And here is the evidence for all the world to see: laundered money !!!

Nola and I have a deep level of trust.  It is built on a number of foundation pillars.  One is the fact that we have a lot of kilometres behind us and anything that might have happened generally hasn’t. The second great ally in the trust department is that we forget many more things that we did in former times.  We forget what we were cranky about yesterday and forget what one or the other did or didn’t do that annoyed us.  Such are the spoils of the aging process.  The New Testament tells us that we should forgive one another and “not let the sun go down on our anger.”  It could well have said:  “if you live long enough, don’t worry – by sundown you’ll have forgotten it anyway.”  (see Medway 4:17).

This morning something happened that has aroused unexpected suspicions.  I haven’t confronted Nola about is yet, so you might know before she does.  But when I rose before dawn and went to collect some clothing items for the day I turned on the light in the laundry, was about to open the dryer door and saw what I have shown in this photo.  The evidence.  There in full view were two ten dollar notes.

I would never have expected that Nola was running a money-laundering racket, but I now have as explicit evidence as any prosecutor would ever need.  It must have been the left-overs of a late night stash of money.  Who knows where it comes from?  Of course I confiscated the money and as I used it to purchase coffee later on today I was a bit worried that the guy behind the counter might recognise a set of numbers and call the police.  So far I am still at large -  and so is Nola.  We’ll keep you posted.

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day.  It is a day

dreaded by aspiring roses who wish to go on living and unromantic Aussie blokes –  but eagerly anticipated by florists and romantic Aussie females who are hooked up to liberated Aussie blokes (such as myself of course).

As you are probably aware, the origins of St. Valentine are among the most obscure in Catholic tradition and the fourteen or so people of that name who were among the early Christian martyrs have even less to do with the secret and no-so-secret admiration that is hyped up every year by purveyors of chocolates and roses. It seems more likely that it was Geoffrey Chaucer who needed the patronage of a Saint to mobilize the cause of romantic affection among members of the English court sometime during the fourteenth century.  Most of the pictures of Geoffrey don’t give much evidence of the heart of a romantic

As romantics go and on a scale of 1 to 10, I am something of a hybrid.  Somewhere inside of me lives an above-average  romantic. At the same time there is the product of twenty-something years of life as a small town farm-boy and a hundred or so of ancestral tradition of firmly closeted emotions.

These came to the fore this past Valentine’s Day.  I left for the church premises in Belconnen under the cover of darkness as I commonly do.  At about 8:00 am. I received an SMS from Nola with a Valentine’s Day greeting and the invitation to a special dinner she was going to cook at home in honour of our love for each other.

About mid morning I decided to spring into action.  The plan was to go across to the mall, get some roses and a card and take them around to her work place – not far from the church.  When I got outside the building the idea of walking through the mall with a bunch of roses and a card seemed a bit much for the farmer boy to contemplate.  Plan B was to drive to Jamison – a smaller centre with a Florist who was only interested in my money.

The exercise was no trouble for the incurable romantic, but the farm-boy was having some problems.  Standing at the Valentine’s Day card section at the Newsagent was the first challenge.  How do you look through the cards and remain “normal.”  I caught my eyes in the act of looking around to see whether anyone was looking at me (and why in the world would they have been doing THAT).  When I had waded my way through the crude ones and found something that was in my emotional range I then had to muster up my nonchalance to engage with the girl at the counter – hoping like mad that she wouldn’t make any reference to my actions.  Victory !   She just took the money and said nothing.

Then it was the Florist.  This is a different challenge.  Florists are much more competent at dealing with farm-boys who want to be Rudolphs (Valentino – the movie idol of the 1930’s).  The trick is to avoid being shamed into spending a lot of money but not to come across as cheap and nasty.  I have learned how to do this over the years.  First of all, I don’t ask for advice.  I stand back and make a choice from that distance and then move in for a quick purchase with minimum comment.  I found a single rose in a nice long box and made my move – all the time looking around hoping that there would be no familiar faces.

Making the purchase is only half the challenge.   You then have to run the gauntlet from the shop to the car while maintaining that demeanor you have when you have bought a roast from the butcher.  But the farm-boy just knows that everyone is looking.  You know they are summing you up.  The blokes are looking with either covert jealousy or disdain – which come out pretty much the same way.  The women may look with approval but it isn’t the kind of approval that helps.  And, of course, you KNOW this is so without a word being said or without genuine evidence.  It’s one of those things you just KNOW.

In the safety of the car I can then write my lines with romantic abandonment and when I make the presentation to Nola, meeting her as she walked toward the car on her way to do a visit you get to smell the fragrance of  victory and an opportunity to enjoy the spoils of the great Valentine’s Day battle.

And the dinner was fantastic.  Good on you Geoffrey (Chaucer).

Brian

I used to fly small planes here and there across eastern part of Australia.  It was an exciting period of my life where I had the chance to get my PPL (Unrestricted Private Pilot’s License).  It was in the days before GPS and we had to navigate by DR (strictly speaking Ded-reckoning but commonly referred to as “dead reckoning”). The ‘ded’ referred to “deduced” reckoning.  That is, working it out using known information.  It was always a terrific challenge to fly exactly along the track you had made on an aeronautical map. It’s hard to imagine getting lost while you are five or six thousand feet above the ground, but it can happen.  My brother-in-law told us that when he was learning to fly the instructor told him if he was on a cross country flight and became lost and if there was a railway line somewhere close he could fly along the railway line as low as he was allowed to so that he could read the sign at the next railway station.  Railway signs were big enough to be read from fifteen hundred feet above the ground.  It happened that he did lose his bearings on one such training flight.  He saw the railway line, flew slightly to one side of it and got down low enough.  The station he flew past and read the location of happened to be Gunning (my home town).  He hadn’t heard of Gunning before that day but found it on the map and got himself safely back on track.  There was a lovely irony when he laster started dating (and then married my sister) and ended up spending a lot of time on the farm at that location.

Anyway, we would always set out to fly exactly along the track.  Sometimes we would find ourselves a few miles to the left or right and it would require a slight adjustment.  They had a thing called the one-in-sixty rule got you back on track with not too much lost time.

I can readily understand someone getting a few miles off track.  A bit more cross-wind than was forecast was all you needed.  I can’t imagine flying in the complete opposite direction to what was intended.  Everything instrument and everything you could see would scream at you and tell you what was happening.

You have to be a follower of Jesus to find yourself going in completely the opposite direction to the one intended.  You have to belong to the church to be doing that and NOT KNOW ABOUT IT.

One way this happens is when we persist in taking our identity and our reference points from the past.  When we do this we can find ourselves defending and protecting the past rather than using the past as it really is – a stepping stone to the future.  The past is to be remembered, celebrated and appreciated, but never slavishly replicated, worse still, defended.

This was an issue when the Israelites came back from exile.  A little group of passionate believers left the comfort of the rivers of Babylon and the majority of their fellow Jews and risked life and limb trekking through harsh and dangerous country to end up looking at the pile of burnt rocks that was the remains of Jerusalem.  When they tried to rebuild the temple it was hard, there was fierce opposition and it was not going to be anything like the one that had stood there before.

We have to finish what we started.

When Zechariah starts getting visions about  what God wants to do with Jerusalem and the temple there are more surprises.  He gets a vision about the new priesthood.  Joshua and his fellow priests are told that they are neither to reflect nor replicate the past but they are to be a sign of the future.  That future we are told (Zechariah 3) is to do with the coming of the Chosen King (Jesus).

That’s the way it is always meant to be.  Why does it seem impossible for us to appreciate and remember without feeling the need to freeze-frame some moment in history and think that by locking it down we are serving God. Why is it in Christian history that the next reformational movement found their most vicious enemies among the people who were part of the previous most recent reformation movement.  We are subject to a deadly virus that says “Let’s keep it like it is” rather than “let’s become more like Jesus.”  We seem to be able to find a way to justify doing that to the point where we continue to crucify anyone who just may have MORE.   It was true when Jesus was leaving footprints on the earth and it is still true.

Zechariah’s vision involving Joshua and the renewed priesthood was all about the future.  God required them to be a continual sign of the future rather than being custodians of the past. I have a serious suspicion that the “good old days” were not nearly as good as they are sometimes made out to be.  The challenge for us is not to become endlessly faddish or voguish.  The challenge is to use the past and the present as stepping stones to a future that we can discover but never control, one that we can embrace but never possess.  The only measure of it will be its capacity to reflect more of the glory that only belongs to Jesus.

Here are some Power Point slides that sum up last Sunday’s teaching.

FINISH THE UNFINISHED WORK – THE THIRD VISION – Joshua the High Priest