Category: Personal

Just one more war

I’m going to wade right into discussions of war, foreign policy and faith. What could go wrong?

No simple stories

First of all, I want to acknowledge these matters are complex. And simple demonization of either side of a conflict doesn’t speak to the truth. And simple wishing for peace can feel really naive, ignoring the real reasons people are upset and afraid.

Through-out the brutal war in Gaza I’ve appreciated the voice of Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who consistently faces the harsh reality of what’s going on and refuses to dehumanise either side. She can unpack the history, the ideology, and the politics on both sides of a conflict. She can call out wrongdoing when she sees it. And she can draw us back to the truths tied up in our shared humanity.

Her post from the days after the October 7th terrorist attacks on Israel, and then the Israeli military response in Gaza, talks to the complexity – and the truth of hurt – on both sides. But then calls us to the greater truth. Her 19 dot points still are helpful grounding points several years into this war.

We can refuse to root for the safety and lives and rights of human beings like they are sports teams.

In which there are winners and losers. In which safety is a finite resource that must be hoarded.

I don’t know what the way out is politically, but I believe in finding the will, and in finding the way. If we choose to look for it, we can get there.

At the end of the day, everyone must be safe, free and allowed to flourish, because everyone is holy, created in the image of the divine.

Nobody’s children should be killed. Nobody’s.
Danya Ruttenberg, A Lot of Things Are True

Read it here: A Lot of Things Are True (by Danya Ruttenberg)

Bombing Iran, and dangerous concepts of God

So this month, that war expanded, and Israel attacked Iran, with a seemingly overwhelming mix of air strikes and assassinations. The justification was over Iran’s nuclear program getting too close to completion – though what the global intelligence community has publicly shared so far doesn’t give confidence there was a strong consensus. (Also as Jon Stewart points out, Netanyahu’s government has been warning they’ve been weeks or months away from the bomb for well over a decade. Perhaps it was more real this time??)

After being so successful in their first strike and with Iran not having much ability to fight back, Israeli leadership wanted to eliminate the nuclear threat. But Iranian nuclear facilities were buried in a mountain, so without a land invasion, only one country has the kind of bombs that could help. So Netanyahu asks the US to help with their “bunker buster” bombs. And here in comes the awful mix of faith and war.

Mike Huckabee’s, the US ambassador to Israel, sent this message to Trump. A mix of patriotism at Trump’s writing level, ass-kissing, and weird theology:

Mr. President,

God spared you in Butler, PA to be the most consequential President in a century—maybe ever. The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else.

You have many voices speaking to you Sir, but there is only ONE voice that matters. HIS voice.

I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts.

No President in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945. I don’t reach out to persuade you. Only to encourage you.

I believe you will hear from heaven and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else’s.

You sent me to Israel to be your eyes, ears and voice and to make sure our flag flies above our embassy. My job is to be the last one to leave.

I will not abandon this post. Our flag will NOT come down! You did not seek this moment. This moment sought YOU!

It is my honor to serve you!

Mike Huckabee
Source: MSN

And then Trump authorises bombing. And in his press conference afterwards, ends on this note:

There’s no military in the world that could have done what we did tonight, not even close. There has never been a military that could do what took place just a little while ago.

Tomorrow, General Caine, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, will have a press conference at 8am (12:00 GMT) at the Pentagon, and I want to just thank everybody, and in particular, God.

I want to just say, “We love you, God, and we love our great military. Protect them.” God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America.

Thank you very much. Thank you.
Source: Al Jazeera

Trump has often claimed Christians as his followers but hasn’t often given much lip-service to following Christ himself… but it seems when the obsession some Christians have with prophecy about the middle east and the end times mixes with conspiratorial thinking and ego-stroking… it’s cutting through and influencing his decision making.

Diana Butler Bass wrote about this in War and Prophetic Ecstasy: Bombing Iran and Evangelical Dreams – also worth reading to understand how this branch of Christianity mixes ideas about “end times prophecy” with nationalism and ego to create this horrible system.

Which makes me think: when Christians talk about demonic activity and “powers and principalities”, often the thinking is about some kind of spiritual force taking over an individual. But my mind goes to the power of systems, where many people don’t feel evil, they might even feel they’re doing good, but somehow the whole collective system works for evil, destroying and degrading humanity as it goes.

When people make the state a god, they make it a demon. We see it all around us in our world, too, even though a good many people would mock the idea of there being actual demons. We, too, appeal to the “forces” of economics, of political theories; or, at a personal level, to the forces of aggression and sexuality; and increasingly people talk about such forces as if they are known to be things that it is pointless to resist. The pattern is that of paganism, even though in polite society we ignore [the real pagans].
From The Crown and the Fire by NT Wright. Read in “Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter“.

But did it work?

I was in an online chat with friends and one said this line:

Israel may feel that they have achieved their goals.

At a cursory look it seems that way. They’ve significantly weakened the Iranian military and killed much of the leadership. They’ve convinced the US to drop bombs on the nuclear sites, they’ve survived the retaliation and now there’s a ceasefire.

But has it actually taken away the nuclear threat that they said justified it? Trump says yes, leaked memos from his intelligence agencies say it’s likely only set back a few months, and it’s clear he won’t accept anyone saying his victory was anything but complete. So who knows how far set back Iran’s nuclear program actually is.

But they’ll definitely want a nuclear bomb now, because what else could act as deterrence when your enemies have so much air superiority? If there was any chance they were not rushing for a bomb before, I find it hard to imagine they’re not now.

And back to that idea that Israel may feel they have achieved their goals… is the ultimate goal to block nuclear weapons, or is it safety for their own people? Like Danya Ruttenberg said in the post I quoted earlier – it is flawed thinking to treat safety as a finite resource.

Making your neighbour less safe won’t make you more safe!

Terrorising people with overwhelming force might subjugate them for now, but it’s going to breed enmity for generations.

And this story is evidence of that! Iran and the US had good relations, until the UK and USA helped back a coup in 1953, taking down the democratically elected government to protect their oil companies. Iran’s current “Death to America” slogan emerged in the revolution, in large part because of the anger over that coup and US support for the authoritarian monarchy. Then Iran taking American hostages in 1979 built up enmity on the US side. And so the cycle has continued over and over.

The kind of peace Jesus’ calls for

Jesus also lived in a time and place where cycles of violence perpetuated over and over. And some of his followers hoped he would bring peace for Israel – by crushing the Romans. But that would merely continue the cycle of violence.

Instead he came with a message: “love your enemies“.

And with an example to follow: “do not resist an evil person“. (The examples he gives in this are a different form of resistance, a non-violent resistance).

The cross of Christ was the price of his obedience to God amidst a rebellious world; it was suffering for having done right, for loving where others hated, for representing in the flesh the forgiveness and the righteousness of God among people both less forgiving and less righteous. The cross of Christ was God’s method of overcoming evil with good.

…

Christians whose loyalty to the Prince of Peace puts them out of step with today’s nationalistic world, because they are willing to love their nation’s friends but not to hate their nation’s enemies, are not unrealistic dreamers who think that by their objections they will end all wars. On the contrary, it is the soldiers who think that they can put an end to wars by preparing for just one more.
From “He came preaching peace” by John Howard Yoder. Read in “Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter“.

Reflection and response

It upsets me deeply that violence is being done in the name of Jesus who preached peace and pioneered it with non-violence. It feels so wrong.

But scrolling news articles and analysis endlessly won’t help. I’m probably overly attentive to the news cycle, particularly politics and foreign affairs. And when Trump is in power the whole cycle is designed to generate news and outrage non-stop. I escaped the addiction of social media to fall into the addiction of the news cycle. It’s heavy, but following the latest outrage isn’t making it any lighter.

Again, Danya Ruttenberg has wise advice, and a link to a beautiful prayer for this moment:

Make conscious, intentional space for your feelings. Something that’s not, “scrolling endlessly while feeling kinda sad, and sublimating your emotional life into intellectual, political things,”– which we all do, especially these days, but I urge you to Make. Time. To. Stop. And. Feel. (And this is for all of us, with regards to everything going on these days. Please.)
Danya Ruttenberg: On Hostages and Broken Hearts

And this “Prayer of the Mothers” from Rabbi Tamar Elad Appelbaum and Sheikha Ibtisam Mahamid, is a beautiful interfaith prayer for the current moment:

God of Life
Who heals the broken hearted and binds up their wounds
May it be your will to hear the prayer of mothers.
For you did not create us to kill each other
Nor to live in fear, anger or hatred in your world
But rather you have created us so we can grant permission to one another
to sanctify Your name of Life, your name of Peace in this world.
For these things I weep, my eye, my eye runs down with water
For our children crying at nights,
For parents holding their children with despair and darkness in their hearts
For a gate that is closing and who will open it while day has not yet dawned.
And with my tears and prayers which I pray
And with the tears of all women who deeply feel the pain of these difficult days I raise my hands to you
please God have mercy on us
Hear our voice that we shall not despair
That we shall see life in each other,
That we shall have mercy for each other,
That we shall have pity on each other,
That we shall hope for each other
And we shall write our lives in the book of Life
For your sake God of Life
Let us choose Life.
For you are Peace, your world is Peace and all that is yours is Peace
And so shall be your will and let us say Amen.
This “Prayer of the Mothers” is from Rabbi Tamar Elad Appelbaum and Sheikha Ibtisam Mahamid. Translated by Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie.

Writing this post has helped ground me in what I believe – even in the midst of such turbulence. But ultimately, the work of peace is a big and lifelong work, and it needs to permeate all parts of my life – from the internal world, to friends and family and colleagues and neighbours and local people I just don’t like, to nations and world religions and empires.

Jesus showed us what peace looked like. And it’s far harder work than dropping another bomb and then demanding a ceasefire.

Tags Bread and Wine Readings for Lent and Easter, danya ruttenberg, Diana-Butler-Bass, iran, israel, Jesus, John Howard Yoda, middle east, nt wright, palestine, peace, violence, waging non-violence, war

Faith Justice and Politics Microblog Personal Quotes

Quoting NT Wright on the political and historical reasons Jesus was killed

Post author By jason
Post date June 21, 2025
No Comments on Quoting NT Wright on the political and historical reasons Jesus was killed

The gospel which Jesus preached is a direct challenge to the power structures of this world. We do not often, perhaps, think of it like that. Children of our times as we are, we like to keep politics and religion in separate and watertight compartments. But try selling that line to a Jew of the first century. Or try selling it to a Roman emperor, for whom the worship of the national gods was a vital part of what constituted obedient allegiance to himself!

Religion was woven tightly into the whole social fabric of the world, as it has been at almost all times and almost all places in human history, with only the last two centuries in certain parts of the Western world being exceptions, and even then the split is only skin deep. Result: challenge the religion, and you challenge the society. Summon people to a new allegiance to God, and you weaken their allegiance to Caesar. Or, as it may be, summon nationalist rebels to a new allegiance to God and you weaken their allegiance to the rebel cause, as they discover that their rebellion proceeded not from faith and trust but from fear and bruised arrogance. There you have, in a nutshell, the historical and political reasons why Jesus was crucified.
From The Crown and the Fire by NT Wright. Read in “Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter“.

I like the way he captures that Jesus’ freedom was a power threat both to the state and to the rebels.

Tags Bread and Wine Readings for Lent and Easter, crucifixion, Jesus, nt wright, politics, religion

Faith Microblog Personal Quotes

Quoting Henri Nouwen

What is even more astonishing is that on both occasions Jesus commands us to do the same. After washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus says, “I have given you an example so that you may copy what I have done to you” (John 13:15). After giving himself as food and drink, he says, “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). Jesus calls us to continue his mission of revealing the perfect love of God in this world. He calls us to total self-giving. He does not want us to keep anything for ourselves. Rather, he wants our love to be as full, as radical, and as complete as his own. He wants us to bend ourselves to the ground and touch the places in each other that most need washing. He also wants us to say to each other, “Eat of me and drink of me.” By this complete mutual nurturing, he wants us to become one body and one spirit, united by the love of God.
Henri Nouwen from “The Road to Daybreak. Read in “Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter“.

Tags Bread and Wine Readings for Lent and Easter, communion, Henri Nouwen, love, quote, washing feet

Email List Faith Personal

Why are you like that?

The topic of evangelism has been following me around. The literal meaning is something like “telling the good news”. It’s often taken to mean sharing your faith with someone from a different background, and hoping they come around and want to join you in it.

It’s something I’ve been uncomfortable with most of my life – and I think I’m in the process of trying to understand why. And maybe, finding what is my way of being authentic in talking about my faith with an open invitation.

I have a bunch I want to think and write about, including why I’ve been so uncomfortable with it in the first place.

But first, Paula Hadfield’s recent message at Riverview on 2 Timothy 4 captured something beautiful, and I want to share it here. (When I asked Paula for permission to share this, she also wanted to pass on credit to Michael Frost and his book Surprise The World which was quoted in her message, and I’ve since added to my list of things to read!)

So you’re not Timothy, I’m not Timothy. Maybe you’re not an evangelist. I hear you.

Is there a way that the church – a group of ordinary people – can be sent out into our world to announce and demonstrate the reign of God through Christ without trying to be something that you’re not, or becoming less than you should be.

Let’s remind ourselves of the charge of Paul again:

“In the presence of God and Christ Jesus who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom I give you this charge: preach the word. Be prepared in season and out of season. Correct, rebuke and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. But you keep your head in all situations. Endure hardship. Do the work of an evangelist. Discharge all the duties of your ministry.”

So let’s be prepared. How do I foster a missional lifestyle?
Paula Hadfield

She then went from that verse in 2 Timothy 4 to quote two other letters from the early church leaders in the bible:

But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect
1 Peter 3:15

Be wise in the way that you act towards outsiders. Make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation always be full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.
Colossians 4 2:4

Paula then drew the link between these verses. To share the good news, and tell people about what you’ve got in your faith, you need to be in a conversation. And that means living with them. And to avoid being pushy, live in a way that stands out. So they might want to ask questions. And be ready to answer questions.

Then she gave these examples, I found it beautiful. I want to reflect on them, chew them over in my mind a lot more and think about how I could live differently:

Why do you live like this?

Why do you give your time and money to care for those who are struggling and disadvantaged? Why advocate for them? Why do you feel compelled to get involved?

Why do you show love to people who clearly dislike you or even hate you?

I know we really disagree on politics but you always make an effort to listen to my point of view, and you’re interested in why I think the way I do. Why do you do that?

You seem to have peace. Why is that?

Why do you forgive people when they hurt you?

I never hear you talking about getting back at anyone.

I know the way that I live is really different to yours but you never judge me, you’re always kind.

Why don’t you get involved with gossip and talking behind people’s backs?

You always seem to use your words to be kind – why is that?

You seem to have a deep sense of purpose – where does that come from?

I see that things really frustrate you at work, but you never take it out on anyone else. How are you so patient?

Thanks for apologising… I’m kind of shocked that you did. What’s that about?

I know that you have struggles but you always seem hopeful. Why is that?

By living lives that were counter-cultural, the first Jesus followers made the proclamation of the gospel even more effective because it was being backed up by their lives.
Paula Hadfield

Like I said at the start – thoughts about evangelism and how to share faith have been following me around. And I’ve been wondering about how I’d articulate the story in a way that people – especially the kind of people I’m around at work and in my community – would relate to. This was a perfect reminder that the place to start isn’t a compelling story but a compelling life.

Tags 1 Peter 3, 2 Timothy 4, Colossians 4, evangelism, gospel, Paula Hadfield, Riverview

Faith Microblog Personal Quotes Reading & Inspiration

“Calvary Love” by Amy Carmichael

Post author By jason
Post date June 3, 2025
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This excerpt from Amy Carmichael’s “If” hit home. Almost every sentence challenged me, and at the same time reminded me why I chose to come back to Christian faith, even when I had so many doubts about both the belief systems and the church: the way of Jesus feels incredibly right and good, enough so that I want it even if I’m not sure if it’s literally true.

If I belittle those I am called to serve, talk of their weak points in contrast perhaps with what I think of as my strong points; if I adopt a superior attitude, forgetting “Who made thee to differ? And what hast thou that thou hast not received?” then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I find myself taking lapses for granted, “Oh, that’s what they always do,” “Oh, of course she talks like that, he acts like that,” then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I can enjoy a joke at the expense of another; if I can in any way slight another in conversation, or even in thought, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I can write an unkind letter, speak an unkind word, think an unkind thought without grief and shame, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I do not feel far more for the grieved Savior than for my worried self when troublesome things occur, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I can rebuke without a pang, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If my attitude be one of fear, not faith, about one who has disappointed me; if I say, “Just what I expected” if a fall occurs, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I am afraid to speak the truth, lest I lose affection, or lest the one concerned should say, “You do not understand,” or because I fear to lose my reputation for kindness; if I put my own good name before the other’s highest good, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I am content to heal a hurt slightly, saying “Peace, peace,” where there is no peace; if I forget the poignant word “Let love be without dissimulation” and blunt the edge of truth, speaking not right things but smooth things, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I hold on to choices of any kind, just because they are my choice, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I am soft to myself and slide comfortably into self-pity and self-sympathy; If I do not by the grace of God practice fortitude, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I myself dominate myself, if my thoughts revolve round myself, if I am so occupied with myself I rarely have “a heart at leisure from itself,” then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If, the moment I am conscious of the shadow of self crossing my threshold, I do not shut the door, and keep that door shut, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I cannot in honest happiness take the second place (or the twentieth); if I cannot take the first without making a fuss about my unworthiness, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I take offense easily, if I am content to continue in a cool unfriendliness, though friendship be possible, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I feel injured when another lays to my charge things that I know not, forgetting that my sinless Savior trod this path to the end, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I feel bitter toward those who condemn me, as it seems to me, unjustly, forgetting that if they knew me as I know myself they would condemn me much more, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If souls can suffer alongside, and I hardly know it, because the spirit of discernment is not in me, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If the praise of others elates me and their blame depresses me; if I cannot rest under misunderstanding without defending myself; if I love to be loved more than to love, to be served more than to serve, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I crave hungrily to be used to show the way of liberty to a soul in bondage, instead of caring only that it be delivered; if I nurse my disappointment when I fail, instead of asking that to another the word of release may be given, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I do not forget about such a trifle as personal success, so that it never crosses my mind, or if it does, is never given room there; if the cup of flattery tastes sweet to me, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If in the fellowship of service I seek to attach a friend to myself, so that others are caused to feel unwanted; if my friendships do not draw others deeper in, but are ungenerous (to myself, for myself), then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I refuse to allow one who is dear to me to suffer for the sake of Christ, if I do not see such suffering as the greatest honor that can be offered to any follower of the Crucified, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I slip into the place that can be filled by Christ alone, making myself the first necessity to a soul instead of leading it to fasten upon Him, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If my interest in the work of others is cool; if I think in terms of my own special work; if the burdens of others are not my burdens too, and their joys mine, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I wonder why something trying is allowed, and press for prayer that it may be removed; if I cannot be trusted with any disappointment, and cannot go on in peace under any mystery, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If the ultimate, the hardest, cannot be asked of me; if my fellows hesitate to ask it and turn to someone else, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I covet any place on earth but the dust at the foot of the Cross, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

That which I know not, teach Thou me, O Lord, my God.
“If” by Amy Carmichael. Read in “Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter“.

It’s from a short booklet that is out of copyright – here’s the PDF if you want to read it in full:

amy carmichael – IF Download

Tags Amy Carmichael, Bread and Wine Readings for Lent and Easter, calvary, discipleship, love

Blogmarks Faith Personal Quotes

Quoting Alfred Kazin

There were images I did not understand, but which fell on my mind with such slow opening grandeur that once I distinctly heard the clean and fundamental cracking of trees. First the image, then the thing; first the word in its taste and smell and touch, then the thing it meant, when you were calm enough to look. Images were instantaneous; the meaning alone could be like the unyielding metal taste when you bit on an empty spoon. The initial shock of that language left no room in my head for anything else. But now, each day I turned back to that little blue testament, I had that same sense of instant connectedness. First the image, then the sense.
“I Had Been Waiting” by Alred Kazin. Read in “Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter“.

I love this description of how powerful writing can work with a human mind and spirit in a way that is beyond the plain meaning of the text. As I read this I wanted two things: first, to also read the Bible like this again, letting the images speak before the words are understood.

And second, I want to practice writing like this.

Tags Alfred Kazin, Bread and Wine Readings for Lent and Easter, prophetic imagination, scripture, writing

Faith Microblog Personal Quotes

Quoting Sadhu Sundar Singh

Post author By jason
Post date April 30, 2025
No Comments on Quoting Sadhu Sundar Singh

God is love and forgives us freely. But God does even more than this. Forgiveness alone is not enough to release us from our sins. Complete release only comes when we are free from the urge to sin. It is completely possible for us to receive forgiveness and still die from the consequences of our sin. The Master came not only to announce our forgiveness, but also to deliver us from the disease of our sin, from its consequences and from death – to break the relentless cycle of sin and death.
Sadhu Sundar Singh. Read in “Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter“.

I used to be frustrated by how much many Christian belief systems talk about sin. Now I think it’s more how they talk about it. This quote from Sadhu Sundar Singh feels like it’s speaking about sin in a way I want to hear more about.

Tags Bread and Wine Readings for Lent and Easter, forgiveness, freedom, Sadhu Sundar Singh, sin

Blogmarks Blogmarks Personal Software Engineering

Charity Majors “On Writing, Social Media, and Finding the Line of Embarrassment”

Post author By jason
Post date April 19, 2025
No Comments on Charity Majors “On Writing, Social Media, and Finding the Line of Embarrassment”

Charity writes one of my favourite tech blogs, and this meta-post about the art and experience of writing resonates.

Charity Majors: On Writing, Social Media, and Finding the Line of Embarrassment

I can really relate to her experience of writing with ADHD (I don’t have a diagnosis, but I have my suspicions):

Over the past 2-4 years, I’ve been writing less frequently, less consistently, and mostly in blog post form. My posts, meanwhile, have gotten longer and longer. I keep shipping these 5000-9000-word monstrosities (I’m so sorry 🤦). I sometimes wonder who, if anyone, ever reads the whole thing.

The problem is that I keep writing myself into a ditch. I pick up a topic, and start writing, and somehow it metastasizes. It expands to consume all available time and space (and then some). By the time I’ve finished editing it down, weeks if not months have passed, and I have usually grown to loathe the sight of it.

For most of my adult life, I’ve relied on hard deadlines and panic to drive projects to completion, or to determine the scope of a piece. I’ve relied on anger and adrenaline rushes to fuel my creative juices, and due dates and external pressure to get myself over the finish line.

And what does that finish line look like? Running out of time, of course! I know I’m done because I have run out of time to work on it. No wonder scoping is such a problem for me.
Charity Majors: On Writing, Social Media, and Finding the Line of Embarrassment

I also really like her experiment to improve her behaviour and improve her craft.:

I need to learn to draft without twitter, scope without deadlines. Over the next five years, I want to get a larger percentage of my thoughts shipped in written form, and I don’t want them to evaporate into the ether of social media. This means I need to make some changes.

write shorter pieces

spend less time writing and editing

find the line of embarrassment, and hug it.

For the next three months, I am going to challenge myself to write one blog post per week (travel weeks exempt). I will try to cap each one under 1000 words (but not obsess over it, because the point is to edit less).
Charity Majors: On Writing, Social Media, and Finding the Line of Embarrassment

Tags blog, Charity Majors, twitter, writing

Email List Faith Personal

Staring at the curse

We’re heading into the Easter weekend.

I’ve been reading Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter as a way of engaging with the story and reflecting. I’ve loved the Advent book by the same team, and so I bought the Lent / Easter book, and tried to read it a few years ago, but struggled. I find the Easter story harder to engage with than the Christmas story. Christmas calls out that God being born among us as the baby Jesus, and by God becoming human it lifts the dignity and worth of every human. Easter tells the story of Jesus being killed, made to suffer, abandoned and betrayed and scorned. And being killed, by us. Which is harder.

And I found it even harder to engage with, because one of the key religious beliefs I learned in school and church was usually something like “substitutionary atonement” – the idea that Jesus death was in our place, and that somehow, it was required to satisfy God’s sense of justice, to take away God’s anger at how lousy we were. Which to my taste, makes God seem like an aggressive person I’d rather avoid. I kind of saw where it was coming from, but it was nothing like the God I knew.

I knew enough to know this wasn’t the only way of looking at Jesus’ death on the cross and understanding its meaning. I bought an NT Wright book to try to explore that more, but never got through it.

This year, even though I still don’t really understand what to think about it, I feel like I’ve found value in putting this story, the suffering of Jesus, front and center.

And a Henry Nouwen reading from this book referenced this quote from a conversation Jesus had, and the imagery behind it:

Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in Him may have eternal life.
John 3:14-15

I remember the first time my friend Justin pointed out the connection here to me. Before then I thought it was a pretty weird reference, but then, a lot of what Jesus says is pretty weird.

The “snake in the wilderness” story is from Numbers 21 in the Hebrew bible. The story is set years after the people had escaped from Egypt, but before they’d made it to Israel, they’re still wandering the desert living day-to-day from the special food God provided on the ground each morning (“manna”).

(Once again, this story is weird. Once again, it makes God seem angry and vindictive in a way that is just not my experience. But once you hear the story, Jesus’ comment about being lifted up like a snake suddenly becomes more interesting!)

Then the people of Israel set out from Mount Hor, taking the road to the Red Sea to go around the land of Edom. But the people grew impatient with the long journey, and they began to speak against God and Moses. “Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die here in the wilderness?” they complained. “There is nothing to eat here and nothing to drink. And we hate this horrible manna!”

So the Lord sent poisonous snakes among the people, and many were bitten and died. Then the people came to Moses and cried out, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you. Pray that the Lord will take away the snakes.” So Moses prayed for the people.

Then the LORD told him, “Make a replica of a poisonous snake and attach it to a pole. All who are bitten will live if they simply look at it!” So Moses made a snake out of bronze and attached it to a pole. Then anyone who was bitten by a snake could look at the bronze snake and be healed!
Numbers 21:4-9

So the people in the desert have done something wrong, and are suffering a curse – a plague of poisonous snakes that were biting them and killing them¹ ².

Then when Moses prays, and God wants to stop it, he makes Moses craft a replica of a snake³. A picture of the very curse they are suffering. And when people look at the curse, somehow, they are healed.

And this brings me back to Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, right at the start of his public life, several years before he was executed on a cross.

There was a man named Nicodemus, a Jewish religious leader who was a Pharisee. After dark one evening, he came to speak with Jesus. “Rabbi,” he said, “we all know that God has sent you to teach us. Your miraculous signs are evidence that God is with you.”

Jesus replied, “I tell you the truth, unless you are born again, you cannot see the Kingdom of God.”

“What do you mean?” exclaimed Nicodemus. “How can an old man go back into his mother’s womb and be born again?”

Jesus replied, “I assure you, no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit. Humans can reproduce only human life, but the Holy Spirit gives birth to spiritual life. So don’t be surprised when I say, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it wants. Just as you can hear the wind but can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can’t explain how people are born of the Spirit.”

“How are these things possible?” Nicodemus asked.

Jesus replied, “You are a respected Jewish teacher, and yet you don’t understand these things? I assure you, we tell you what we know and have seen, and yet you won’t believe our testimony. But if you don’t believe me when I tell you about earthly things, how can you possibly believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ever gone to heaven and returned. But the Son of Man has come down from heaven. And as Moses lifted up the bronze snake on a pole in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life.

“For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.

“There is no judgment against anyone who believes in him. But anyone who does not believe in him has already been judged for not believing in God’s one and only Son. And the judgment is based on this fact: God’s light came into the world, but people loved the darkness more than the light, for their actions were evil. All who do evil hate the light and refuse to go near it for fear their sins will be exposed. But those who do what is right come to the light so others can see that they are doing what God wants.”
John 3 (emphasis mine)

So in this rolling, imagery rich conversation Jesus is painting a picture of God wanting to save the world, because he loves the world. And part of how he does that, is by Jesus “being lifted up”, like the “snake in the wilderness”.

In that desert story, the people were suffering a curse, but when they fixed their eyes on the image of the snake, the picture of the curse, they found themselves healed.

And that’s what it’s like when Jesus is lifted, hanging from a cross at the top of a hill called Calvary.

He’s the image of all that we are cursed by.

There is all of his suffering. The death. The betrayal. The abandonment. The ridicule. The rejection from those he came to love. Unfair judgement. The feeling of abandonment from God. The shame. The helplessness.

And also there’s so many awful things in the picture that condemns us: the crowd that cheered for him a few days earlier and then turned on him. The mockery. The “I wash my hands of this” stance of Pilate while still being complicit. The absolute hypocrisy of the priests who have no problem paying blood money for his betrayal, but then have an issue with that money being in their treasury. The friends who couldn’t stay awake when he needed them. Who thought they would die for him, but then cowered in the moment.

Everything about the story is confronting – it makes us face the very worst in humanity. In the conversation Jesus pivots straight from this snake image to “God so loved the world” to talking about light and darkness, good and evil.

“All who do evil hate the light and refuse to go near it for fear their sins will be exposed.“

When we look at the cross, and we look at the curse, somehow all of this comes into perspective. The worst of us is exposed.

And I still don’t know what I think about theological frameworks for “substitutionary atonement” and the like, and I still feel like the old trope of an angry God needing a blood sacrifice just doesn’t fit what I’ve known of God.

Yet somehow, when I look at the cross, when I stare at the curse, I see clearly the worst of the world, and the best of God. And I understand that somehow, what Jesus did that day, is for our healing.

The weight of the world
Too much for the souls of man
But somehow you hold it all
Up on the cross

Calvary’s enough, calvary’s enough.
When I know nothing
When I know too much
What I choose to know right now is:
Calvary’s enough
Brooke Ligertwood “Calvary’s Enough”

I don’t really want to read this literally, the idea that God was angry at their ungratefulness and so killed a bunch of people… I’m leaving that as something to hold loosely for now, and I’ll stick to what my experience of God is like, and come back to for more study later. ↩︎
If you’re looking for lighter content about poisonous and non-poisonous snakes, this data visualisation project from my Di is a favourite: https://didoesdigital.com/project/snakes/ ↩︎
I wondered if the medical symbol was related to this story. Turns out it’s a similar sounding snake-on-a-stick from Greek mythology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_of_Asclepius. Also while on this Wikipedia rabbit-hold, I found out there’s a story from much later in Jewish history about this snake Moses made being used in idol worship and then destroyed by Hezekiah. Clearly Snakes on Sticks was a whole thing in ancient religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehushtan ↩︎

Tags Bread and Wine Readings for Lent and Easter, calvary, cross, crucifixion, easter, Jesus, john 3, lent, numbers 21, snake

Design & UX Personal Software Engineering

AI personification

I’m trying to navigate Woolworth’s customer support hotline and they’ve personified their AI as a character named “Olive”. While collecting identity verification information:

Olive: What’s your date of birth?
Me: 16 Oct 1987
Olive: That’s the year my mum was born! She was one of the first websites with pictures
Me: WTF
Olive: What’s your postcode?

My thought process, in slow motion:

why are you telling me random things?? This is annoying
wait, websites didn’t exist in 1987!
wait, you don’t have a mum, you’re an AI character
this is ridiculous. Who designed it to say this?!
oh we’ve moved on

My friend Jack asked if I could get anymore backstory out of it, and next time I’m tempted to try get the LLM off course.

Tags ai, call-centre, personification, ux

Blogmarks Email List Faith Justice and Politics Personal Quotes

Peter Kreeft on Suffering

Post author By jason
Post date April 6, 2025
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Henceforth, when we feel the hammers of life beating on our heads or on our hearts, we can know – we must know – that he is here with us, taking our blows. Every tear we shed becomes his tear. He may not yet wipe them away, but he makes them his. Would we rather have our own dry eyes, or his tear-filled ones? He came. He is here. That is the salient fact. If he does not heal all our broken bones and loves and lives now, he comes into them and is broken, like bread, and we are nourished. And he shows us that we can henceforth use our very brokenness as nourishment for those we love. Since we are his body, we too are the bread that is broken for others. Our very failures help heal other lives; our very tears help wipe away tears; our being hated helps those we love. When those we love hang up on us, he keeps the lines open.

God’s answer to the problem of suffering not only really happened two thousand years ago, but it is still happening in our own lives. The solution to our suffering is our suffering! All our suffering can become part of his work, the greatest work ever done, the work of salvation, of helping to win for those we love eternal joy.
Peter Kreeft, “Making Sense Out of Suffering”. Read in “Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter“.

I’ve often pondered the connection between Jesus’ suffering on the cross and our suffering, and what it means to have a faith with a God who suffers like we suffer – God understands what we’re going through, and is not aloof. God is with us in our suffering, with understanding, and in some way, that helps – even if the suffering continues.

I don’t think I’ve thought about the next connection before: that when we suffer, it’s also a chance to join in that same work. Like Jesus suffering can help us feel understood and supported and sustained, our entering into suffering can help others feel understood and supported and sustained.

And somehow, that submission to suffering is the path to defeating it too. Keep suffering without quarreling or crying out, but instead showing mercy, until he leads justice to victory.

Calvary is Judo. The enemy’s own power is used to defeat him. Satan’s craftily orchestrated plot, rolled along according to plan by his agents Judas, Pilate, Herod, and Caiaphas, culminated in the death of God. And this very event, Satan’s conclusion, was God’s premise. Satan’s end was God’s means.
Peter Kreeft, “Making Sense Out of Suffering”. Read in “Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter“.

And in that, is the call, which is all to easy to ignore, to follow in the suffering way:

Does he descend into violence? Yes, by suffering it and leaving us the solution that to this day only a few brave souls have dared to try, the most notable in our memory not even a Christian but a Hindu.
Peter Kreeft, “Making Sense Out of Suffering”. Read in “Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter“.

Tags Bread and Wine Readings for Lent and Easter, Jesus, lent, Peter Kreeft, suffering

Blogmarks Faith Family Personal

A Blessing for Caregivers

Post author By jason
Post date April 5, 2025
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Kate Bowler hosts the “Everything Happens” podcast, and has also written a book of “blessings”. I can’t remember how I stumbled across this one, but I did, at a time when I was in the depths of carer’s burnout. It resonated with me more than almost anything else I’d read before (or since!) about how hard that time was.

Here’s how it starts:

Blessed are we
for whom the call to loving action is still strong,
whose every urge is to keep going, keep working,
and not to count the cost.

And yet blessed are we,
beginning to notice that we are slowing down, inexplicably,
or just pausing, staring for no reason,
or starting something,
but then quickly turning to another demand.

Blessed are we,
realizing that we are beginning to lose the thread.
Excerpt from “A Blessing for Caregivers” by Kate Bowler

Read the rest on her website.

(I feel like the prayer “Come and be the wisdom to find the support system that is broad enough, kind enough, effective enough to meet the needs that are here – both mine and theirs” has been answered over the last couple of years.)

Tags blessings, burnout, caregiving, everything happens, Kate Bowler

Blogmarks Faith Justice and Politics Personal

He too deserved to have the perfume poured on him

Post author By jason
Post date March 26, 2025
No Comments on He too deserved to have the perfume poured on him

I’m reading “Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter” this lent and there’s another reading from The Gospel in Solentiname by Ernesto Cardenal. I’ve quoted a similar reading before from their advent book. They’re beautiful conversations.

They’re discussing the scene where Mary (sister of Martha and Lazarus) pours absurdly expensive perfume on Jesus. Maria’s comment astounded me on several levels:

William: But all that perfume. And the bottle. The alabaster bottle!

Padré: The alabaster bottle was sealed, and it had to be broken to use the perfume. The perfume could be used only once. And the Gospel says the whole house was filled with the fragrance of nard. It’s believed that nard was an ointment that came from India.

Teresita: Maybe a smuggler paid her with that.

Maria: Jesus was a poor man, too, and he too deserved to have the perfume poured on him.
The Gospel in Solentiname. I read it in “Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter”.

Tags Bread and Wine Readings for Lent and Easter, Ernesto Cardenal, john 12, lent, money, poor, the gospel according to solentiname

Email List Faith Personal

Lessons in pastoring, lessons in friendship

Post author By jason
Post date March 23, 2025
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It started with an email:

Hi Steve

Jason O’Neil here – it was nice to meet you on Sunday, thanks for the friendly welcome. For whatever reason I chose small talk instead of sharing something I wanted to, but you said you’re a pastor who loves the story, so here’s an introduction to mine.

It’s a complete surprise to me that God is doing something in Anna and she’s feeling a pull back into church. That’s her story to share. But she’d encouraged me to listen to your message from last month on Humility, the “building bridges, tearing down walls” one, and at the end I felt challenged to reach out to you (not sure if this counts as building a bridge or tearing down a wall? 🤷‍♂️)

But then when I met you on Sunday, I’ll admit I was feeling relatively anxious being back in the building at Riverview. The community there was home for me for some 15 years, I was very much an insider. But I’ve consciously rejected that and chosen to stay on the outside after we returned to Perth 4 years ago.

When you talked about building an inclusive community, a welcoming church, it reminded me of everything I loved about this community, and I want to be part of that. There’s two stumbling blocks for me at the moment.

One is that by most evangelical standards I’m a bit of a heretic. I’ve variously described myself over the past few years as “an agnostic christian”, “a christian mystic”, “I grew up religious”, “a god-fearing gentile” and “it’s complicated”. Unlike a lot of my friends on similar journeys, I still believe in God, even still try to be in relationship with God. But my beliefs and my language around that have really shifted. My mind doesn’t know what to believe. And yet, the Philippians 2 story you preached on, of incarnation, self-emptying, is the most compelling story I’ve encountered. I don’t know if it’s literally true, but its powerful, and its good, and I’d want to live my life following that way. Protestant churches have so emphasised correct belief and correct doctrine that when you question it all, its hard to stay in the community. And I don’t blame the churches, when you unravel your worldview like this the most common response is to call it all bullshit and walk away. Too many people asking too many questions won’t be good for the health of the community. But in your picture of a big inclusive church… where do heretics that are still interested in discipleship fit?

The other stumbling block is the churches exclusion of the LGBTQ community. Riverview was founded by a pastor who later came out as gay, and so long had a softer stance than the surrounding evangelical culture. The first time I had a friend come out as gay, it was a friend from Riverview, and I’m still grateful to him for loving me through my prejudice. But at some point (2015-ish?) the church took a stance that those in gay relationships couldn’t volunteer. When we moved back to Perth in 2018 we tried to return to Riverview for a while, but I silently took a stance of only getting as involved as a queer friend would be allowed to. (If I wanted my protest to be meaningful, I probably should have told someone 🤦‍♂️). Anyway, it turns out feeling connected at a megachurch is hard when you’re not involved in a team. The challenge in your sermon to protect the unity of the church challenged me to be less hostile towards those Christians who are hostile to the queer community – can I make space for them? But reciprocity would demand they also make space for those whose life choices they think are wrong… I have no idea what that looks like in a community in practice. I’m bored of the debate about if homosexuality is sinful (to the point about me being a bit of a heretic, I have a non-standard definition of sin anyway). But I am interested in how to build a united church when the divisions are so deep. And given the Australian church’s history of stoking division (burning bridges?) in this area… I want to hear about how you think about rebuilding bridges with this community.

I hope you don’t mind me putting all this in an essay-length email. Like I said, don’t feel like you have to respond. Me sending this is just a way of forcing myself to open up my story, rather than stay polite but closed off. If you’re interested we can pick the conversation up some other time. This is me reaching out and responding to something I felt in your sermon. Thanks for preaching it so passionately.

See you soon,

Jason

I figured I would get back to church at some point, once the kids were a bit older, but going anywhere with a one year old and three year old felt impossible. And I didn’t know where to go. It’d been five years since I left Perth, and the church I’d grown up in – Riverview – along with it. I’d tried lots of churches since then – in Melbourne and Sydney and Perth, Anglican, Church of Christ, a home church, even two separate Hillsong churches. There was a small community of about 30 people in Melbourne that felt like a spiritual home and a community where I belonged, but after it wrapped up, nothing felt quite right.

I knew enough to know that there would be no perfect place, and that if I wanted genuine community it starts with messy community. But the thought of starting over somewhere felt overwhelming, especially at this stage of life, and so I just had stopped trying. For a while anyway.

Steve’s response cut through that.

He took a walk around the park next to the church and sent an initial response. He engaged with my questions, offered no judgement, shared some of his story, and some of how he views his role. He used the word “missionary” rather than “pastor” or “leader”. To my question about where there’s a space for a heretic in church, he returned the question “what is church?” to deepen the conversation. Then he talked about how that afternoon he was going to visit a young man dying from Huntington’s disease, as if answering his own question. And then he invited me to grab a burger with him to talk more.

It was a style of pastoring I hadn’t experienced before. And definitely not at that level of leadership in a large church. The start of a friendship.

I want to tell all the stories of all the other times it cut through. It would be a long post! Instead I’ll share the message I wrote for him now that he’s heading back to Canada. (Today is his last day as senior minister at Riverview). I hope it gives you a picture of what his pastoral work, and his friendship, has meant to me:

Hey Steve,

There are many things I want to thank you for. For taking a walk around G.O. Edwards park and responding to my email and inviting me for a burger. For paying for that burger. For seeing my pastoral gifting and calling it out over that first lunch, even when I wasn’t sure about anything about church. For reading a blog post I sent you, and then reading some more, and encouraging me to the point I started writing again. For the vulnerability to share some of what was frustrating or hard for you and your family in the move to Perth. For the smile and honest-to-God “it’s good to see you” when I’d walk in late and sit a row or two behind you on a Sunday morning. For holding space for me and Anna the day after our sister attempted suicide. For calling us friends. For visiting me when I was in hospital because I had bladder problems, and not making it awkward. For being only the second person to subscribe to my blog, and the first person who is not my mum. For communicating a vision for the church that resonated with me so strongly that it shapes my own hopes and goals and plans. For helping me chart a path to nurture my preaching gift, then seeing where my family was at, just being honest that that 100% had to be the focus for the next few years. For seeing me broken and crying in the foyer, at a time you couldn’t stop, and at least making sure someone else was with me. For that walk around Heirisson Island / Kakaroomup and enjoying nature together. For hearing me as I tried to tell you how hard it was without telling you what was happening. For being at my house less than an hour after I told you what was happening. For immediately speaking hope: that you have always felt like God had better days ahead for me. For calling every couple of days. For encouraging me every time you saw me at church – I felt like you understood how hard it was. For being the first to ask, with a glint in your eye, if anyone new had caught my interest. For when you met her for the first time and, without making it weird, named the calling you see for my life.

So thank you, for all of these things.

But most of all, I want to thank you for a moment you weren’t present for. It was in the darkest point in this whole story when I was not coping at all. Visiting Anna in hospital every day. Trying to solo parent special needs kids. Carrying the weight of the start of a marriage break-down but having not told anyone yet. And in there, I took a day off, and went for a hike in Mundaring. And on that hike, God showed up. There were three key moments, each with images that shifted how I understood God to be holding me, in this situation, and in all of my life. And the second of those, I think I could only understand because of what you most love to talk about. The trail rounded a corner and hit a breathtakingly beautiful spot, and I had to stop. I felt like the Spirit was reminding me it was holy ground, so I deliberately paused, stepped off the path, and acknowledged the moment. And in that moment, I noticed that it wasn’t just a sense of God as spirit/breath, or God in Heaven over everything sense… my sense was that it was Jesus. The person, my friend. Nearby, walking along this same path, looking at this same view, with me in this. All of this. The Jesus I knew when I was young. You speak about it so often – that he calls us friends. I knew it when I was young, but in de-constructing / re-constructing my faith, I’d lost it. And in that moment, with your constant encouragements, I found it again. I’m still learning, but in that moment, something shifted.

Whether you saw your work here as being a missionary or a pastor or a friend… whatever it is, I’ve felt your love, and through that, I’ve re-discovered Jesus’ friendship. And for that most of all, thank you.

My faith is in a very different place than it was three years ago. To make it through that season and to where I am now I needed a pastor, and I needed a friend, and Steve was both.

Thanks Steve ❤️ Can’t wait for the day I make it over to Canada to visit you and the family!

Tags church, family, friendship, Jesus, pastoring, Riverview, steve mccready

Blogmarks Justice and Politics Personal

“How much discomfort is the world worth” (on strategic listening and movement building)

Post author By jason
Post date March 18, 2025
No Comments on “How much discomfort is the world worth” (on strategic listening and movement building)

Like so many other aspects of organizing, listening is a practice, and at times, it’s a strategic one.

We might need to hear something true that makes us uncomfortable. Listening deeply makes space for that to happen. But even if the person who’s talking is off base, we can often still learn by listening to them. Why do they feel the way they do? What sources informed or convinced them? What influences them? What strengthens their resolve? What makes them hesitant to get more involved or to engage more boldly? If you are in an organizing space together, how has that issue brought them into a shared space with you despite your differences? What points of agreement might you build upon? What is surprising about them? A good organizer wants to understand these things about the people around them, and you cannot truly understand these things about a person without listening.
From Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba in the Boston Review: How Much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth?

Tags community, listening, movement, organising, stretegy

Email List Family Micro Memoirs Personal

Remembering my Uncle Brendan

Post author By jason
Post date February 20, 2025
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My uncle, Brendan Eaton (Bung) passed away in January. Here’s the story I shared at his funeral today.

The story I want to share of uncle Brendan is about one of the most frightening moments of my childhood, and how he was there for me in that.

In the hospital a few weeks ago I heard the stories of Brendan, Rosey, and the hill trolley. Building a kart to race downhill at a breakneck pace, and then loading your little sister in it. It sounds like even as a kid Brendan had a love for vehicles, and maybe a respect, but definitely a need for speed. But it was more than the hill trolleys and motorbikes and cars – he also liked to help others experience the thrill and adventure of it.

So if as a kid for him it was hill trolleys and his little sister, by the time he was older and my uncle, he’d graduated to bigger toys. Quad bikes, specifically. And he even got a farm to ride them on.

So together with my sister Clare and brother Aaron we’d get dropped off to Toodyay for a day with Bung and Mush, and the quad bikes. I day dreamed about it, easily the highlight of every school holidays. He taught us how to ride, about safety, respect for the vehicle. But he also taught us – and showed us! – how to have fun. Nothing like that sense of adventure and thrill seeking as a kid.

That’s the first thing l want to remember Brendan for: teaching and modelling and giving us that sense of adventure.

The second is what happened on the day I crashed the quad bike. We’d been having fun in the paddocks for a few hours already, and were coming back in for the end of the afternoon. Brendan was on one bike in front, I was driving the other with my brother riding on the back, chasing him back through the gates and to the house. As we came to the corner where the gate was, there was something I didn’t see – a guy wire from a nearby pole. I hit it, at speed. The bike lifted, my brother went flying and landed on the barbed fence, and I ended up pinned underneath the bike. My memory of the moment is dark – I can’t remember seeing anything. I remember hearing myself screaming, and my brother screaming. I remember feeling trapped. The burning heat. And I remember Brendan shouting, the shouts coming closer.

See the flip side of adventure is that sometimes the risks eventuate. And in that moment, as an eleven year old, it felt like it was all over for me. But it wasn’t. Uncle Brendan was there in a moment, lifted the bike off, and got me and my brother to safety.

And that’s the second thing I want to remember Brendan for. That incredible strength, loving strength, that was there to help pick up the pieces, and let us know we would get through this.

And those two things have shaped me – willingness to live large and take risks. And the knowledge that when it does fall, there’s loving people who’ll be with you on the other side, as he was then, and as he has been even up until this last year.

Bung, I am so grateful.

Tags adventure, family, love, micro-memoirs, rip, risk, strength

Faith Personal

Nothing like your thoughts

Post author By jason
Post date February 2, 2025
No Comments on Nothing like your thoughts

Last night I was journaling, still processing some of the things that happened in the final year of my marriage – and in particular, some of the things I felt to be God speaking to me at the time, and how I had interpreted them.

See at one point, right at the very beginning of the unravelling – the first time I wondered if it was the start of the end of our marriage – I went outside the front of my home, looked up at the stars, and felt like God told me: everything is going to be all right.

I needed that message of hope, and I clung to it. But I interpreted it as your marriage is going to be all right. And in that, I felt like I had permission and endorsement to question a lot of the prior things I’d held to be true about marriage – maybe things are going to shake up but the relationship will be alright. Take some risks. I even wrote a post about how learning the difference between right and wrong isn’t always clear cut. And some of my decisions and choices in that time ended up being ones that led to a lot of hurt – and regret.

And so I was journaling last night, and wondering: how did I get it so wrong? And wondering if my spiritual compass and ability to discern things is still so off base. And I had a verse from Isaiah pop into my mind.

“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts”, says the Lord.
And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.
For just as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so my ways are higher than your ways
and my thoughts higher than your thoughts
Isaiah 55

But by this point I was tired and didn’t go much deeper. I literally ended the journal entry with “Isaiah 55?” because I felt like there was something there for me to hear, but I didn’t have it in me to sit in that space last night.

I think I was wondering if the way to interpret this was that I was too willing to ignore wisdom from church and the bible and community and do things anyway, and those choices made the breakup worse and more painful than it already had to be. And maybe my take-away should be that I need to be more humble and submit my life choices to God’s ways (not that it’s always obvious! But I was really deconstructing a lot of my framework of wise life choices and willing to be a contrarian and ignore advice that previously felt settled).

So perhaps that reading of “my ways are higher than your ways” is that I need to be humble, and submit, even if I don’t get it, because there’s wisdom there that is deeper than my own reasoning.

And there’s almost certainly some truth there.

But then I came back to it this morning, and opened up Isaiah 55 again. And this time I read it completely differently.

“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts”, says the Lord.
And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.
For just as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so my ways are higher than your ways
and my thoughts higher than your thoughts
Isaiah 55

Reading this verse 12 hours earlier the focus was on my failure, reading it in the morning, the focus was on God’s goodness – and awe at the idea of thoughts beyond our ability to reason.

When I re-read it, instead of viewing it as a statement about wise life decisions or even morality, I thought about that night out the front of my house: everything is going to be all right.

And that thought was true – and 18 months later – is more true than I could have known. What’s ended up happening was in fact beyond my capacity to imagine from where I was that night. If God had laid it out in all the detail I don’t think I would have even wanted it, or understood how it could be good.

But perhaps there’s things God knew, and those thoughts were higher than my thoughts.

And I feel like with that perspective I can have some compassion for myself too. Yes there were regrettable decisions that led to hurt. And yes – I can definitely grow in maturity and discernment. But there was also a path forward that was so outside my ability to understand, that I was always going to have to be stumbling forward with limited understanding, and relying on trust.

And so this morning I’m grateful for God’s ways, and that from a situation that was so bad that I’d lost the vision of a hopeful future, there is a path forward that has more hope and grace than I could have imagined.

And I’m reminded of how scripture can speak in multiple ways. One day I can read a verse and see my failure, and then the very next day, I can read it and see only God’s surpassing goodness. I do still want to grow in discernment – of wisdom and folly – and also grow in the humility required to follow wisdom from the bible and from the church and wider community, even when I’m questioning it. But I’m glad to be reminded that there’s an overwhelming grace that permeates our lives, and is far beyond anything we can imagine, and far higher than our thoughts.

Tags faith, isaiah, isaiah 55, scripture

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The spiritual and religious background of a childhood

Post author By jason
Post date December 30, 2024
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Every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the Passover festival.
Luke 2:41 (NLT)

My favourite podcast for a decade now has been On Being with Krista Tippett, and she opens every interview with the same question: “Can you describe the spiritual or religious background of your childhood? (In whatever way you interpret that question).” The answers vary, with probably half describing an upbringing rooted in one of the world’s major religions, and others bringing their own take to how their family embraced love, community, responsibility and perspectives on life. Hearing how those early experiences shape the lives of people is fascinating, and enlightening. Everyone on her show has quite an amazing story in their adult life, and the links to the spiritual and religious background of their childhood makes you think. Especially as a parent of young kids.

This morning I was reading one of the few stories from the bible about Jesus in his childhood¹. There’s only a few things I know about Jesus’ upbringing:

His birth story was pretty unexpected (which we talk about every Christmas. I hear a lot about this one!)
His family left their home and fled to Egypt as refugees
At some point they returned and settled in a town called Nazareth (which had a bad reputation)
When he was 12, he was on a trip to the temple and got left there, and had some big chats with the rabbis.

This morning I noticed one extra detail on that last experience: “every year”. I’m sure there’s a lot I could learn about the spiritual and religious background by learning about what was normal for first century Jews under Roman rule. But even this little detail is fascinating.

Each year as a family they made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Google Maps thinks it’s about a 138km walk. So several days of walking even for an adult. I imagine when you’re travelling as a family it’s even slower. And they obviously knew lots of other travellers – enough that it was normal for a 12 year old to be in the company of other travellers and not his parents. (I think about my annual trips to the Pemberton Caravan Park as a kid, and meeting some of the same families year after year. And then later the annual youth Summer Camp with other high school kids from my church.)

Google maps is also telling me it’s largely uphill on the way there: that’s why the psalms associated with the pilgrimage to Jerusalem are called “the songs of ascent“² – I’m guessing Jesus and the other travellers would have known these and sung them on the way.

This whole pilgrimage – a week or so of travel, a week or so of the festival, and a week or so for the return – I’m sure would have been included in Jesus’ answer to Krista Tippett’s question. How could such a regular, huge, intentional, communal experience not shape the way you see the world?

And then there’s the story of him staying with the teachers of the law and having the big conversations. Where did he learn all this? I think some of the answers I heard as a kid in Pentecostal churches suggest it was all the Holy Spirit and divine insights… and while my experience says God does connect with children directly and they can learn spirituality from revelation and not just from culture – I also have no doubt that Jesus would have soaked in the religion and spirituality of his community and culture. They did this pilgrimage every year, and I doubt this is the first time he’s had conversations with the teachers. It’s just memorable because it’s the time his parents lost track of him. (Terrifying!)

And what about the rest of the time with his family? What was their spirituality like at home? If the birth story was as full on as the gospels suggest then his parents would have been indelibly changed by the experience. They would have had a strong sense of God’s involvement in their lives.

They also would have been forever changed by their experience of fleeing persecution. I doubt anyone can be a refugee and then experience the rest of their life as if that dramatic escape hadn’t occurred. They would have been so aware of the power systems of the empire they lived in, and more culturally aware than many of their neighbours who may not have travelled as far as they had, and may not have experienced other cultures up close.

And once they’re back in Nazareth, and living as Jews in a Jewish culture: did they treat Jesus differently? This verse makes me think not:

And his mother stored all these things in her heart.
Luke 2:51

Combined with other stories from the gospels about Jesus’ home-town community viewing him as “the carpenter’s son” and not particularly special, I wonder if Mary tried to let the kid just grow up, without placing expectations on him. He was in his 30s by the time she prompted him to help out with the lack of wine at the wedding, prompting his first miracle and the start of his ministry. By that point Jesus and Mary have obviously talked about something, because he has a sense of the purpose in his life and it’s timing: “my hour has not yet come”.

It is a beautiful thing to imagine Mary as a mum, holding all the promises she believes for her son, and having faith for them, enough faith to let it happen in its own time.

No extra-curricular religion classes were needed. Nor any messiah training or exposure to zealot groups. Clearly Jesus gravitated to the temple and the teachers all on his own.

And there’s also the experience of being a people living under foreign occupation. And the experience of growing up in a small village with not a lot of people and not a lot of opportunities. So many of these things would have been in the backdrop of his life, shaping who he ended up being as an adult – the things we remember him for.

And all this makes me think about me as a parent, and what I want to impart to my kids.

Growing up as a child of pastors, I had so many beautiful and formative moments. And while the rhythms of a Pentecostal / evangelical church don’t feel as rich as Jewish culture or even liturgical Christian calendars, there were regular rhythms – like the summer camps I mentioned, these were so crucial for how I formed into adulthood.

I love how big the annual pilgrimage was for them. How much it would have dominated their annual calendar. How much it must have been a big thing for them as kids, taking in a little bit more, with a little more independence each year (and then too much!) What would an equivalent look like for our family? And our church community as a whole?

Only as an adult have I started practicing Lent and Advent more deliberately, respecting the whole season rather than just Easter Weekend and Christmas Day. But even then I’m engaging with these seasons mostly through readings and reflections – it’s very cognitive and not often visceral. I’m wondering what kinds of communal rituals would build memories and form character in a more deliberate way.

For my boys definitely. But also for me. And also, the church.

Apparently it is, or was, the Feast of the Holy Family today? I’m having trouble following the logic of the liturgical calendar combined with the timezone differences from the newsletter that alerted me to it! ↩︎
A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson was a formative book for me – it’s centred around these psalms and the idea of pilgrimage. ↩︎

Tags childhood, discipleship, formation, Jesus, krista tippett, on being, passover, pilgrimage, rituals, songs of ascent

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Joy Oladokun’s gift

I was introduced to Joy Oladokun’s music a few months ago, and she’s an absolute gift. I got to see her live two weeks ago here in Perth, and as she introduced her song Jordan she gave the context: how she had “grown up religious, and very gay”.

Her music is beautiful. I’d encourage anyone to listen, but if you’re involved in any way in leading in churches and shaping their cultures, then you really should. She’s done us a huge favour by putting words and melodies together to capture the beauty and the pain of what it is to have faith, but also to know rejection at the hands of that faith community. And also the beauty of finding love and grace after all that.

Writing this honestly and putting it out into the world, and grappling with the pain and hope and disappointment out in front of everyone – that takes serious courage.

I can’t say it better than she does, but I’m going to share a video, some lyrics, and some links to songs on Spotify in the hope you’ll listen, and get a better feeling of what it’s like to grow up religious and gay. And maybe that’ll help us be kinder when we find ourselves, or the people we’re serving, on the same road.

Jordan

They told me he’s a good lord,
as they tied the shackles to my feet.
They drowned me in the Jordan,
then they walked away from me.

…

I don’t feel so young now
I gave the best years of my life
I tried to build an institution
Instead of trying to keep the faith

…

You kissed the curse from my lips
And taught them to rejoice again
Now we’re building our own promised land

sunday

Mama says I’m up to no good again
I couldn’t make her proud, though I did mybest
I feel like I’m a mess, I feel like I’m stuck in the wrong skin
I feel like I’m sick, but I’m having trouble swallowing my medicine

Sunday, carry me, carry me, down to the water
Wash me clean, I’m still struggling
Sunday, bury me under the weight of who you need me to be
Can’t you see I’m struggling?

Questions, Chaos and Faith

When my friend Casey died
I didn’t drive home for the funeral
I was prostrate, as they say to higher minds

Went to my dorm and cried
because I still believed in Heaven
And I was sure I wouldn’t see her when I die

…

Nothing is certain, everything changes
We’re spirit and bone marching to the grave
There are no answers, there are only
Questions, chaos, and faith

Dust / Divinity

Oh to be a man of faith
Never asking questions, never changing your ways
I’m a skeptic who still prays
If death leads me to Heaven, they’ll recognise my face

Cause though it hurts me to believe, it kills me not to
And I am trying to find my way through the middle
And I am desperate to receive every good thing
From now until eternity, from dust until divinity

Her last album also has some “observations” which feel half way between a podcast interview and a conversation over a cup of tea.

It has not been easy for me to be so vulnerable
For so long on such a stage
I think there is a part of me that sort of
Sees what I’ve given, and sees the places where it hasn’t always been
Respected, or treated with care…

…

When I’m looking back on my life
I feel like I’ll be able to confidently say
That so much of it was motivated by love
And actual care for the world around me
And hope that I could make it a different, kinder place
For people who don’t always feel welcome in it
And I sort of saw the world change, you know?

Tags church, faith, homosexuality, joy oladokun, music

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Elections and bush-fires

I’ve paid far too much attention to the US election, consuming media and commentary about it for years in the lead up, with addictive behaviours to check-in on news websites and blogs regularly especially over the last few months.

With the result coming in today that Trump has won a second term – despite all the things that I would have wished were disqualifying – I was dismayed. Not surprised – I’d read enough analysis to know it was basically a coin flip chance. But dismayed.

And left wondering how much I should feel with this: it’s not my election. But I’ve followed it so closely, I’m invested in it. And Australia is so closely linked to the US – obviously in defence and foreign policy, but also culturally – that the direction they’re turning worries me. I especially worry for the Ukrainians. And for young women in conservative states. And for the gay and trans communities who are very much being used as scapegoats.

I tried to get through today without doom-scrolling. I cared for my boys, I had a call with a friend, I worked, I went to my piano lesson. I didn’t really know how to process it.

Then while I was driving I remembered an experience I had in 2017, it was a lesson I needed to learn then, and I think I need to remember it now too.

In 2017, I was a several years into trying to do something in education and software and startups. Working in schools, building various educational products, launching a startup, and then when that didn’t work, joining another one that was even more ambitious. I was determined to do something “big”, to make a dent in the universe, as many of us in that scene dreamed of.

Alongside this work/business ambition, I’d also been dreaming big in church circles. First at Riverview (the church I grew up in and have now returned to). But then also with First Home Project, an attempt to not just serve the refugee community but re-shape the Australian culture to be less scared and more welcoming. And then in Melbourne I was part of a small church – only a few dozen people – but that was so determined to be a counter-culture, almost a prophetic voice critiquing what’s wrong with many church communities and painting a vivid picture of what an alternative could be.

Big dreams in work, big dreams in church, but they were all sputtering along by July 2017, and it wasn’t really going anywhere. Our church was soon to close its doors, from burnout and disillusionment amongst those running it, and the startup I worked at was struggling along, and I wasn’t sure if they’d have enough money to keep paying me each month.

The big dreams felt like they were dying. And that’s when we went to visit my aunties in the Southern Flinders Ranges in South Australia.

While we were staying with them, we made a day trip out to the farm Annette grew up on, and while giving us a tour and telling us stories – she tells great stories – I had a “holy ground” kind of moment.

She was telling us the story of the 2014 Bangor fires that had swept through this area. I remember their Facebook updates each night as the fire burned for weeks and weeks, each night filled with fear that it might break containment lines and burn through the bushland, through the farm, through people’s houses.

So that day as we walked through the bush, past trees and dried out creeks, with their dogs running ahead, the leaves crunching under my feet with each step, and the stories still being told, I started to see the evidence of the fire. Scars on the trees. The lack of undergrowth. It had come right through here, right where we were walking.

But there was life. Trees still standing tall. New plants sprouting everywhere. The birds. This place was coming back to life.

The family didn’t operate the farm anymore, they had leased out much of the land, but this land, around “sheep camp hill”, they’d wanted to give back to the country. And so they were letting the bush grow again. And after the fire, it was coming back to life.

And I remember being so inspired by that little resilient ecosystem.

Here I was trying to dream big and change the world, but nature was teaching me a lesson. Instead of grandiose plans to re-shape the world to our liking, there’s something beautiful about loving a small patch of land, and fostering the kind of resilience that can survive and bring new life, even after a fire destroys everything.

And so I had a revelation about love at a small scale.

Love, placed in individual relationships and families and small communities and tiny systems. In sports teams and work teams and social groups. Love that can self propagate and spread. That can evolve to the conditions and that can recover after catastrophic events. That love could change the world, far more than the biggest startup or the most dynamic church.

To quote Jesus and mix my metaphors, a little yeast spreads through the whole batch of dough.

And so today, as I feel disappointed in the failure of the big political movement I wanted to see “win”, and dismayed at the state of the culture that wants this alternative, and a little bit of shame for treating the whole thing like as an entertaining sport with winners and losers but not actually doing anything to help… I’m brought back to this idea that maybe where I need to focus is on building resilient love, self propagating love, into communities at a small scale.

There’s a beautiful interview between Krista Tippett and adrienne maree brown that captures this so perfectly, I want to quote it at length:

brown: So I was doing electoral organizing in 2004 — 2003, 2004. We’re gearing up — it’s post-9/11; we’re going to war with Iraq, Afghanistan, and we’re like, we’ve got to get Bush out of office. We have to. He’s just going to keep perpetuating all these unjust wars with all these people and not help figure anything out. So we’re doing all this organizing, and it clicked for me, in a way that I couldn’t — it’s one of those things, you see it and you can’t un-see it. And I was like, oh, we are trying to just change the top layer of this very layered cake, this very layered process, this system of governance. We think that if we just win the presidency, that then we’ll be able to change the world.

And it clicked for me that actually, it’s a fractal system. And it’s layer on top of layer on top of layer. And if none of us are practicing democracy anywhere, it’s not going to just suddenly work at the top layer. [laughs] And I got it, and then I realized — so I started asking people, because I was touring a book we had written. And I started asking people, Do you practice democracy — anywhere in your life? [laughs] Not even politically, but just in your household? Who makes the decisions about the budget?

Tippett: [laughs] What did people say?

brown: No.

Tippett: [laughs] Right.

brown: Nobody was practicing it, or if people were practicing it, they would be like, oh yeah — you know, there would always be like one really happy person who was like, I practiced it. And then I would be like, okay, in your household, you practice it. Do you practice it with your neighbors? And then they would have to be quiet. Or, do you practice it —

Tippett: Okay, that’s fascinating.

brown: There was almost nobody who was practicing it on their block or in their community or in their organizations or other places. Everyone’s kind of dodging the actual work of democracy, small-d democracy.

So then, of course, we are in this crisis right now where we cannot figure out a way past this political impasse moment. To me, what it reveals is we haven’t been practicing democracy for such a long time anyway. We’ve really outsourced almost every aspect of governance, and the only part we’ve held onto is complaining. People sit in their living rooms, they form opinions, they’re upset about stuff, they don’t do much about it, but they’re apoplectic. [laughs]

Tippett: And they also don’t know what they can do about it, right — at that mega level.

brown: Exactly. That’s on purpose. [laughs] So it’s like, trying to keep people in a place where they’re angry and they think they can buy their way out of it. That’s one of the reasons organizers exist, is to be like, actually, you can’t get out of it that way, but there are ways. We’ll have to work together to figure it out, but there are other practices.

But that’s when it clicked for me, that I was like — something about smallness, I was able to gain respect for, because I was like, every single large system or structure or network or political protocol, all of it is made up of small things — of humans either having or not having necessary conversations, and humans being willing to stand up for what is right and stand up against what is wrong. It’s all these small activities that we need to get great at if we want to actually have anything that would be a real democracy.

Tippett: This way you make the connection between what happens at the interpersonal level is a way to understand the whole society — how we are at the small scales, how we are at the large scale.
On Being with Krista Tippett – adrienne maree brown: On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life

adrienne maree brown — On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life

Tags fire, nature, on being, politics

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Everyone will know me already

Post author By jason
Post date November 5, 2024
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This is post 12 of 12 in the series “Hebrews”

In many times and in many ways, God speaks
We may drift away
It was only right
Where you’ll find God
“Stay soft”: Sabbath rest
The difference between right and wrong
An anchor for the soul
Our great desire
Which promises?
Write it on their hearts
The community’s relationship to God
Everyone will know me already

I will put my laws in their minds,
and I will write them on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
And they will not need to teach their neighbors,
nor will they need to teach their relatives,d
saying, ‘You should know the Lord.’
For everyone, from the least to the greatest,
will know me already.
And I will forgive their wickedness,
and I will never again remember their sins.
Hebrews 8

I’ve written before about how I think God “is not far from any of us” regardless of what kind of religion and spirituality experiences and communities we associate with.

And here in this poem describing the new covenant, we see God telling the same story: “For everyone, from the least to the greatest, will know me already.”

A lot of Christian service talks about different types of roles – like pastors, who care for those in the church, and missionaries, who reach out to those outside.

How different would it be if in your care for everyone, you didn’t weigh too heavily their prior religious experience, but you assumed that in some way, they know God already?

That in some way, each person has had experiences of something transcendent, something meaningful, a little mysterious. That they’d once felt a love bigger than anything that made sense. That they’d felt a caring spirit staying with them in the most lonely moments.

So much of pastoral caring work is not just to offer your own care and love, but also to help them see where God might be in their situation – because God is a far greater source of love and care, and if we can help them connect to that source, it’s more than we can offer on our own.

If someone I’m supporting doesn’t think of themselves as Christian, but I find myself in their world to offer support, I need to remember: they probably know God too, already, in some way. They might not use the same words I use to describe it, but there will be something in their life, some evidence, that the spirit is close by.

And if I can help them notice that and find that, in the language they use and connected to the experiences they already know… that is beautiful.

It’s transcending the categories of “missional” or “pastoral”, but recognising, honouring, and fostering the relationship between God and this person that’s already there, somewhere, if we’re open to seeing the different ways and finding the different words.

Tags bible, covenant, faith, God, hebrews, mission, pastoral

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Purity culture and “negative idols”

Post author By jason
Post date November 4, 2024
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I really appreciated this post from Allison Murray at Women in Theology critiquing evangelical purity culture, and exploring how sometimes overly focusing on avoiding a thing somehow still keeps that thing central, which is its own form of idolatry:

A Bible study teacher I had once tried to get us to think more critically about the idea of idols. She said that idols were, yes, things in life that we gave too much attention or allowed to drive our lives in place of our faith (listing some of the usual suspects in these types of discussions: money, fame, power, sex, etc.). But she also encouraged us to think about how the desire to flee from idols can end up shaping our lives just as drastically as when we centre them. One might, out of a desire to not let thirst for material comfort take hold, decide to live as a modern-day ascetic, and spend their life running away from money. What if, she posited, an idol wasn’t only something we ran towards, but something we ran full-steam-ahead away from? What if we think about idols as something that we give undue power and authority in our lives, either negatively or positively?

In their pursuit of uprightness and sexual morality, the evangelical purity industrial complex still ends up making a negative idol of sex. Fleeing from it makes it present everywhere, but in a haunting, overbearing present absence/absent presence kind of way.
I did it anyway – haunted by the battles (Allison Murray)

I read the “Every man’s battle” books she critiques at a formative time in my teenage years… I’m grateful I read healthier books about sexuality and the spirituality involved in it too. A few decades later even hearing the name of the book was a throw-back, but the critique I find useful.

There’s probably lingering ways that ideology has influenced me I should be aware of, and there’s still a tonne of people in churches who are being told this worldview is the true one… when it’s not, and it can be pretty unhealthy!

(I will say, those books did have some positive impacts – it helped me learn self control when it comes to the Male Gaze – which aligns with some feminist values: they’re not completely opposite worldviews! But she points out plenty that’s wrong with the worldview and I agree.)

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Scandals, sequoias, high intensity fire, and Benjamin William Hastings’ album

Post author By jason
Post date October 29, 2024
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I think I’ve listened to the song “Seasons” by Benjamin William Hastings hundreds of times, it’s been near the top of my playlist of christian songs for years.

Today someone introduced me to Benjamin William Hasting’s 2022 self titled album, and it’s so good.

It’s beautifully written, and engages with a rich faith without being a “church worship” album. It’s artful and self reflective, and dances between faith and parenting and creativity and vulnerability and probably more, rather than just being songs sung to God.

One of the songs “Cathedrals of the Nelder Grove” jumped out at me.

It’s talking about his response to scandal in his church. And in the third verse, he references back to his song “Seasons”, and the lessons we can learn from Sequoia trees, again:

You know, I’ve sang before about sequoias
I guess we’re more than just one song alike
But as I sit and mourn here in the garden
Indulge me please, just one more time
We tower high above our brothers
We reign the sky, but for a time
Alas, we serve beneath the soil
Where our death just makes a way for life

And after that, the song samples a recording of an ecologist talking about Sequoias in the Nelder Grove in California after a massive fire in 2017.

We’re here right now in the railroad fire of, of 2017 where four years ago, um, in the Nelder Grove of Giant Sequoias. And, and right now we’re standing in an area that burned at low intensity.

Uh, the fire burned in a mix like all wildfires do. It was mostly low and moderate intensity. But there was a portion that burned at high intensity as well.

And the interesting thing, and for me as an ecologist, the important thing is that in the low intensity fire areas, there is no giant sequoia reproduction, none. None from before the fire, none after the fire.

Because what they need for that is high intensity fire, in other words, it’s fire that’s intense enough that it actually will kill some of the mature giant sequoias. But what you get in the bargain is hundreds of times more giant sequoias

It’s striking and I wanted to share these follow up videos: him talking about the song.

And the original video he sampled, at the time I’m posting this still with less than 2000 views:

This is one of those times nature offers such a striking metaphor for human experience that I’m unlikely to forget it.

This is heartwarming.

I don’t mind saying this as a scientist. I love seeing this.

This gives me a lot of hope for the future.
Ecologist Chad Hanson

Tags benjamin william hastings, church, fire, nature, scandal, sequoia, songs

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Tanya Luhrmann on hearing the voice of God

Post author By jason
Post date October 14, 2024
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Luhrmann’s provocative theory is that the church teaches pray-ers to use their minds differently than they do in everyday life. They begin by holding conversations with God in their heads, modeled on the kind of chummy conversations they’d have with their best friends. As they talk to Him, tell Him about their problems and imagine His wise counsel and loving response, they are training their thoughts, much as people use weights to train their muscles. The church encourages them to tune into sounds, images and feelings that are louder or more intense or more unfamiliar or more powerful—and to interpret these internal cues as the external voice of God.
Hearing the Voice of God – Stanford Magazine

Steve McCready mentioned Dr Tanya Luhrmann’s research on Sunday and I read several articles about it and am going to order a copy of her book. I’ve always been fascinated with descriptions of prayer that try to not shut out those with a material-only worldview, or suspicion of the spiritual, or just a view of spirituality that doesn’t fit “invisible person who speaks english and other languages”. The fact she also studied witchcraft as an anthropologist is just fascinating to me. I’m keen to read more.

The other description of pray I loved was from Danya Ruttenberg’s “Nurture the wow”. The whole chapter was amazing, here’s a sample quote:

It is this outward offering that turns “feeling feelings” into prayer: We don’t just experience them, we offer them up to someone, something. We say, “Here, can you hold on to at least a tiny piece of this anger, frustration, and despair for just a second?” We connect our heart to the great infinite everythingness, the gushing, pulsing stream of life within and around us. We reach out. It’s about tuning in to that which interlinks us all, that which is found within and between us.
Danya Ruttenberg, Nurture the Wow

Tags danya ruttenberg, prayer, tanya luhrmann

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The community’s relationship to God

Post author By jason
Post date September 23, 2024
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This is post 11 of 12 in the series “Hebrews”

In many times and in many ways, God speaks
We may drift away
It was only right
Where you’ll find God
“Stay soft”: Sabbath rest
The difference between right and wrong
An anchor for the soul
Our great desire
Which promises?
Write it on their hearts
The community’s relationship to God
Everyone will know me already

I will put my laws in their minds
and write them on their hearts.

I will be their God,
and they will be my people.

No longer will they teach their neighbor,
or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest.

For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.
Hebrews 8

Years ago I remember trying to paraphrase this line: “I will be their God, and they will be my people.”

I think I wanted to make it personal, more individual, something I could remind myself in my own quiet prayer time.

But it just sounds wrong, it doesn’t really work: “I will be his God, and he will be my person”?

I’m sure if I tried long enough you could come up with a line that echoes the original and doesn’t sound completely broken… but at some point I gave up because I realised that the plural is intentional.

This covenant isn’t describing a billion small person-and-God relationships. It’s describing a single community-and-God relationship.

The style of Christianity I’ve grown up with has a heavy emphasis on a personal relationship with God, and this has been important to me!

But the covenants, both the one made with Moses to ancient Israel, and the one promised in Jeremiah’s writings that the early church claimed, are not about the personal relationship to God. They’re about the community’s relationship to God.

I’ve never had much sense that the wider community had any sense of unity around matters of faith. After all I grew up in pluralistic Australia. We’re lots of individuals with individual views making individual choices, and we often don’t agree with each other. So when I read something like Daniel’s prayer for his people (in Daniel 9), the use of us and we instead of I and me feels foreign and strange, even though it’s been translated into simple English language. I’m much more used to prayers and confessions being personal.

Daniel prays this heartfelt confession for the whole people: “we have sinned and done wrong”, “we have refused to listen”, “we have not followed the instructions he gave us through his servants, the prophets”, “all Israel has disobeyed… refusing to listen to your voice”.

From the written accounts we have, Daniel was an outstanding citizen and an outstanding person of faith. It’d be hard to look at the things he’s confessing and match them to things we know from his own life choices. Yet he’s confessing and praying not about his own behaviour and actions but the actions of his entire people.

What comes to mind for me as I try bring this to my own life, is the racism that runs deep in this country. I’m tempted to give myself a pass because I try to be accepting of those who look or sound different, I try respect the First Nations that have been here since before the first words of the bible were even written, and I voted “yes” in that referendum. But if the community has done wrong, and I am in the community… If I follow the example of Daniel I should confess our sins as if they were my own.

“God we started with outright massacres, we went on to steal children from their families and try force assimilation away into our culture, destroying their culture, and to this day we continue to hold racist prejudices and support biased systems that keep oppressing the lives of First Nations Australians, who are your children…”

Daniel doesn’t just confess the failings of his community though. He launched into this prayer after reading the prophecies of Jeremiah, which had been written a few decades earlier. And no doubt he’d read this bit with the promise of the new covenant – which celebrates God’s faithfulness to the people, even when the people are not faithful to God.

So he prayed “O Lord, you are a great and awesome God! You always fulfill your covenant and keep your promises of unfailing love to those who love you and obey your commands.” And “the Lord our God is merciful and forgiving, even though we have rebelled against him.”

If framing our covenant relationship with God requires considering the whole community and its actions… that is confronting. But when you remember the mercy and faithfulness of God that are central to this covenant… that is hopeful.

Tags aboriginal, australia, community, confession, covenant, daniel, first-nations, hebrews, prayer, racism

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Write it on their hearts

This is post 10 of 12 in the series “Hebrews”

I will put my laws in their minds
and write them on their hearts.

I will be their God,
and they will be my people.

No longer will they teach their neighbor,
or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest.

For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.
Hebrews 8

As I’ve continued this series of posts through the book of Hebrews, I knew I wanted to write something on this passage, but it’s so rich it’s hard to know where to start.

So much of the big story in the bible is about the deep commitment in the relationship between God and God’s people – the covenant. There was the covenant with Abraham to make his descendants a great nation, and then the covenant with those descendants shared in the law of Moses. And then in the writings of another Hebrew prophet, Jeremiah, acknowledges both the failings of that covenant, but also the deep love and commitment:

This covenant will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant, though I loved them as a husband loves his wife.
Jeremiah 31

And then Jeremiah describes a new covenant God is making. And the few sentences he writes are elevated by the author of Hebrews to be a key to understanding Jesus’ work as high priest and his purpose here on earth.

So as I’ve been thinking about what to write, the challenge for me was to not jump at the first thing to write, but to meditate on it deeply. Memorise these couple of sentences. And let them do a deep internal work.

What’s happening for me here has been another instance of what I quoted in the first post in this series:

A memorized work (like a lover, a friend, a spouse, a child) has entered into the fabric of its possessor’s intellectual and emotional life in a way that makes deep claims upon that life, claims that can only be ignored with effort and deliberation.’ … A memorized text has a peculiarly character-forming effect on the memorizer. The text becomes part of his character; he lives in it and lives it out.
Paul J. Griffiths, Religious Reading

There’s so many things I could write about… but mostly I’d encourage you to meditate on the words of this new covenant and let what you learn about God’s heart go deep, to be placed in your mind and written in your heart.

Tags covenant, discipleship, hebrews, law

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Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg: Food. Money. Sex. Tech.

Post author By jason
Post date September 7, 2024
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This post by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg speaks of a spiritual practice for the month of Elul that she learned from her rabbi – Rabbi Alan Lew. It sounds like the whole month has a theme of preparation, reflection, and repentance in the lead up to the high holy days Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I don’t know much about Jewish traditions – though the Wikipedia page’s section on customs has a decent introduction – but Lent feels like the closest parallel season in Christian calendars – and the practice she outlines I’d love to adopt for lent.

Rabbi Lew would suggest you spend a month paying close attention to one area of your life.

He would often to teach this around this time, as a way of helping people to wake up, to find a way to see their whole lives.

Because once we get clear on what’s driving us– and what we’re resisting, and afraid of, and reacting to, and can start to figure out why– in one area of our life, the whole picture becomes illuminated all at once, sometimes.

He would suggest that you pick one of the following three:

Food, money, or sex.

given that things are– how they are now– I might suggest the following addition of a fourth contender for potential scrutiny. That is, I propose that we broaden the list to:

Food, money, sex OR tech.

Pick one of them. Not all of them. One of those four things, and your relationship with it.

And spend the next month paying really, really close attention.
Danya Ruttenberg in Food. Money. Sex. Tech.

The specific examples paint a picture of very intentional mindfulness on a particular area, with the view to self understanding, compassion, and maybe repentance.

Tags danya ruttenberg, lent, practice, reflection

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Which promises?

This is post 9 of 12 in the series “Hebrews”

There’s a lot of talk about hope and promises in the letter to the Hebrews. Even the last two posts I wrote about Hebrews were around this:

Therefore, we who have fled to him for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls.
Quoting Hebrews 6 in my post “Anchor for the soul”

Our great desire is that you will keep on loving others as long as life lasts, in order to make certain that what you hope for will come true. Then you will not become spiritually dull and indifferent. Instead, you will follow the example of those who are going to inherit God’s promises because of their faith and endurance.
Quoting Hebrews 6 again, the verse I started with in “Our great desire”

At some point last year when I was first getting back into reading the bible in general and reading Hebrews in particular, I was thinking about whoever it was that wrote this letter, and wondering what grand hope they had in mind when they were writing words like “hope” and “promises”. Is it the massive saving-of-everything-and-everyone narrative arc in the Jesus story? Is it hope for their nation and restoration after Roman destruction? Is it their own personal hope for Heaven or eternity or something?

There’s a hint right there in Hebrews 6, in between the two paragraphs I quoted above:

For example, there was God’s promise to Abraham. Since there was no one greater to swear by, God took an oath in his own name, saying:

“I will certainly bless you, and I will multiply your descendants beyond number.”

Then Abraham waited patiently, and he received what God had promised.
Hebrews 6 (NLT)

The New Living Translation even uses the phrase “for example”, which isn’t really in the original language, but does capture that at this point the writer has moved on from using generic phrases like “what you hope for” and “inherit God’s promises” and is now talking about something specific.

They’re not just talking about the grand overall narrative here, they’re talking about an individual promise God made to Abraham.

And that stood out to me, because I’d probably swung the pendulum away from thinking about what God promises to individuals. Having grown up in a church that sat on the edge of Pentecostalism, we were careful not to fall into traps of the “prosperity gospel”, but we could see it in the wider Pentecostal culture. People who were too concerned with God giving them benefits in this life – whether that’s getting the marriage they wanted or the promotion or the private jet or the parking spot.

And along with the rest of my church, in my formative years it felt like we pushed back against that and tried to remember the big picture of what God is doing in the world.

Later in the book of Hebrews this tension is even laid out directly:

By faith these people overthrew kingdoms, ruled with justice, and received what God had promised them. They shut the mouths of lions, quenched the flames of fire, and escaped death by the edge of the sword. Their weakness was turned to strength. They became strong in battle and put whole armies to flight. Women received their loved ones back again from death.

But others were tortured, refusing to turn from God in order to be set free. They placed their hope in a better life after the resurrection. Some were jeered at, and their backs were cut open with whips. Others were chained in prisons. Some died by stoning, some were sawed in half, and others were killed with the sword. Some went about wearing skins of sheep and goats, destitute and oppressed and mistreated. They were too good for this world, wandering over deserts and mountains, hiding in caves and holes in the ground.

All these people earned a good reputation because of their faith, yet none of them received all that God had promised.
Hebrews 11

I think I probably anchored too strongly on that second paragraph: sometimes you don’t see the promises in this life, so let’s instead hold onto a bigger picture of hope, that we expect to take longer than our lifetimes. (Less chance for disappointment maybe?)

That’s not all bad – I think holding onto the big picture leads to a more selfless and long term approach to life and decision making. It is certainly better than the prosperity gospel style of promises.

But reading this, and noticing that the Abraham example is a personal promise – rather than just his inclusion in a cosmic hope – challenged me.

Are there any personal promises from God that I’m holding onto?

Even using this language felt dangerous to me: I’ve had times in my life where I’ve felt something that I assumed was from God, and thought I could trust it, and then watched it fail.

As a 23 year old when Anna – then my girlfriend, had developed a chronic sickness and we prayed, and something shifted, she felt well for the first time in months, and we felt hope, but only for a night. Over a decade it had good days and bad days and the sickness shifted and morphed but the promise of full healing never really came.

Or when my friend Casey and I started Today We Learned and we felt so strongly God was calling us to have some kind of impact in the education sector through our startup, but it fizzled out. It was great growth for us and I regret none of it – but if I had clung to my sense of what God wanted to do as a trustworthy promise, I think I would have been disappointed.

It’s not all disappointment – other times I’ve felt things and trusted them, and it’s made all the difference. When Anna was really sick and we weren’t surviving off the income from my casual jobs, I was waiting for a job opportunity at our church, when an unexpected offer came from a software startup. I intended to decline it but felt like God was saying “This is me looking after you”. And 12 years later my career in this industry really has felt like being looked after.

So I’m open to hearing promises God has for me, but I’ve had enough experience to not put too much hope in a specific, personal promise – or in my interpretation of such a promise.

So, last year when I read this, and chewed on the idea that the personal promise, like Abraham’s example, is also important, I opened up to it. And while out hiking, sometimes thinking about this, sometimes praying, sometimes just reflecting on how rough life was feeling at that moment, and also just enjoying the view – somewhere in there, I felt like God made me another personal promise.

Photo: a wide photo of the bush landscape and the blue skies. You can see the Mundaring Weir (a giant dam) in the distance. It looks smaller in the photo than it did in real life. — One of the views from the hike

For now I don’t think I want to share it here. But I’ll say it’s vague enough to not really be measurable or provable. But despite that it’s real and concrete enough that it shifted something for me, and has been an anchor for me to hold onto in one of the hardest periods of my life.

While writing this post I caught up with Allen Brown and we talked about Abraham’s promises. As he is so good at doing, he helped paint the big picture for me – how does this one story about Abraham tie into the big story?

And it was a reminder for me that Abraham’s promise we talked about before – that he would have descendants beyond number, was both something personal for him and part of a deep global story. Personal: the deep desire for him and his wife to have a child after years of infertility – many can relate to that even today. And part of the deep story: through his family, which would grow into a nation, God would demonstrate and orchestrate a different way of life, for the people to live in covenant with God – living aligned with his ways rather than independent and opposed – and through this nation, all other nations would be blessed. That’s the big story.

So when the writer for Hebrews talks about hope and promises that are an anchor for our souls – which promises are they talking about?

There’s no doubt that they had in mind the new way of life, the community in a committed covenantal relationship with God:

But now Jesus, our High Priest, has been given a ministry that is far superior to the old priesthood, for he is the one who mediates for us a far better covenant with God, based on better promises.
Hebrews 8

But by including the example from Abraham, there is a beautiful reminder that weaved into the big story that spans across generations and continents, there are billions of individual stories, and while God is in covenant relationship with humanity as a whole, God is also connecting with individuals. With us.

And God also offers hope and promises on the scale of our short lives, and these are beautiful for us on their own, but when included as a thread in the bigger tapestry God is weaving, it can be breathtaking.

Tags abraham, hebrews, hope, promises

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Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on when the character of God in the Bible doesn’t match our experience

Post author By jason
Post date June 18, 2024
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I need to pause and take a moment to talk a little more directly about God, and the character of God as depicted in the Torah/Bible. Which, at least for me, aren’t necessarily always the same thing.

I know that for some people, it’s really important to be able to track how every verse in the Bible can be totally consistent with every other verse in the Bible and also their theology, but that’s never been my jam, honestly.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg – Life is a Sacred Text: Theology Interlude

And later

…it was already OK with me that God in the Torah wasn’t necessarily always going to be acting like the God I’d begun to meet in prayer, in mystical encounters, in the woods and on my long, winding walks outside at night.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg – Life is a Sacred Text: Theology Interlude

For something funny, but still on the topic of understanding God’s character via weird Bible stories: After A Long Pandemic Layoff, God Interviews For A New Job by Jonathan Weisberg.

Tags bible, danya ruttenberg, faith, mcsweeneys, theology