Something unique about Mark's Gospel

Over the last few months on 3 different Sundays we have read Mark's gospel aloud in big chunks. It has been refreshing, confronting and invigorating. Mark's gospel was probably written first and for some (probably some villages in the Galilee area) it was their only written text about Jesus for perhaps a generation. What might it be like to have this story as your only written Jesus story? How might it shape you? (In other words..... what is unique to Mark and what matters most to him?)

Here are a few things..... as you read Mark -what strikes you?

ü     The “parable of the sower” takes the place of the “sermon on the mount.” A focus on God’s goodness and kingdom invitation being thrown everywhere and seeing a dynamic process of life and death, just like in the fields around about you.

ü     Action, emotion– dynamic, immediate, emotional, confronting and confusing. I imagine that this community expected discipleship to be all kinds of highs and lows. There is not a lot of teaching (apart from chap 4.) There are lots of radical acts that are lauded (the widow’s mite, the syro-phoenician woman, John the Baptist). The kingdom is massively different to everyday life and comes to life with big sacrificial acts.

ü     Faith – the “answer” seems to be radical trust in Jesus –and ACTING upon this. (The bleeding woman, his own village and the failure of the disciples to cast a demon out of a boy, moving a mountain.)

ü     Failure and misunderstanding is normative – the followers and “insiders” who choose to remain close to Jesus experience failure as a norm. The ending of the gospel (16:8) highlights that raw encounters with God often produce negative results, as do many other stories. We would want to say that this is not the end of the story but need to be circumspect in this since in this case it quite literally is!!!

ü     Inclusion of all kinds of people, yet something about Israel. Jesus criss-crossed Galilee (the key to this is knowing Jews mainly live on one side and gentiles on the other.) YET felt the need, in dealing with the syro-phoenician woman – to put her in her place.

As we were reading on Sunday i thought of another distinctive. Jesus teaches only in Chapter 4 (what is the kingdom like) AND in chapter 13. This second lot of teaching is as big and is all about the life and times of believers/church after Jesus has gone. This "end times" teaching is passionate and extreme. Perhaps it makes for some hard core "hanging on" in tough times but perhaps also some sad weird end times beliefs in soft times.

 

 

Environment - Week 4 Household Covenant

The topic for week 4 of the Lent Household Covenant is 'Environment'.

The key questions are: 'What concrete steps can you take to make your household and lifestyle significantly "greener"? How can you become knowledgable about the issues in your community and advocate for change?'

We do the usual things of recycling, re-usable shopping bags, turning off lights and appliances (a bit) and walking or biking a little. We only run one car in our household.

We could make more of an effort to get info about current environmental issues. As an engineer and investor, I could learn a bit more complex stuff about power generation and consumption on a big scale. We could do some more to measure our gas and electricity consumption - perhaps by looking at our meters more often.

We eat a bit of meat and don't grow much food at home. We could investigate that kind of stuff pretty easily.

We certainly don't know lots about the natural environment around our home. We could learn a bit more about native vegetation and what is a sustainable ecosystem in our immediate area.

Lot's to think about!

Ethical Investing Resources

I've collected a little list of resources for people wanting to start out in ethical investing.

A key part of investing is being well-informed. If you are wanting to consider ethical issues you will need to seek information from alternative sources. Not all information will lead to sound investments and I do not endorse the investment advice from any of these sources of information. alternative sources of information should be read alongside mainstream sources to get a more complete picture.

Kiva is a micro-credit organisation that matches up investors from the developed world to entrepreneurs in the developing world. www.kiva.org

Ethical Investor magazine is another good newsletter, I've only seen a few hard-copy issues so far. www.sri.com.au

The Uniting Church have an ethical investment fund which has a retail offering. It is both a vehicle for churches to invest, as well as a provider of captial for some social programs run locally. It also invests globally in ethical opportunities. www.ucafunds.com.au

TEAR are starting to produce some resources to help guide investment, check out tear.org.au, they are also a source of general information on big infrastructure projects and developing world infrastrcuture need. TEAR have links to developing world microcredit organisations, but I don't think they offer a retail investment opportunity. www.tear.org.au/resources/harambee/

Reading the 'New Internationalist' alongside The Economist etc. is a good way of following news of infrastructure investments and also micro credit industry movements. www.newint.org

The 'Intelligent Investor', is an Australian value-investing newsletter. This is a good check for the soundness of investments. www.intelligentinvestor.com.au

a picture of faith

For a baptism this morning we were asked to provide a definition of faith that we felt comfortable with. Fortunately I was given pre-warning and in my reflections I came across this picture again by Richard Stine... It's the front cover of his book, one I picked up second hand some years ago - the image speaks volumes to me!

I find it interesting that there are many books out there explaining faith, but I haven't come across nearly as many picture books tackling the same topic. Hmmm.

Giving - Week 3 Household Covenant

It's week 3 of Lent and topic 3 of the Household Covenant is 'Giving'.

The Household Covenant states 'Giving helps build social relations rather than private capital'. That's an interesting perspective that is contrast to giving as a simple, non-rational, transfer of wealth.

We give to church, to Red Cross (for humanitarian work both in Australia and overseas) and to the Australian Conservation Foundation to help the environment. We also give a lot of our time to friends, family, church and some causes. We have a strong network of friends as a result.

We've probably given to the extent that money and time that could have been invested in career and wealth creation has been forgone. I suppose only time will tell whether that was a sensible decision. It was a compassionate decisions, so perhaps that's enough.

One idea that came out of my review, is that we could give a little less time and try to earn a little more money. That money could be well spent on eradicating extreme poverty within our lifetime. I've started reading books by Jeffrey Sachs (The End of Poverty) and Peter Singer (The Life You Can Save) that strongly suggest that we can eradicate extreme poverty soon at at reasonable cost.

Above all, I'm keen that giving be something that builds relations, not just a voluntary tax.

Hymn of the Big Wheel - week 3

Last night I read through the section of the liturgy called "List of Poverty". It takes about 10 minutes to read aloud and everyone who's spoken to me about it says that the experience is overwhelming and just difficult to get a grasp on what it contains.

That's the point.

Some of what is contained in it is as follows:
Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day.
$50 Billion (USD) is spent on cigarettes in Europe each year.
$9 Billion (USD) is required to provide water and sanitation for all.
(you can read the whole thing from http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats)

Previously I've heard it being read, and last night I read it through for the first time. It was everything that people say it is: overwhelming and difficult. Probably more so when you can actually see the words and numbers on the page.

I've been each week to the Hymn of the Big Wheel and plan to continue doing to. I suspect that as I do, each week the experience will be different, building up to a challenge that I hope won't be overwhelming for me personally, but quite possible to do.

It's easy to get lost in the weight of the enormity of the world's problems. I'm using this time each week to ask the question, "what's my response? what can I do?" For now those are some questions I can manage.

The second Sunday of Lent

A lot of thought went into Part Twelve of Glenferrie Gospel, which went live today. Re-writing and re-contextualising the story of Jesus walking on the water, from John's perspective (Jn 6:16-21), was hard. It was one of the last parts I wrote - having skipped it and left it for a couple of months, almost sacking the episode altogether amidst laboured cries of "why on earth did you put that bit in, John!?!" Scholars were largely unhelpful as they imported the meaning of the story disciphered from the other gospel accounts. Only six verses long, I understand the temptation.

Whether or not I understand it acurately (should such a position be absolutely possible!) I found a point to the story that both seemed outrageously new and exciting, while also reassuringly familiar. In John's account there is no Peter stepping out on the water, no homily about faith and doubt, no unpacking the geographical significance of where they are going and from where. Rather it is about Jesus' friends in the midst of utter fear (darkness, water and storm represented some of the great threats to life in that time). It is about Jesus calming that fear. Is it mostly about Jesus reassurig his friends that they wouldn't face something which he had not - he wasn't (and couldn't) assure them that they wouldn't die, but told them that it wouldn't happen before he first had died.

"Follow me" Jesus said to them. He wasn't interested in them running on ahead without him.

I had breakfast in Rococo on Glenferrie Road this morning, with my younger brother. I noticed across the road a cafe that had changed hands again - possibily the fifth time in the past few years. Its facade now a different color to what I photographed just a couple of weeks ago. I thought about the "death" of various businesses along the street, which has increased over recent months. I looked around at the other people in the cafe, and those on the street. I thought about the people we had seen last night - old school friends and aquaintences. Each have a story, where death and life - death and re-life, are a part.

Jesus says "follow me" and then promises to go before, to leave only to come back, and to walk with us in this following.

Grappling afresh with the fear of the disciples in this part of John's story of Jesus has brought a new awareness to Jesus' promise. Within the next couple of years I hope to be opening up a cafe with friends; should it "die" or shut down, I am reasurred that this isn't something foreign or beyond the experience of Jesus. I am encouraged to engage in the opportunity and face that possibility, rather than hold back from the fear of it. The same can be discovered for many other parts of my life too.

As I've already said, this little 'lesson' from only six verses of the story, seems so new, yet is so familiar.

Debt in the Household Covenant Week 2

Over Lent this year I am assessing our household finances against the topics in the 'Household Covenant'. For week 2 of Lent, the topic is debt.

The Covenant poses the questions - How is debt affecting you? How does debt affect other people? (my paraphrase).

Debt does not affect us overly much. I've been running a small business for a number of years (Mintleaf Studio - professional website design and development in Melbourne) and had made sure I was relatively debt free as part of the overall financial risk. Not everyone in small business does that, I'm sure that many households are greatly in debt to finance a small business that isn't actually very viable.

So, we did it differently. We have no mortgage, a small credit card limit that we pay off most months and a HELP debt (that's a debt to the Commonwealth as they paid for my engineering undergraduate and post-graduate study).

This means we can tighten our belts very effectively and live on less than many of our peers. We can be a little more generous with time and money as we don't have to service debt.

Of course, we may have forgone some wealth-generating investing in order to stay so low in debt; which may not be the best place to be long-term.

We don't know enough about the effects of debt in the world, except that Highly Indebted Poor Countries often face debt that can never be repaid. We've been involved in the Jubilee, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History campaigns for a while and that helped us understand that kind of debt.

We should find out a bit more about how debt affects relatively affluent westerners, as well as how debt can be sustainable in poorer regions of the world. At the moment I couldn't tell you much about the difference between bad and good debts - and I think I ought to know.

Household Covenant Week 1

I'm aiming to go through each of the seven topics in the Household Covenenat over the seven weeks of Lent. The first topic is 'Savings and Investment'. I decided to list out the ways that we save and invest and decide if they are making a positive contribution to a fairer and more sustainable world.

We keep most of our savings in an online bank account. I did a quick check and the bank does do some donations to environmental and children's health causes. Children's health is a pretty safe issue. The causes are located in Australia. Given how many kids die of preventable diseases overseas, that doesn't seem like a priority. Still, if my daughter got sick; I'd certainly feel different about the anmount of care available locally. It's nice to support causes my closest neighbours would identify with as well.

We do have a small amount of money in the 'Kiva' microcredit scheme. The scheme operates out of the US and matches lenders in the developed world to borrowers in the developing world. Borrowers may only borrow a few hundred dollars. Typically there are a good number of lenders, so the loan is spread out across a few lenders. Our money is currently with a woman in India, who has used it to buy a sewing machine. She has successfully paid off most of the loan already. We get a small return on investment, so it's worth doing another loan through the scheme and maybe extending our committment.

We have an online trading account for share market investing and I'm learning about the sharemarket through the ASX public help. I'm aware that there are managed funds for pretty much every investment flavour. I'd be interested to find out if we could go further than a local ethical investment fund (of which there are a number of good ones) and find a fund that helps address a critical need overseas; such as health and education. It's hard to know what needs will be suitable for private investment; especially as we'll need a relatively low risk investment.

After a recent adventure running my own business, we're setting our sights on home ownership. That's a big investment! I'd like to find out more about buying a smaller, more energy efficient, dwelling - maybe renovating a small house over a few years will be better than a large place in the outer suburbs.

So, that's our review in a nutshell. We have a couple of little things we could committ to, otherwise we'll need to do more research before we can turn these wishes into a definite savings and investment plan.

first Sunday of Lent

The first Sunday of Lent... My focus this Lent is my blog Glenferrie Gospel. I was wondering whether I should update it on Sundays - Sundays having the tradition of breaking the "fast" during the Lent period... I decided to rather spend a part of each Sunday deliberately reflecting on the story, the area of Glenferrie where I live near, and my interaction between both... So here goes...

I've always had the impression that as a foreigner to the time and location of the Gospel story that I missed much. If only I knew the customs, smells and sights it would unlock some hidden treasures of meaning for me... My study of John's Gospel over the years has debunked this idea totally. Sure, there's something to gain in some background knowledge, but in John particularly there is a sense that the whole story is set in front of a blank screen. A blue screen, perhaps, waiting for us to project our own context in it... Maybe.

The observation encouraged me to take a greater look at what can be found in my local area. I've since found many layers and facets of life down on Glenferrie Road, things that are lost when I describe the area simply as inner eastern middle-upper class Melbourne (which of course it is, but it also is not).

Who is in need in this area? 

Where are the poor? 

Where are the wealthy? None of these questions lead me to simple answers anymore. 

I'm encouraged to take the second, third and fourth look at what I see around me. I wonder if what I imagine Jesus doing in Glenferrie, the things that would make him happy, are anything near what actually interests or delights him. I wonder, so I go back for the fifth, sixth and seventh look around me...