In an age of natural disasters, financial meltdown and political instability, can anything or anyone be truly ‘unshakeable’? In the Gospel of Luke Jesus teaches that those who hear his words and put them into practice will not be shaken. They will be like houses founded on rock, able to withstand the ultimate test. As we will see, however, laying those foundations means digging into some of our most basic assumptions about God, life and ourselves. Jesus’ words shake us to our core, but they gives us true grounds for ‘unshakeable lives’.

Join us as we open Luke Chapters 6 and 7 in the weeks ahead

April 15th  Luke 6:1-11 The Lord of the Sabbath Listen again  Speaker: Nick Colyer

April 22nd  Luke 6:12-26 A World Upside Down Listen again  Speaker: James Macbeth

April 29th Luke 6:27-36 Love Your Enemies Listen again  Speaker: James Macbeth

May 6th Luke 6:37-45 Good Sight. Good Fruit. Listen again   Speaker: Matt Redmond

May 13th Luke 6: 46 – 49 Ready for the Flood. Listen again  Speaker: James Macbeth

May 20th Luke 7:1-17 True Faith Speaker: James Macbeth

May 27th Luke 7:18-35 The Messenger Speaker: Andy Pearce

June 3rd  Luke 7:36-50 An Awkward Dinner Party Speaker: James Macbeth

Prayer is a vital expression of our new life in Christ. Our small groups and Sunday gatherings are marked by prayer for our local teachers, leaders, emergency services personnel and the church.

Four times a year we gather to pray at length for our world, our city and each other. We would love you to join us. There is no pressure to pray out loud. If you can say “Amen” , you are welcome!

Next meeting 7.30pm in the main church building, MONDAY 25th JUNE.

One life. What’s it all about?

Join us for a free course over seven weeks exploring Christianity.

WHEN?   We will be running the next course over seven Wednesday evenings  

Starting Wednesday 9th May, 2012  8pm-9.30pm

 WHERE?   

 19 College St – next to St Bede’s Hall, 21 College St, Drummoyne. Come in the main gates and follow the signs to the left.

This is a great opportunity to discuss matters of faith, ask questions or simply listen as we consider what Jesus said and did. Evenings are deliberately low-key and light refreshments are provided.

If you are interested in attending our next Christianity Explored Course please call James Macbeth on 9181 1653 or email 

 A number of years ago I knew a student minister who drove a taxi part-time in order to pay the bills. He used to end his shift and hand over at 3am to a tiny Cambodian fellow. One night he asked him what he did when he’d get a taxi full of big, drunk Aussies giving him a hard time. The Cambodian man just laughed: “You guys have no idea what ‘a hard time’ is.” It turned out this man had had his entire family shot by the Khmer-Rouge before his eyes. He had fled and, somehow, made his way to Australia. He found this country to be a ‘strange oasis’ of peace and order, but also (and perhaps mercifully) ignorant of what was going on in neighbouring parts of the world.

I often think of that man when I see the footage of the boats towed in to Christmas Island and the faces of those sitting cross-legged on the deck. Where are you from? What has driven you away from home and out onto the water?

I know there are thousands who have waited in line, waded through the interminable beauracracy, and arrived according to the law. I know two Iraqi Christians in particular who came this way, then laboured long to help their family flee the warzone and come out by the right channels. I know it is a godly thing to respect the laws of the land (1 Peter2:13-17) and that illegal immigration draws precious resources away from an already stretched department. I know there will inevitably be those whose refusal to wait for official channels will also be reflected in dishonest dealings with the govenment once here (a long Australian tradition, I might add!). Letting others in before those who’ve applied and waited is not fair. 

And yet, I look at those faces and wonder. What if ‘official channels’ in their country have meant terror, violence and loss? What if they have never known a day when they could trust the authorities or have a voice in politics? If I found myself, Michelle and the kids in the rubble of Afghanistan or Cairo’s ‘city of the dead’, wouldn’t I do all I could to get us out?

I look at those faces and wonder about Jesus’ command to be merciful (Luke 6:36) and that vital fruit of his Spirit within us: compassion (Galatians 5:22,23). This is a readiness to look on the brokenness of another and not walk away or slam the door. It means loving and serving, as Jesus has loved and served us, well beyond any worldy guage of ‘fairness’. Grace isnt fair or even. It’s costly and utterly of God. In Jesus, crucified and risen for us, we see that tension between being generous and just played out in full. 

How this works through a secular government or any of the agencies working in this area, I do not know. There are so many tensions in this matter and I suspect last Tuesday’s Long table will not be the last word spoken on the matter. Yet I know this. I would rather live in a country that shows costly compassion to that Cambodian man, than a nation that slams the door on all because some abuse that grace.

I want to live amongst people who keep asking: Where are you from? What has driven you from your home and out onto the water?

 I’ll leave the last word to Bruce Smith

BOAT PEOPLE

Torn from

their moorings

by tempestuous events,

cast upon open seas

hoping for

distant kindness.

Crowded undernourished

ill-equipped

they float

under God’s eye

menaced by fears.

They drift

in the

shoreless conscience

of our world.

Their frail light

flickers

in ocean’s night.

Within an hour of that victory I was on my feet again, my voice raised in public. This time there was far less tension in my stomach and voice, but a much greater clarity and intent in what I said. I was speaking not as a mere Australian, but as a follower of Jesus Christ and, therefore, a member of the ‘Third Race’. This was a term coined by early Christians to reflect the radical change in identity that had come about because of Jesus. Having been dead in sin, dead to God, they knew what it was to be forgiven and made alive to him because of Jesus’ sacrificial death on their behalf. They had been drawn from every tribe, every strata of society and brought together in churches comprised of a ‘new humanity’ (Ephesians 2: 11-18). It was this that led Paul to write this explosive and wonderful truth in Colossians 3:11

      ‘Here there is no Jew or Greek, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.’

It was this removal of all the dividing walls, this onenss in Christ, that the early Christians were trying to capture when they used the appellation ‘Third Race’. They were still culturally Roman, Egyptian, or Sythian and economically slaves or free, but race and social status no longer mattered when it came to relating to God and each other. I’m sure they still followed their teams (and Pauls’ use of sporting metaphors suggests he loved sport) and even fought for their country in war (when justified), but this did not, in the end, define them. 

An hour after I’d yelled myself hoarse as a member of the Wallaby tribe, I was standing with a group far more varied, yet far more precious. A very different tribe, a sample of that new humanity that Jesus came to create – a  Third race defined by our forgiven state, our love for the Lord and our common access to the heavenly Father.

When the Wallabies run onto Eden park for that semi-final I will be with my precious tribe, celebrating our oneness in Christ, preaching the glorious mystery revealed in Ephesians 3. A couple of us will catch the game later and we will once again emotionally rise and fall with the fortunes of our men in gold. But win or lose, my mind will eventually go back to the earlier meeting, to my most defining tribe, to those of whom this rings eternally true:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” ( Galatians 3)

I’m also conscious of the danger such a home presents – the danger of isolation from other family members and our neighbours. The more rooms we have, the greater the opportunity we have to withdraw into private space, even as a family of five. Paul D, a friend and heritage architect, has observed that the move towards homes with multiple rooms instead of largely common space is a distinctly  modern Western trend. The bigger the lawns and private back-yard, the less likely we are to run into our neighbours.

 The basic link between increased wealth and expanded living space is, of course, an ancient phenomena. I have walked through huge castles and estate homes in Europe with rooms that were never occupied. Last Wednesday we drove past a building site where one of Sydney’s wealthiest men is either demolishing or incorporating neighbouring properties he has bought in order to make them all into one home.

My question is this: Does the desire for more money and a bigger home carry within it a subtle or open desire to withdraw from the the uneven, challenging and costly reality of relationships with others – even others within our own family?

In The Great Divorce, C.S.Lewis’ portrait of Hell is a grey, bland endlessly expanding city  where everone moves further and further away from each other. One of the searing criticisms God made of the wealthy class in Jerusalem was their tendency to create massive private estates at the cost of other’s land and homes. Isaiah 5:8,9 says this:

Woe to you who add house to house, and join field to field, till no space is left and you live alone in the land. The Lord Almighty has declared in my hearing: “Surely the great houses will become desolate, the fine mansions left without occupants….”

This refers to a particular moment in history and God’s particular judgement on their empty religiosity, but John Oswalt makes the brilliant observation on this passage that ‘covetousness is always self-defeating in the final analysis. To acquire is to lose, to give is to get…So the great houses that were built after all the smaller ones were bought and razed will themselves be abandoned and desolate. Nor does there need to be some historical or political upheaval to cause this. How many of the world’s great castles and mansions have been lived in for any appreciable time? They are simply too pretentious to be borne. By their very immensity they reduce their owners to beetles scuttling about inside them. So they shortly become museums, monuments to human acquisitiveness, and thus under the ban of God’. (John N. Oswalt – The Book Of Isaiah, Chapters 1-39, TNICOT, p159)

The larger our context becomes, the more we need to be deliberate about relationships. The more we have, the greater the opportunity for generous, sacrificial engagement with others, not merely private and too often selfish acquisition.  This home is at its best when the people of St Bede’s are all over the front lawn on a Sunday (with a jumping castle!). We love this house most when our lounge room is full and our kitchen table surrounded by friends sharing the Word of God and praying. Then we have a taste of that great home prepared for us, our Father’s house with many rooms, alive with people and rich beyond imagining with Christ centered relationships. John 14:1-4

Dr Richard Selzer tells of performing surgery to remove a tumor and of necessity severing a facial nerve, leaving a young woman’s mouth permanently twisted in palsy: ‘Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together they seem to do well in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry-mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily. The young woman speaks. “Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks. “Yes, it will. It is because the nerve was cut.” She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles. “I like it,” he says. “It’s kind of cute.”….Unmindful, he bends to kiss the crooked mouth, and I, so close, can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.”[i] 

Here is a husband’s sacrificial love in the face of permanent disfigurement. In a more profound way, Jesus has bent down to you and me and gone to that permanently scarring place, the cross, because he loves us so much. The things that others would turn away from, he confronts head on.