[Propertalk] Tidbits for sermon on Luke 12:49-56 - V.

[Joe Parrish]

      Brother Ed in Richmond
      August 14, 2010
     





      ...the recent picture on the cover
      of TIME magazine of the Muslim young woman who had
      her nose and ears cut off because she was not
      obedient to her abusive parents-in-law. It was
      not that the law was unjust so much as the
      punishment was unjust. Jesus, taking on himself
      the punishment shows us God's way of dealing with
      injustice.
     

http://www.desperatepreacher.com/bodyii.htm
Page 2
- - - - -

Surfing the Edge of Chaos
A sermon on Luke 12:49-56 by Anne Wilkinson-Hayes, 19 August 2007

Last month some of you are aware that I attended the BWA Council meetings in Accra. 2 weeks before going I was talking to a Liberian woman - Louise - at the Transformation course @ Whitley - she is a deacon at Reservoir and I told her that I was going to Ghana soon. After the session I was teaching, she came up and asked me whether she could come with me. She told me that she had just discovered that her husband, who she thought had been killed in the war in Liberia, was alive and in a refugee camp in Ghana. They had not seen each other for 17 years. 
Through a series of extraordinary events we got her onto our flight and organised her visa in less than 10 days, and I was privileged to witness their re-union, their getting to know each other all over again, and their remarriage all in the space of a week!

When the fighting broke out in Liberia in 1989 Boakai (her husband) had gone north to protect his parents. He got there just as the soldiers arrived in the village and had to watch his father have petrol poured over him and be set alight. He was then forced to sit in a locked room while his mother and three sisters were raped, tortured and killed in the room next to him.  At some stage he escaped and lived in the jungle for many weeks until he finally made it across the border to Sierra Leone. He hoped to wait there until the fighting died down and he could get back to Louise. Instead war broke out in Sierra Leone and he had to continually move around to avoid the violence, eventually being forced into a refugee camp in Guinea Bissau. He had to wait here several years, as he had no money and trying to get through Sierra Leone and Liberia was certain suicide. 

Meanwhile Louise (with her three month old baby and younger brother and sister) escaped east to Ivory Coast and was in a refugee camp there for 12 years hoping that Boakai would come and find them. After a while the Ivory Coast could not cope with the volume of refugees and some were forcibly shifted to Ghana. After 3 years in Ghana Louise was suddenly given a UNHCR visa to come to Australia. She had to conclude that Boakai must be dead by now, but she still held out hope.
Boakai did finally make it to Cote d'Ivoire, but just after Louise moved to Ghana. When he got to Ghana, she had gone to Australia, but news began filtering through to Louise that Boakai was alive and last year they talked on the phone for the first time in 16 years!

I spent the weekend in the refugee camp outside Accra- 20, 000 Liberians are still there, separated from their families. Not allowed to work in Ghana; they survive in the informal economy - living on a pittance - many forced into prostitution, petty crime and the oblivion of drugs and alcohol.
<>
There was a popular book in business circles a few years back called "Surfing the Edge of Chaos". It was written by a group of business people who observed nature as a way of understanding how best we can learn to organise ourselves. One of the key things they saw was that in nature - equilibrium - ie a stable state, is the precursor of death.
Only a system that maintains significant internal variety can withstand the threat of external variety. So the inter-tidal zone is the most fertile context for spontaneous mutation. This is a region swept by extremes - inundation and flood followed by drought and desiccation, and this amazing variety forces the system to the edge of chaos, and  demands that organisms adapt or die.  It is here that fish grew legs, and roots learnt to breathe. It is in the place of extremes that life comes forth.

Businesses and churches have to learn that equilibrium is life-threatening.  If we do not embrace risk and change, if we do not encourage extremes of experience and ideas, we will die. The birthing of peace, and all good things, is forged in the crucible of life lived on the edge of chaos; life that is open to risk and to new possibilities.  

And I think that this is what Jesus is talking about in this passage. 

No wonder that churches are struggling to survive. We do not welcome change. We don't like hearing people we disagree with. We don't move much beyond our comfort zones, so we don't nurture much internal variety, and then we are surprised that we are threatened by changes all around us!

http://www.laughingbird.net/ComingWeeks.html
Sermon 3.

- - - - -
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://stsams.org/pipermail/propertalk_stsams.org/attachments/20100814/6ff93604/attachment.htm>