lewis. Like a hook in his soul, this question haunted him. The myth of Christianity was unlike any other myth. These other myths – Irish, Greek, and Norse, were clearly not true because they didn’t involve actual historical characters or a specific time in human history. But Christianity, on the other hand, Lewis realised, involved verifiably historic characters and took place in an identifiable location, at a verifiable time in human history. Not long after this question from Tolkien, Lewis reluctantly converted to Christianity, He had accepted the true myth.

 

THE OTHER TRUE MYTHS TO HAPPINESS

If we accept that a true myth is an intervention by God into our history, then perhaps we should also accept that a true myth is when God offers supernatural principles for dealing with difficulties in life — even when these principles seem to be counter-intuitive. For example, when it comes to enjoying true happiness consider the following principles from God’s Word that seem to be counter-intuitive:

INTUITIVE	COUNTER-INTUITIVE
1.  In solving life problems, if someone else wins, I must end up losing and this always makes me sad.	It is possible for a problem to be solved in a “win-win” fashion where everyone can be happy.
2. If I take time off, then I will not get everything done that I need to, and this makes me sad.	Working from rest, rather than resting from work, actually increases your productivity which leads to increased satisfaction which produces happiness.
3. Getting ahead in my business or career requires that I sacrifice time with my family in order to provide what they need to be happy.	Most spouses and children would rather have more time with you than your money. You are a far greater source of happiness to your family and this actually increases your likelihood of being happy.
4. I need to achieve all my dreams and goals before I can help anyone else. Interruptions from needy people prevents me from being happy.	Giving to others what you actually want invokes God’s law of sowing and reaping in which you are the happy beneficiary.
5. I have to buy it now or I’ll miss out and won’t be able to impress people. This is why I have to go into debt to do it.	Delayed gratification, waiting to buy something because you are saving up for it, actually increases your appreciation for the thing eventually purchased which created a sense of happiness in you.

God’s Word provides supernatural wisdom for attaining lasting happiness:

(i) Don’t make happiness your goal in life – instead, make goodness (ie. Christlikeness) your life goal.

(ii) Don’t assume that others are responsible for your happiness – but you can contribute to the happiness of others and in so doing find personal happiness.

(iii) Don’t put yourself first – your true happiness is more likely to come from sacrificially serving and helping others.

(iv) Don’t always be in a hurry – a truly happy person is a very patient person (instead of looking for the smallest line at the supermarket checkouts, stand in the longest one and chill. Try it.)

(v) Don’t be boring. Try new things. Meet new people. Say ‘yes’ to something you would impulsively say ‘no’ to. Interesting people are usually happy people and interesting people usually have a growing list of interests.

Wisdom is a tree of life to those who embrace her;
happy are those who hold her tightly.
Proverbs 3:18 NLT

Amen.

Your Pastor,

Andrew

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