A CHINESE MAN GETS UP AND GOES

A CHINESE MAN GETS UP AND GOES

I have just seen a delightful eleven minute film, YU MING IS AINM DOM,[1] about a young Chinese man who, bored by his routine job, searches the internet for appealing prospects overseas. He decides on Ireland and, with Chinese determination, sets about learning the language via the internet. There is a clip of him talking to himself in the mirror in Irish while he shaves. He duly takes a plane and lands in Dublin and is immediately puzzled why people cannot understand him.

At the end of his tether he goes into a bar where they look at him quizzically as he perseveres in asking where he can get work, where he can stay. The barman, who happens to be Australian, tries to be helpful though he thinks the man is speaking Chinese.  But salvation is at hand. Leaning on the bar with his glass of Guinness is one of the 1% of Irish people who do speak Irish and he engages the Chinese man in conversation – in Irish. The short film ends with the Chinese visitor employed in the Irish speaking part of the country in a bar himself where he becomes a local celebrity.

It is a simple moving story but it does show up the saying we often hear: Have the courage to be different! You do not have to settle for ‘what everyone does’. A person can strike out on her or his own. If you don’t manage all the research – you’d be excused for thinking they speak Irish in Ireland – it may add to the adventure.

Our pre-Covid 19 world was peer driven. There was a dominant culture which seduced people into its ways.  I am thinking of the rise of fashions, like being wired to gadgets, to which many felt drawn to conform. And, paradoxically, I am thinking of the assertion of individualism, meaning a focus on one’s own life to the exclusion of compassion for others.

Along comes Covid 19 with its ability to penetrate ‘locked doors’ and reach every corner of the planet.  Suddenly our lives are utterly changed.  All predictions of economic growth wither and the opposite of growth is the norm even for the richest societies on earth. Suddenly each of us is faced with questions about our life style, the spontaneous choices we make and the values of which our choices are the expression.

And it all happens at Easter: a time when a seed was sown in the human family that would take centuries, millennia, to mature. No longer was humankind to be swept along by forces beyond its control. Individuals could make decisions that reversed the headlong flow of evil forces which enticed people to slavery and despair. In the first century an Ethiopian (Acts 8:32) ‘urged Philip to get in and sit by his side’ and explain what this new way was all about and, in the last, a young girl, Sophie Scholl, and her friends stood up to Hitler’s tyranny even if it meant losing her life.

Easter is the celebration of the gift of courage to ‘get up and go’. This has to be done by free men and women. The young man from China, who ended up in the West of Ireland, is a parable.  That he comes from China, the place where the virus originated, is coincidental but fitting.  He blundered into a new life where found his true self – perhaps for the first time.

26 April 2020     Easter Sunday 3 A     Acts 2:14, 22-28       1 Pet 1:17-21      Luke 24:13-35      

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[1] https://ifiplayer.ie/yu-ming-is-ainm-dom/

OF GRACE AND GRIEF

Near where I live there is a graveyard ‘in which no one has yet been buried’.  Someone had the idea of investing in the dead and bought a large piece of land and crisscrossed it with pristine roads that would be the joy of our suburbs. That was all some time ago but up to now, as I walk its perimeters, there is no sign of death or burial. I ask a man, who seems like a caretaker, when they would start to bury people. ‘There will soon be a pilot project’, he said. A pilot project?  I continue on my way, baffled, as the images of the mass burials in New York come to mind.

Death is such an enemy! For Paul, reflecting ever deeper on the mystery of God’s death, it is the visible sign of Sin. And Sin, like Death, touches all of us. No one can say they are ‘without sin’ even though we are quick to cast stones. For Paul, the whole world was under the power of Sin and Death, two enemies of human nature personified in Satan or the devil. These days we are remembering that death on Calvary, and what happened afterwards.

Up till then death was the end.  People erected tomb stones to ease their pain and then walked away. But this death changed everything. No human being could overcome the awful virus of Sin and Death that had entered the world.  Only someone from outside humanity could do that and God entered humanity precisely for that purpose. He ‘carried our offences’ and the ‘burden of our guilt was laid on him’. What we celebrate these days is the victory over Sin and Death. They no longer have power over us.

But we need the grace, the life-giving power, of God to make this truth our own.  Otherwise it will pass us by.  We cannot grieve ‘for ourselves or for our children’ unless we have the grace to grieve. Sorrow is a grace, a gift.  We know it can set us on a new track – in our relationships, the way we work and so forth. But we cannot force sorrow.  We have to wait for it.  A therapist has to wait for her patient to understand, to ‘come to their senses’. Sorrow and grief are life-giving. We have only to look at the woman who covered Jesus’ feet with her tears.  She was a new person.  The prodigal son was a far better man after his tears than he was before.

And so we come back to Calvary and the empty tomb. They are not two events but one.  Jesus is the one who ‘passed through (our human misery) … and entered the sanctuary once and for all’ (Hebrews 9:11-12).  It is a decisive moment of universal and eternal meaning. No wonder we will spend the next forty days rejoicing.

19 April 2020               Easter 2 A

Acts 2:42-47                1 Peter 1:3-9                 John 20:19-31

AN EASTER CRISIS

AN EASTER CRISIS

Where is God in all this? Every question is related to the one asking it! So here we can reply to this question with another one: where are you expecting God to be? Are you expecting him to have prevented this? Or are you expecting him to come to our rescue now? As has often been pointed out, a crisis is a moment of decision (from the Greek krino, decide). A cyclone, a drought, an economic collapse – all these are crises in the sense we often use the word, meaning a disaster.  But a crisis is also an opportunity, an opportunity to choose.  

While the world is in mourning for the many who have died and the countless millions whose lives have been affected, many have commented on the beneficial effects of the corona virus pandemic. Suddenly we breathe the clean air of our cities and can hear the birds sing.  Suddenly people are becoming aware of each other and their dependence on each other, not just for the benefits of daily life but even for survival. And people are asking what all this means at a deeper level for the choices we have made as people of the twenty first century.

This year Good Friday will be different, not just for Christians who pause to consider the Lord’s death and who come to venerate his cross, but for everyone. You can see it in the media.  The world’s leaders are putting their grand plans in the ‘PENDING’ tray while they grapple with, what they may see as, this unwelcome intrusion. Maybe it is unwelcome? But it is a moment of truth: a moment when, not only leaders, but all people who have the power to choose (the majority don’t) look hard at the decisions we have made in designing the way we live on our planet.

There are two decisions we have to look at. First there was God’s decision in creating this wonderful world which he planned for us to prepare us for an even more wonderful fullness we can only dimly glimpse at the moment. The second decision was ours. How would we receive this gift? In a word, we messed up. His plan went horribly wrong and, to go back to the question in the first paragraph above, he intervened. He did this in an almost incredible way by coming in the flesh, bearing all our burdens and showing us the way. We, being who we are, rejected him and led him out of the city and killed him. But God, being who he is, remained faithful to his plan and broke out of the tomb and made his purpose clear in a way people could never have grasped before.

The first decision is unalterable. The second still depends on us.  Each year at Easter we are asked, ‘Will you come with me?’ Will you make this world a better place for my brothers and sisters? If you say ‘yes’ and mean it, if you ‘lose your life’ in your decision, you will find it is a far better place for you too.      

12 April 2020              Easter Sunday

Acts 10:34 … 43         Colossians 3:1-4          John 20:1-9