FLOURISHING  IN  ALL  WEATHERS

Scripture:  Jeremiah 17: 5-10; Psalm 1; Luke 6: 17-26

Rev Dr John Bodycomb

Last Sunday we started with a text and a headline about a cricketer. Today we start with a text and a headline about a football coach. The text is in Psalm 1 and verse 3. "They are like trees planted by streams of water." So, what was the newspaper headline? The day I began this it was reported that a Mr Sheedy had been hospitalised in Perth. A day at the beach caught him unawares, with heat exhaustion and dehydration. Tut! Tut!

Another hazard in summer is the closed car. The temperature in a parked car can be 20-30 degrees hotter than outside. If the outside temperature is 29^oC (about 82^oF), in ten minutes it can reach 44^oC (112^oF) inside. In twenty minutes it will be 60^oC; that's about 140^o in the old reckoning! The young and the old are particularly at risk in summer. A new-born is about 77 percent water, and an adult male about 60 percent. That means you can literally wither up to a crisp if you dehydrate.

You know, I surmise, that the holy land is pretty dry. About half of it has an annual rainfall averaging 200mm. That's a quarter of the average rainfall in eastern and central Britain; an eighth of western Britain's. In other words, take your Wellies to Wales in the winter! But hence the importance in the holy land of the Jordan river, and the significance of our text. The psalmist says that those who embrace a formula called 'the law', will be like trees planted by streams of water. In other words, will flourish - and since the natives there are evergreens, will flourish all year round. So, what's the secret? It should sell!

After porn, the best selling material is what tells you how to be an integrated, purposeful, successful and happy individual. Some have a veritable library on how to be a fulfilled and flourishing person, so keen are they to snap up the latest and the best. I want us to try to get behind the psalmist's claim, and see what his secret is; how he feels he can say so confidently that we become "like trees planted by streams of water"! I have three headings: The Good Way, The Good Spirit and The Good Life.

I

First, THE GOOD WAY. Psalm 1 is a song about what in Hebrew is called torah. That's commonly rendered as 'law'. "Happy are those . . . whose delight is in the law of the Lord." It shouldn't be. The problem with that word is that it gets to be seen as a body of regulations, some petty and absurd, and all rigidly imposed. Law means 'legalism'. This is how christians have thought of it. I admit that some ultra-orthodox Jews probably reinforce that image today. And some quite probably did so in Jesus' time. But this is to misunderstand what torah means. A better word is 'way' - The Good Way. Some never find it. The German philosopher Schopenhauer, a renowned pessimist, was sitting one day on a park bench, looking utterly miserable. He was asked by a policeman who took him for a homeless man, "Who are you? What are you doing here?" Schopenhauer shook his head and said, "God, I wish I knew!"

In 1897 a French social philosopher called Emile Durkheim created a sensation with a book called "Suicide". This dealt with the rising incidence of suicides in Europe, following the French Revolution. Durkheim didn't deal with suicide as individual pathology. He saw it as reflecting a kind of social disorder. He saw that periodically something catastrophic happens to social order, turning people's world upside down. With the Revolution, time-honoured ways of think-ing and behaving had been upended. Old signposts had gone. The lack of social norms and values to guide people's lives left them not knowing which way was up. Durkheim called this condition 'anomie' - no 'norms'. I owe to my former colleague Nigel Watson the one about that crate on an Indian railway station. It was labelled "Container is incorrectly marked. Top is bottom and bottom is top. To avoid confusion, it should be stored upside down." Not easy!

The implication of this concept called torah is that anomie need not afflict us. There is a good way built into the very nature of reality. The Nangikurrungur people around Daly River speak of 'Nelen Yubu'; that means 'good way'. Buddhism speaks of 'The Noble Eightfold Path'. The Chinese word 'Tao' means 'the way'. The early Christians were called followers of 'the way'.

When I came into faith at nineteen, two books were definitive for me. One was a modern version of the New Testament epistles by J B Phillips; it was called "Letters to Young Churches". The other book that probably affected me permanently was called "The Way". It was written by E Stanley Jones, the great missionary of the 20th century. After studies in law and then theology, Stanley Jones went in 1907 to India, aged 23. He didn't attack other faiths, but set about trying to understand them and learn from them. He tried to disentangle his own faith from its Western dress, and develop a style he called 'indigenization' as he presented it in Indian dress. He organized inter-faith 'round tables' (we didn't say 'dialogue' back then!) and 'ashrams'. That's Sanskrit for a kind of retreat where men and women gather for several days to talk about the spiritual nature of humanity and what the faiths offer.

In 1947 Stanley Jones published "The Way": twelve years in the making, partly ground out of these ashrams. The drift of it is what all major faiths believe; viz., that there is a 'way'. This way is deeper and more mysterious than rules and regs. There will always be attempts at codifying this in relation to particular matters, to suit particular times and cultures. But 'the way' lies behind and beneath all these specific applications. You could say it is embedded in the very nature of reality - rather like the laws of maths and physics. The role of good religion is to help us discover and embrace that 'good way'.

II

Second: THE GOOD SPIRIT. This concept of torah implies also that we are not alone on the good way. It implies that God is in everything and everything is in God. No part of our being or our life is apart from God. I had a chat recently with your minister about challenging essays to set candidates for ministry (if we were running a theological school!) We thought a good assignment would be to reflect theologically on the retirement of Steven Waugh. I'm serious!

I have said previously in this place that the notion of a divinity who dwells in some region called 'heaven' which is somewhere above the clouds or away in space is nonsensical. That this being or entity drops in occasionally to tinker in the process or do something special for a pet person is not what we believe, either. If God is God, then God is with and in everything that happens; with and within everything that has ever happened and ever will happen. Let me tell you how in my judgement another preacher illustrated this rather deftly.

On a short study leave from the university chaplaincy in 1991 I was based in Boston. Not sure where to worship one Sunday, I found that the preacher in Harvard's Memorial Church was Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of "When Bad Things Happen to Good People", and sundry others. It was Memorial Church's annual recognition of Christian Jewish relations. After the service Kushner and I talked, and I asked what it would take to get him to Australia. "I've never been invited," he said. Next day I air-mailed a tape of Kushner's address to Rabbi John Levi and said "We have to get this man." We did too!

The address was called "To what questions is God the answer?" It was a superb message from a good and godly man. Much of it sounded like the Sermon on the Mount. Harold Kushner reminded us that he was a conservative Jew, and that he observed the Jewish dietary laws. With a smile he suggested that some of us were probably thinking, "Poor chap. More than likely mopes around all day asking 'Why doesn't this mean old God let me eat pork? Oh, how I wish I could have a pork chop!' " "I don't think that at all," he said. "I say isn't it wonderful that God cares what I have for lunch!"

What torah says is that God is in everything and everything is in God. God has lunch with you. Kushner would be the last to say that he would burn in hell over a ham sandwich. That is to misunderstand the meaning of torah.

III

So, third point. What the Psalmist is telling us is that when you put these two affirmations - 'a Good Way' and 'a Good Spirit' - together, the flow-on effect is A GOOD LIFE. "Happy are those whose delight is in the good way . . . They are like trees planted by streams of water." Flourishing in all weathers! Let me conclude with a personal story that brought this home to me very graphically.

When all four of our offspring were still living at home, we bought a ten acre bush block on a hillside, not far out of Ballarat. The upper half was thickly wooded. The lower half was cleared and had a large dam, always well filled. In this cleared area, all through the grass, there were masses of seedling native trees. We lifted and transplanted twenty or thirty of these to the rim of the dam, with not an inkling of what might happen. Most of them survived, and within twelve months were growing well.

We took our tent up there from time to time, but did no more than that. When our various activities meant we got up there less and less, we sold the block. About ten years later, my wife and I took a run to the area to see what was happening there. We couldn't believe what we saw on what had been our block. In the middle of that lower part was a towering oasis of native trees, totally surrounding the dam and now thirty or more feet high! That is what proximity to water can do.

Maybe the psalmist was surveying something just like that when he sang his song - that those who have found the good way and walk it with the good spirit will flourish in all weathers!

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A sermon presented by the Rev Dr John Bodycomb at St Aidan's Uniting Church North Balwyn, on 15^th February, 2004.

IT MAY BE REPRODUCED WITH ACKNOWLEDGMENT.