Bayswater Chapel 6.30

Elder: Renate Weber

Pianist : Veronika Rutowics

Text: Psalm 39 Verses 4-7

Welcome!

When one is faced with writing a Service for a special occasion such as tonight, one has a few choices. The biblical text for the occasion is always considered, and often its message alone will be sufficient to allow a thoughtful service to be constructed. It is also always interesting to research the traditions that accompany any special or significant occasion in our calendar or you can use the best from both and try to combine them in some logical way.

I have chosen the latter approach to share with you this evening.

Let’s first sing the Templer hymn, Number 1 in the hymnbook. - Verses 1, 4, 6,9,10.

New Year’s Eve traditionally is a time for reflection on the year just past and a time for considering what the future holds or New Year has in store. Some things we can’t change so if we are pensioners or self funded retirees our finances may be a little out of our hands, but if we are young, ambitious, just finding our niche in our chosen career, it might be a time to spread our wings and seek greater rewards for our skills or take the big step and go into business for our selves. Our health is also some thing, which we can’t control: we can eat right, take our medication should we need it and reduce stress but some illnesses come upon us out of the blue. We can also reflect on relationships. If you are in a marriage or living with a partner how has this year been? Do you want to make things better or are things just perfect, if you are single, is 2004 going to be the year you meet the right person with whom to share life’s journey? May be some of you even lost your partner this year and it is the first New Year’s Eve you are facing with out them by your side. Have you learnt to live alone, because you lost your partner some years ago? Or, is there a new life on the way and you are wondering about a shared future with a new being?

Let’s look at some New Year’s Eve history. New Year’s Eve is known as the Eve of Saint Sylvester (Sylvesterabend) in Austria. Legend has it that Saint Sylvester killed an evil monster dragon called the Leviathan in 1000 AD. 1000 AD was widely predicted to be Judgment Day and Leviathan was supposed to rise, fight the Behemoth and be killed. According to legend, he did rise and was vanquished. Leviathan was a serpent-dragon so large that its multicoloured coils encircled the earth. He had shiny scales and fed on other dragons.

The End of the Year: The Old Year is marked by suspension of normal activities. Abstinence and fasts are completed. The life of the community symbolized by the king ends. Kings are deposed or their position temporarily suspended. In ancient Rome February 24th was considered The Flight of the King. Temporary kings for the season are established in Cambodia, Thailand, Nigeria, Uganda, and British Twelfth Night Parties are held to see the Old Year out.

New Year ceremonies are designed to get rid of the past and to welcome the future.

January is named after the Etruscan word janua, which means door.

Let us look now at the text for the evening.

It comes from Psalm 39 verses 4-7. Depending on which bible you use the words are slightly different.

In the Good New Bible it reads.

"LORD, how long will I live?

When will I die?

Tell me how soon my life will end."

How short you have made my life!

In your sight my lifetime seems nothing.

Indeed every living man is no more than a puff of wind, no more than a shadow.

All he does is for nothing;

He gathers wealth, but doesn’t know who will get it.

What, then, can I hope for Lord?

I put my hope in you."

David wrote the psalm for the musician Jeduthun. It was a very honourable task to be asked to set the words of David to music, possibly because in this way his message would be distributed in song among all the musicians who in their turn presided in the choir. It is the lament of a mortally ill person, who in these verses expresses grief over the brevity of life and yet at the end there is some hope.

The first question asked was: -

We all question our mortality and for most of us it is life’s greatest unknown. Not many of us have our use by date stamped on our bodies. Would it change our approach if we knew when we are due to die? If each of were given our date of death we would approach life differently? Some of us would try to fulfil dreams or goals- we might finish work and go on that trip we had always promised our selves, some of us might mend the broken bridges between family and friends, some of us might get so depressed we decide to stay under our doona and let the fatal day roll on. What would your approach be?

The second statement is: -

The text even suggests that to the Lord, our lives mean nothing; we are just like a puff of wind, no more than a shadow.

In the King James Version of the bible it states, "Behold, thou hast made my days as an handbreadth and my age is as nothing before thee and verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity. Selah".

The handbreadth was the shortest measurement used at that time. It is also quite personal; it is in each of us, we each have an individual hand size, so in each of us is the measure of our own days.

The text was also telling the people that man, in the bigger picture of eternity, is just a puff of wind, no more than a shadow, and yet how "vain" we some times are. How "vain" we all are at times. Don’t we some times think what we are doing is of vital importance? We must get those cookies baked, the windows must be cleaned, and New Year can’t come unless the lawn and garden are perfect. No one makes/does our special talent quite like we can! I can remember as a young teacher being asked by my mother to decorate her "Torte" (decorated cake) for her, using the piping bag filled with whipped cream. She thought I always did that task well. Me in my pride and youthful ignorance didn’t do the task fast enough for my mum and when I was ready to pipe on the cream she had decorated the cake very successfully and put a real dent in my ego!

In the King James Version it was also interesting to read the word "Selah". This is left out of the newer translations. "Selah" was used to make a little pause, stop or stay. The congregation was given time to meditate on what had just been said, the music stopped and David suggested that the people were ready to hear and listen to message from the Lord. It also directed the choir to sing the same verse again, this time with cymbals and louder voices praising the Lord.

"LORD, make me know mine end

and the measure of my days,

What it is that I may know how frail I am

Behold thou hast made my days as an handbreadth

And mine age is nothing before thee.

Verily every man at his best state is altogether vain. Selah.

In the early days of Christianity great emphasis was placed on life after death. Christ died and rose again to forgive us our sins and when we died we too would be forgiven our sins and if we had been righteous, would be asked to sit in heaven at God’s right hand. We would be immortal.

This really challenges our thoughts on the meaning of life. Why do you think you are on earth? Have you thought about it at all? I was reading an English text recently in which it was discussing the thoughts of people who were uncertain about the certainty of life after death. Sure a short life was OK if they are going to live eternally in God’s presence. Life then will be all-good! But what if this is not the case? The question was raised, was life then worth living at all?

I really like the Templer approach to this dilemma!

Our motto tells us to "Set your mind on God’s Kingdom and his justice before everything else" Matt 6:33

"Our faith is the conviction that we, as God’s children, are called upon to establish this Kingdom" we see this as a Kingdom "in the making" Rather than waiting and working for the Kingdom of God in the hereafter, we are actively encouraged to trust in God, love our neighbour and have a responsible approach towards the world. We have a role and part in creating our existence. Our contribution in the here and now is important, our actions today count! If we use Jesus as our teacher and guide, and try to love our neighbour, treat them, as we would like to be treated we are already a long way towards living a rich life.

It is also quite revealing that this "golden rule" is echoed in most of the world’s religions. The Christian message is not exclusive!

Buddhism states:

"Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful."

Judaism affirms "What is hateful to you; do not to your fellow man. That is the entire law, all the rest is commentary"

Islam expresses it this way. "No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself".

And the Baha’i Faith is very similar in that it states, "Blessed is he who preferreth his brother before himself."

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we as a world could live by this golden rule?

In Hebrew times we could imagine this meant a man gathered up his riches, probably his corn before carrying it to the barn, but as he was close to death he did not know who would benefit from it after his passing. We also acquire our riches, we store them up, but as we can’t take them with us when we die. We know not who will gather them up or benefit from our labours. Yet this accumulation of tangible riches is very often our top priority! We as a community are very good at it! How many times were the Templers dispossessed, especially in Palestine? Each time they came back and started over again- each time they succeeded. Who gained from this tenacity? I guess we did as a community and as families. I feel there is still a strong feeling to do the best for our family, and our community, as well as leave a little for our kids. Those of us who are organised also leave a last will and testament to try to enure our riches are distributed according to our wishes.

But at the end of the psalm there is a cry, what can I hope for Lord?

I put my hope in you. I am nothing, the world is nothing, my possessions are nothing so what is the use of life, I put my hope in you!

I do believe we are all part of some thing greater than the just the here and now, as I get older I challenge my childish, youthful ideas. I don’t quite have the blind faith I had. I am now questioning my existence and purpose on this earth. I am still looking for answers! I believe in a God or a strong unknown external force. I talk to this God or force. I ask for guidance, I give thanks. I try to live my life in a "Christian" way on a daily basis. I try to be tolerant of others, I work for the good of the community both at school and in the Temple Society and I try to respect the earth, which we all share.

I go to yoga and enjoy participating in the yoga mudras, which are seals of intent. We always focus first on ourselves, so if it is the mudra for peace or harmony we firstly look inwardly at ourselves. If we are at peace internally then we can move on and think about those closest to us. We can acknowledge any conflicts we may be dealing with or we can celebrate our accord with those around us. The final stage of this three-part process is to project our feelings into the wider world. We send out positive and affirming messages/thoughts to the universe. For me the amazing part is the tranquillity, which descends upon the room during this process. The act of taking time out to perform this reflection or meditation refreshes and revives one and gives me a positive focus.

(I was pleased to reading the Templer Handbook, that we,the Templers also strive towards that three-part harmony of self, close community and the wider world.)

I am also a lot less certain about what happens to our vibratile energy, our soul, our spirit, when we die. I think that the energy is released and rejoins the world’s energy field. I am uncertain whether there is a heaven, but I am not banking on it! I am trying to live my daily life not quite like there is no tomorrow but certainly I am not pushing out "the future" too far! I try to live and enjoy and do good each day, I am much more generous with my worldly possessions, because I learnt from the death’s of several of my family members, possessions can’t go with you and they may out last many generations.

I would like to share this poem with you before I finish. It is called Time and Friends.

Imagine there is a bank of time that issues a large credit to your account each morning.

It carries no balance from day to day.

Every evening it deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to use during the day. What would you do? Draw out every cent of course!

Each of us has such a bank. Its name is TIME

Every morning it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off as lost whatever of this you have failed to invest to good purpose.

It carries over no balance, it allows no over draft. Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the remains of the day.

If you fail to use the day’s deposits the loss is yours.

There is no going back. There is no drawing against the "tomorrow"

You must live in the present on today’s deposits. Invest it so as to get the utmost in health, happiness and success! The clock is running. Make the most of today.

To realise the value of ONE YEAR, ask a student who failed a grade.

To realise the value of ONE MONTH ask a mother who gave birth to a premature baby.

To realise the value of ONE WEEK, ask the editor of a weekly newspaper.

To realise the value of ONE HOUR, as the lovers who are waiting to meet

To realise the value of ONE MINUTE ask the person who has just missed the train

To realise the value of ONE SECOND, ask a person who has just avoided an accident

To realise the value of ONE MILLISECOND, ask the person who won a silver medal at the Olympics

Treasure every moment you have and treasure it more because you shared it with some one special, special enough to spend your time

And remember TIME WAITS FOR NO ONE. Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why it is called the present!

Lets us stand pray if you are able: -

Dear God, Great life force,

On this Sylvester evening let me reflect on the past, dispose of all the negative thoughts and feelings I have gathered over the past year. Let me also reflect on the joyous occasions I have shared and experienced. Add them to my treasury that I may draw strength from them in times of need.

Let positive thoughts go now to those closest to us, be they near or far. Send them love.

To those around us who are experiencing hardship, be it mental, physical, social or financial; provide strength and courage to help them to work through their challenges successfully.

Help me to also tread lightly on this precious planet of ours. Alert me when I do things, which might damage the earth. I wish to contribute positively to ensure my children and grandchildren live on a healthy planet.

Encourage me to be generous with my time, money and labours for those around me who are less fortunate and towards those who might benefit from me just being me. As we move into "janua" open the door to an optimistic, meaningful, healthy, thriving 2004. Amen

A tradition with in the Templer Society is to also acknowledge those who have died in the past year. Read list

As in every life scale there is a balancing factor, so it gives me great pleasure to also read out the births for this year in Australia. Read List

We will finish this evening’s Service with the Blessing. Hymn 108

Let us take this message of peace and blessing with us as we continue on our way to further celebrations or we return to our homes. Happy 2004!

Ich wuensche Euch allen ein gutes Neues Jahr!

Elder Christa Lingham

As Christmas draws nearer the thought goes out to send the CARDS. This always seems to be a daunting task until I actually get to do them. It never takes as long as I think it will.

Life had been somewhat easier this year (but no less busy). For starters I stooped working in Ballarat in February- so apart form a minor hiccup I have been home and working with Rod from home since then. (I went back one day a week from March to July as the person who took on my role, passed away. It took that long to recruit someone else and then train them). It certainly is easier if you are not trying to cram all the home things in to a couple of days and a weekend. Still it took a while to settle in – just having to cook tea most nights took a lot of getting used to, as I haven’t had to do it for years. The boys found it harder to ignore the nagging about homework and music practice when I could do it in person rather than over the phone. Other things like sport practice nights on Thursday were easier as I could stay home and get tea etc organised, ready for when they all roll in the door cold and hungry (well in winter anyway). In summer they are just hot, tired and hungry.

Rod is still as involved with tennis and footy as ever. He really enjoys both immensely. His under 13 footy side he coaches made the Grand Final this year. They lost pretty badly in the Grand Final, but it was a learning experience for all. The club nominated him for the junior coach’s award for the Wimmera – which he won. This gave us the opportunity to enjoy a meal with about 200 other coaches and AFL officials at the Rider room at the MCG – a great experience, especially looking over the MCG at dusk. Although the Wimmera did not fare well at the State coaches level, it was good night. Getting through to the Grand Final in Footy meant we had two weekends free before tennis started for the year. Again, he is organising the Junior coaching and comp for Rupanyup and playing A grade in the afternoons. The club has two teams – neither doing much good at the moment as we try to develop some of the younger members into A grade players. Most of them are better than most of the B grade players, but not quite to A grade. Hopefully we will get them there before many leave town to pursue their studies. Both Marcus and Sam have filled in for

A grade this year as harvest kicked in early and a couple of the older players could not play.

Marcus has just completed year 10. He did both year 11 English and General Maths and seems to have done well in them. He has no real idea about what he wants to do so it was a challenge to pick subjects that give him a broad base (at subject selection time he was thinking about anything from journalism to physiotherapy) and he was interested in. Other wise between football and tennis he keeps fairly busy. He still learnt piano this year but wants to give up lessons next year – a pity as music has always had a calming influence on him. Still he has never been over enthusiastic about practice and this felt that school work was more important.

Both Marcus and Sam were in the school play earlier in the year. Rehearsals kept us busy but on the whole the kids did a good job. The drama teacher wrote the play and as such had a fairly large cast. Marcus was the narrator – fairly long monologues at the start and the end, while Sam had one of the seven lead roles. Sam still reckons he only got it because of his height – his character was a midget – and although he has grown a bit now, at the time he was significantly shorter than the other characters. Height might have been a consideration in which role he got, however he does have a reasonable amount of ability and really enjoys acting. He received numerous compliments on his role

Otherwise, Sam has found Year 8 a mixture of fun and boring. His English teacher applied for, and received a grant to write and a book. So much time was taken with character development and illustrations. He was lucky enough for his depiction of one of the main characters to be chosen. This meant he was then involved in illustration of the book as well as the writing. They obtained the services of couple of graphic designer to help with the design and illustration. The teacher then got the bright idea that you could make a video about the process of creating a book. Sam and two of his mates were chosen to do the filming, editing and narration. There were courses being run through education department on filming and editing which they attended. Sam’s only complaints were a) there is a lot of work involved and he thought his other school work was suffering and b) most of the courses were on Friday’s which meant he missed his two favourite subjects – art and graphics. In reality his school work did not suffer and he learnt uses of some of the graphics programs that his graphics teacher was not to sure of. It was probably of great benefit to him as he wants to work with design in some way.

Gareth, too, got the acting bug. He and friend researched wrote and acted the story of the opening of the first Bendigo Community Bank. This was presented as part of the 5^th birthday celebrations of the Rupanyup-Minyip Bendigo Community Bank. They did an excellent job – it was interesting to see how business processes seemed to a couple of 10 and 11-year-old boys. It was pointed out that they got everything correct and had picked up all major points. Gareth felt like a fraud because he id not lived in Rup when the bank opened and he did not know anything about it previously. I pointed out that he was 5 when the bank opened and even if he had lived in Rup it was doubtful he would have known anything about starting of the bank. He has completed a pretty satisfactory grade 5 and is looking forward to grade 6. He was one of the members of Rod’s grand final team and he had a pretty good footy season. He enjoys tennis and has managed a couple of games in B grade when the teams are extra short. (normally there are too many players in B grade, although we field three teams). He would also like to play cricket, but although we get him to the occasional practice game we certainly don’t get there all the time. Even with both of us home it gets difficult to find time sometimes.

Wishing you a Merry Christmas

Rod and Christa

Bayswater Chapel

Elder: Dr Rolf Beilharz

Introductory music by Krista Imberger, medley of Christmas carols

Welcome to the Christmas service for 2003. I particularly welcome any visitors to the community. You are welcome here. In this service, we will celebrate Christmas with much singing and I hope you will allow yourself to enjoy our choir’s contribution. As befits a celebration, if you feel that the choir, or Krista Imberger on the piano, or all of us singing as a community, deserve it, I won’t mind if you clap. After all, we are celebrating the birth of Jesus. That little child, when grown up, really did bring light into humanity’s darkness 2000 years ago with his wonderful wisdom. Our Templer religion is nothing other than trying to live according to the wisdom that Jesus taught. Let’s express our happiness that Jesus was born and that we have been allowed to grow up in a community which takes the wisdom of Jesus seriously. We may even have the opportunity in our lives to set an example of how people can live in peace and harmony, as Jesus asked his followers to do. Why should the world not become a better place as Jesus had foreseen. We’ll start with the hymn "Dies ist die Nacht" Nr 23 in our hymnbook, and we’ll sing the melody which Krista plays from the hymnbook. All 5 verses.

Hymn: Dies ist die Nacht. Sing all 5 verses

Text: John 10, Verses 22 to 30. Read Text.

This text is clear in what it says. You may believe it as it stands, or you may have a different opinion about who and what Jesus was. Such freedom of interpretation is an important hallmark of the Temple Society. Today I will not pursue this text further. I will rather concentrate on Christmas, the day on which the birth of Jesus is celebrated. Our choir will sing the Christmas story as told in the gospel of Luke. Please excuse the fact that this is sung in German. While our religion can be expressed completely in English, and we do this here in the Australian community, we do value our German heritage and some of this heritage is expressed so beautifully in German that we prefer to use such pieces in their German original.

Second part of choir performance.

These 2 songs both concentrated on the Christ child, Jesus as a baby, and its family. I can see a similarity with concentrating on the babyhood of Jesus and my feelings about what Christmas eve should be, the concentration on grandchildren and children.

My memories of the German type Christmas eve were essentially given to me in the heat of the Australian summer. The reality is that, for the light to be effective, you have to wait quite a long time for it to be dark enough. This waiting seems to take longer under daylight saving even though the sun’s progress did not change when we changed the clocks. There is also great danger in lighting real fires, even if only in candles, in Australia. This association of Christmas time with severe bushfires has made me very cautious as I have grown older.

I am not aware of daylight saving in the internment camp. Interestingly, I have no distinct memory of any Christmas eve in the internment camp. I remember Santa Clauses coming into camp, 4 of them on at least one occasion, one for each of the 4 compounds within the camp. But in the German tradition this happens on St. Nicolas day in early December. I do remember that in 1946, our first Christmas in freedom in Australia, there was a German stranger celebrating with us in Balgowlah, near Manly (at the time we were the Paul Gohl family and the Gustav Beilharz family). The stranger had not experienced a German Christmas eve for many years.

As Vyrna and I had children ourselves, we celebrated Christmas eve with our Beilharz Parents and Christmas day lunch with Vyrna’s family, the Smiths. Quite automatically the children learned the German Christmas carols. On one of the visits to Germany we collected booklets with all the verses of the Christmas carols written out. These booklets still help us to get the verses right, as our grandchildren are now learning them.

This year we celebrated Christmas eve, still in the old-fashioned German way, at Lake Eppalock, where our whole family can get together. This happens in Trinity Grammar School’s outdoor education camp where our son-in-law, Rob, is the outdoor education teacher. We did have to make a small change this time, because our American family, Erica and Tim Christensen, with our youngest grandchild, Forester, had to leave for California on Christmas day. They are at Tullamarine Airport now. That’s why Vyrna isn’t here. So we celebrated Christmas eve last Saturday. The children did not mind, and the celebration itself was wonderful with everyone present.

When we lived at Doncaster, new neighbours moved in behind our back fence. They are Jewish and had come from South Africa. Their children were a little bit younger than our own. As we came to know them they asked whether their children could come to our Christmas eve celebration. So we had a number of lovely Christmas eves with the Jewish neighbour children learning the German Christmas carols. These children have all turned out to be very successful, lovely people and remain great friends.

This little story can remind us that one of the things associated with the birth of the Christ child is "Peace to all people of good will". Sharing our Christmas eves helped make friends out of our neighbours. The spirit of Christmas time, the thanks to God for the birth of Jesus, also leads us to think about the possibility of peace among nations and humanity in general. Sadly, the modern world seems to have great difficulty finding peace.

I will refrain from making any political statement. But I will tell you some truths the are obvious to me, which Jesus, as a teacher, spelled out clearly. Imagine a small village where people know each other, and where they take it for granted that everyone will look after people and the property of others. In such a village every person can trust every other person. In this background there can be lasting peace. Peace can be lost if an individual, openly or secretly, takes more than his fair share. Powerful people can do this openly and they often use more than their fair share selfishly. This leads to resentment in others. If secret misuse of a fair share is discovered, it destroys the trust that people have of others. Resentment and lack of trust destroy peace. Unfortunately, this seems to me to be what has happened in the western civilisation built on Christianity, the world in which we live. Today’s challenge is "How do we get peace back after it has become lost?"

Jesus told us to be completely honest. Yes must mean yes! It does not help to swear by God that you mean yes. Your past behaviour determines whether people believe you. And each individual can strive to live by taking only his or her fair share, and helping others to get their share. Jesus called this attitude loving your neighbour as yourself. The important point is that each individual person must try to do this to achieve peace in his or her immediate neighbourhood. Everyone of us can make a start and contribute in this way to peace within our group. If enough of us do it, we may create peace at least in our community. It may even grow to incorporate a larger region. Let us take this one serious thought with us as we complete our Christmas celebration. May God help us in this.

The choir will now make its third contribution, This is song from Yugoslavia, "Sieh Gottes Gestirn" and then the carol "Fröhliche Weihnacht überall". After these pieces, all of us will sing the carol Silent night, Number 105 in the hymnbook. You can sing in English or German.

I thank the choir for their singing, and Krista Imberger for her music. Our singing of "Silent Night", was wonderful. I thank all of you and have a happy Christmas.

Elder – Hermann R. Uhlherr

Prelude – Veronica Rutowicz (Musician)

Welcome to our Sunday morning service.

We will begin with Hymn No. 126: V.1, 4, 5 – Wie groß ist des Allmächtgen Güte¼

I will read the text of Matthew 6: V. 1-4 from the ‘Revised English Bible’.

To-days text is central in the message given to us by Jesus, and is part of "The Sermon on the Mount". It actually consists of three parts:

Now I will try not to give a lecture or preach to you, but I will try to present my thoughts on the topic, "to think aloud", so to speak.

The first thing I notice is that the three topics deal with our personal conduct or behaviour – our relationships.

Firstly, with our fellow human beings, our neighbours, that is by ‘giving alms’ by helping others.

Secondly, our relationship with God – through our prayers; and thirdly our behaviour towards ourselves, our self discipline – through the example of fasting. So let me start with our topic for to-day by looking at our personal behaviour towards our neighbours, our fellow humans.

For me, giving alms or donations, charitable acts, doing good to others can give one a false sense of righteousness, depending wholly on one’s motivations. It seems obvious that if I ‘do good’ with a lot of advertising, great expectations of praise or admiration, I am only feeding my ego, or may do it because I feel guilt or expect a reward.

So that can hardly be described as ‘doing good’, or even being good, in the sense of what Jesus said. I understand if when in giving alms, or when giving my help, I’m parading my religion, or have ulterior motives, I will certainly not be rewarded by our "Father in heaven", my reward by others will be of much less value to me.

We read we should do good deeds in ‘secret’ for the best result, I’ll come back to this a little later. Carrying on with thinking aloud – it seems to me that our motives, even for our best deeds and with our best intentions, are more often than not mixed; and our thoughts of somebody’s approval or even admiration, spoil our good deeds.

So one of Jesus’ requirements is to be absolutely selfless, sincere without any ulterior motive, when we do something for or give something to others. My understanding is that under ‘giving alms’ we can include giving our help, giving of ourselves, giving our love and energy, and this fits into the great twin commandment we all know.

I’ll pause here for a moment and consider what I’ve said up to now. It is not really anything new, I know that, yet I often find it extremely difficult to fulfil the conditions, I still catch myself having ulterior motives, even if they are quite innocent and not at all malicious.

As far as I understand, in the "Sermon on the Mount", Jesus addresses in the first instance his disciples, his closest followers, whom one would expect not only to understand Jesus, but to practise what he saw as a requirement of people, yet they must have struggled so it is not all that surprising if ‘normal’ people of to-day, also struggle with following his principles. Another point comes to mind; in to-day’s secular culture, people’s intuitive responses are often not such a reliable guide to morality.

It seems to me we are more often than not suspicious of people doing exceptional good and seemingly selfless deeds.

We question their motives – was it to bolster their ego, was it for acknowledgement, was it because of guilt? All these cynical questions do not arise if the good deed was done ‘in secret’, when no one but the doer himself knows. On the other hand, how many thousands (or millions?) actually do good quietly without other people knowing? They will only have to question themselves regarding their motives.

Still how often are we tempted to be proud of or feel good about our attempts at ‘being good’ and declaring it to others? There is the question of our motive again. This applies to giving and equally to our prayers as well as to our self-discipline.

True goodness does not require us to be intolerant of other people doing the incorrect, wrong or bad deed. You know – the thoughts of being better in doing good deeds than others. If anything – for one to be truly good requires us to be in the first instance intolerant of our own bad or incorrect deeds. We need to beware of being hypocrites. I try to think of that when I catch myself being critical of others.

So for me it seems infinitely better to identify with and try to follow a model such as Jesus, but without making an idol of such a person or putting them on a pedestal.

If we look closely, we may glimpse some hidden possibilities of real goodness in all of us; especially if we acknowledge that we too are touched by the divine power.

We shouldn’t need an audience to demonstrate our goodness; don’t we realise that God doesn’t look at us from outside in what we do? He is much closer to us than we may think. He is in our very heart, mind and soul.

So when I look at the part of to-day’s passage where it says – "But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing; your good deed must be secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you." – I am puzzled.

In the first instance, my thoughts are: all right, I understand I am not to advertise my good deeds and not to have ulterior motives in expecting gratitude or rewards, is this what is emphasised in saying it must be secret – perhaps only known to God, who is described as ‘your Father’ in the text? The more I think about it, the more I begin to realise that a belief in God, and having a concept about God seems to be called for here, to fully appreciate the message.

I am wondering, if I were asked, how would I explain my thoughts, my beliefs? So thinking aloud again I shall endeavour to put my personal thoughts into words.

Everything, and I mean every thing, is linked through and by creation, and we humans are certainly connected and affected either directly or indirectly, with our environment with earth in general, for example. That means we are not immune to or isolated from what goes on around us: and we are definitely not really different from other life forms, in the sense, that also we can’t do what we like without there being consequences from our actions for us and others. In my view we are different only in that we have been given a conscience and a free will in order to choose what we think and what we do in the course of our life.

I do, however, sense that many of us ask ourselves: what is the meaning of existence, our existence, my existence? This is the area where we just don’t really know, have no proof, and can only speculate. In this area religion becomes a useful tool, and an ordinary person like myself, interested and searching, am often disappointed by what passes for Christian religion to-day; that is what is written and preached about religion by the mainstream churches; I do not find this helpful at all in answering the really difficult questions. Well, we may ask: does the Temple Society provide us with answers? We may not always listen or like what we hear, but my personal view is a definite, if qualified, yes. Our Templer motto actually expresses it very nicely and leads us to the basis of Jesus’ message – and that is, in my eyes what true Christian religion is about.

Jesus expressed the truth about us, our existence, our relationship with our fellow humans and environment and thus also with God, numerous times in the New Testament; whether he personally said each and every word or expressed only the basic thoughts, is of no real concern to me.

Jesus never set himself up as an authority; it was those who listened to him who reported that he spoke with authority.

So coming back to our text,why in order to be of real value have our good deeds and actions to be done in secret?

Here I clearly understand the ‘real value’ to be for the individual, for ourselves as the doers.

Therefore knowing ourselves, that is facing and dealing with our strengths and weaknesses honestly, is a first step, and critical on the path towards our very personal spiritual growth. Just as choosing to be good is only the first step and is not enough to produce goodness, to actually be good.

Unfortunately, the word ‘ spritual’ is a big hurdle for many people to accept, they feel uncomfortable with it. It has nothing to do with ‘Spiritualism’ with séances, or ouija boards or mediums; Spirituality to-day suggests for many a sense of the divine, without the theology and dogmas of orthodox religion.

Here I’m thinking aloud again – I can accept that everything is part of creation, I am part of creation, and hence the influence of the divine – of God, is part of me and I am part of it; we sometimes express this by saying God is within us and amongst us. The divine energy is present in all of creation. The spiritual force existing and working in me is beyond the full grasp of my intellect, my mind; however I think it is reflected through my conscience. Jesus tried to bring the concept of God closer to us through the image of the "heavenly father".

People differ in their spiritual development, and in the paths they take towards it; however, we all have the chance, not to say duty, to participate in our spiritual growth and development in and during our lives.

There is a reality, in which our thoughts, intentions and actions are of importance and do have an effect.

The German Poet - Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach once said: "One must do good, so that it exists in the world."

So by doing good as stated by Jesus, each of us can add a little to the total sum of goodness in the world, and we all will be the better for it. Do I monitor if my thoughts and attitudes are positive – are good, because they determine what I ‘want’ to happen, but also negatively what I don’t want to happen. Remember we can choose our thoughts and set our mind on the higher perspective and create a better reality. You may think, why should that be possible?

Through our conscience we are enabled and even destined to achieve goodness, to grow into spiritually more attuned, harmonious humans. Doing this ‘secretly’ is, I think, not at all difficult, if we accept that the higher power of God, the divine part of our very being, is always with us, so there are no secret deeds – good or bad, that we can carry our unimpeded. Deep down we will always be conscious of what we are doing, and why we are doing it, and I personally feel many will know the consequences their actions are likely to have if they are honest with themselves and listen to the little inner voice of their conscience.

I think it is true to say the aim of the Temple Society has always been and still is to further the spiritual growth of humans, however, the method of realising this aim has always been and still is, very practical and realistic. With our relatively broad religious freedom, and our strong reliance on individual conscience, all of us have full control over our own personal development. We have that within a supportive group, a supportive community. So if we change our attitude first, others who may be receptive, could then be influenced by our example. Jesus essentially expressed a new morality for our personal life – a morality of positive fulfilment illustrated by various examples.

To-days example deals with our spiritual growth through genuine selfless deeds, so that, if we develop more spiritually, we fulfil the true purpose of our existence here.

I said before that I think that Jesus intended "the Sermon on the Mount" in the first instance for his disciples, the people who had been with him for some time and whom he had tutored continuously. Jesus’ teaching represented a higher morality than what was preached by others at the time, for instance by the Pharisees, and required a higher consciousness to be fully understood. His disciples were most likely the main core of people who were ready spiritually, to comprehend Jesus’ message. The warning against doing good very openly, publicly and with self promotion, can only really be avoided if we question and can control our motivation, as well as keep our ego in check. Realising this enables compassion – divine love towards our brothers, our fellow human beings to grow in us, our reward being our coming closer to our life’s purpose.

In ‘the Sermon on the Mount’, Jesus was not addressing a world which was perfect, but rather a world where there seemed to be deep personal and spiritual needs, not unlike to-day. Hypocrisy was practised in the guise of piety, where people were generally preoccupied with their personal standing, their egos and material cares, and were perhaps anxious about the future, in the process condeming each other as well as God; sounds a little familiar does it not?

I think as people get older many are only too aware that all material and financial security is provisional, conditional and not guaranteed, but uncertain. I believe that the thinking, responsible person to-day realizes that it is better to be guided by something higher and more meaningful, than the rather shallow opinions of the politicians or the popular opinion of the general public expressed in the media.

While the spiritual growth that Jesus asks and stands for, may not be attainable without conscious effort, and may often be quite incompatible with our general attitude and lifestyle of today; that does not mean that we cannot embark on the path to enlightenment at all! Our progress may be more modest, our present lifestyle may need some adjusting, but with the right attitude we will be making progress, we will be going not backwards, but forwards and growing. Here it is reassuring to me to note that this individual effort for growth can never come too early or, importantly, too late in our life, we are never too young or too old to take Jesus’ teaching seriously, to grow and develop more compassion, as expressed in the twin commandment of love.

The spirit of God dwells in us. We have it within us to use the powers given to us for good, by showing concern and compassion for those around us in ordinary, everyday situations.

We are responsible for what we think and do, and what we do and say does make a difference!

After all, have we not been given the gift of life, of love, the gift of thought and speech, to find and recognize the harmony and value in the message of Jesus, concerning the close connection between God and man – to find his Kingdom within us and around us?

We are encouraged to develop our spiritual side as fully as we possibly can, by changing our ways, our thoughts and actions where necessary, by using our God-given powers and talents for good; by improving our behaviour to one another, by helping our fellow humans, our brothers and sisters, in their striving towards a more complete and fulfilled life. We may find it a difficult, and at times perhaps an uncomfortable but not an impossible task for each one of us to fulfil!

Lords Prayer

Hymn No 58: V.1 & 2 – Lass dir durch keine Lehre¼ (Erich Bergmann)

Community Chapel Bayswater

7^th September 2003 at 5.00 p.m.

Sing No. 126 – Wie groß ist¼ all verses.

Hymn: Trachtet, ruft mit ernstem Worte ...

Welcome to this service for the Central Victorian country group of Templers and their friends. I like talking to country Templers as their services do not yet have a fixed form, and because we have the possibility of discussing the topics dealt with, either formally, or over lunch.

Our text for today is from the gospel of John: Chapter 3, v. 1 - 12. The verses just after this text make clearer what I want to say, so I’ll read to verse 17. Read text.

I have never liked the gospel of John since my time at Sydney University where I had taken some interest in Student Christian societies. The "Christian" students in these societies were always quoting from the gospel of John, in the same vein as what I read in the last few verses. "… the Son of man must be lifted up, in order that everyone who has faith may in him have eternal life. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that everyone who has faith in him may not perish but have everlasting life. It was not to judge the world that God sent his Son into the world, but that through him the world might be saved." Using such passages they told me that to be a Christian and to be saved, I needed to believe in Jesus and that he died for me. This seemed to me rather weak because it did not mean that I had to change anything in my behaviour, like helping or treating others with respect, as long as I had faith that Jesus had died for me. Eternal life did not appeal to me either. The Templer emphasis on the teachings of Jesus, seemed much clearer. We humans should change from being selfish to becoming better persons, and thus contribute to making the present world a better place for all,. I could see that if we people did sincerely change our behaviour, real improvement might occur.

Later I came see a pattern of development in the New Testament Gospels from not very miraculous stories about Jesus in the older manuscripts, to more and more miraculous stories in the manuscripts written later on. You can check this yourselves. For example, the oldest gospel, Mark, knows nothing about a virgin birth, or in fact any details about the birth, of Jesus. Matthew and Luke provide pedigrees, or family trees, showing that Jesus descended from King David in an unbroken line, and many details about the birth of Jesus, including that Jesus was born not from a human father, but from the Holy Spirit, God himself. The details differ between the two gospels. The gospel of John is different again. Here Jesus was the word, or the wisdom, which has existed with God from the beginning of time. It became flesh and was born, this time without need for any birth details, for the purpose of saving the world and its instinctively sinful people. To me it seems that as time passed the story about Jesus changed and details that later became significant to the faith about Jesus were included as they became important to the developing story.

I believe that historically there was a preacher, called Jesus, who had a great effect through what he taught. We Templers have expressed this element that Jesus was a human in our golden book under the heading Beliefs. Read from b) Jesus.

To me it seems that this probability that Jesus was a human like we are was later turned into a story about a more than human being who became part of a formula for God’s great rescue plan for humanity. The rescue plan goes like this. If you believe that Jesus, who was without sin because he came directly from God, died on the cross as a sacrifice for all of us, who are inherently sinful, then you will be saved. That seems to be the dogmatic position of mainline Christianity today. There is little direct support for this in Mark. The support grows stronger as you move through Matthew and Luke to John. For me, Jesus, the ordinary human teacher, is infinitely better than the superhuman alternative, because then we can at least try to become like him. By definition we can’t become like a superhuman being. I am also fully aware that all people now explain things very differently from what people thought 2000 years ago. Most of us are now skeptical about miracles.

Over the years I had heard Felix Haar, a previous regional head of the TSA and a thoughtful teacher of young Templers in their confirmation classes, say that he likes the gospel of John best. At a recent community discussion at Bentleigh after Renate Beilharz’ Saal, Felix explained what he means. He sees all the gospels as teachings for the early Christians. There is much symbolism in the words employed in these teachings and we are probably not recognising this symbolism properly. While the first three gospels are mixtures of teachings from several sources, the gospel of John is a single-author piece of concise teaching. The time trend shown in the gospels is still there. John’s gospel, at the end of the trend, is the best and most concise symbolic description. Felix is saying that the details the gospels bring are not to be understood as true in nature, as we tend to do automatically. So I’ll have to read this gospel again, to check up on just how this gospel might be understood symbolically. I should put aside the miracles as symbols showing how great a person Jesus is. We don’t need to believe that supernatural things occurred in those days. Descriptions of miracles were used to emphasise how important a particular person was. Please note that I have here used words as I use them to tell you how Felix thinks. It is possible that I have not expressed his thinking well.

In the Modern English bible, worked on by many scholars, some very interesting subtle changes can put a different meaning on the passages my former student friends quoted at me. Take the last verse I read: "It was not to judge the world that God sent his Son into the world, but that through him the world might be saved."

Could that not mean "If people really listened to what Jesus taught, and then did as he asked us to do, change our behaviour radically, the world could become a better place for all humanity and the rest of life." Can you picture a human society where cooperation, love and respect are preferred over always competing with others? That can be how Jesus can save us from our sins, which are nothing other than the problems we continually make for ourselves because we are naturally selfish.

I have noticed that, in science, and in the modern world generally, we often focus above all on conflict. Our newspapers sell well when they tell us about murders and other acts of violence. They even present ordinary happenings as if the were a power struggle between the people involved. We describe nature and evolution as though animals were always fighting, for example with rivals over females to mate with. Animals compete, both within and between species. Evolution is often described as competition to the death (nature red in tooth and claw). Well, I now know that if you look at the bigger picture, there is actually very much harmony, and mutual benefit between individuals and between different species. Flowers being pollinated by insects is just one obvious example, which is multiplied many times over. And in evolution it does not have to be the warriors whose descendants inherit the earth. It might well be that, while the warriors continue to kill each other, those who look after each other peacefully, who have stable cooperative and friendly societies will also have many descendants in future generations. Did not Jesus say something like "The meek will inherit the earth"?

Life (you can call it God’s Creation) is truly a wonderful thing. We should enjoy its many positive aspects, without always concentrating on its violence. We humans have the choice to be cooperative with other humans and the rest of life. We will be happier and much more relaxed if we do that.

I want to finish this talk by telling you a story, which had a great emotional effect on me. I recently came back from a conference in the USA, at an Airforce base in San Antonio, Texas. The conference was about breeding programs for working dogs. My interest in working dogs is related to the fact that my doctoral students in the past have created the breeding programs used by Australia’s major Guide Dog producer, Guide Dogs Victoria, and by the Australian Customs Service for breeding their drug detector dogs. There is at present a huge unsatisfied demand for good bomb detector dogs. One can use good drug detector dogs to find bombs, or any other kind of object, as long as you teach the dogs the particular odour of the substance to be found.

The story made me see in a different way something I had long taken for granted. At the conference dinner we were going to hear from a blind man who had survived the terror of planes flying into the World Trade Centre in New York because his guide dog had led him down to safety from the 87^th floor.

The blind man had been a successful sales manager of a large company. He was having dinner with us and his guide dog was lying quietly under the table next to him. He already had three guide dogs before the present one and was well used to how guide dog and blind person work together as a cooperative team. He lived in New Jersey, very close to New York and he and his guide dog took the subway train to Manhattan to get to work and home. His office was on floor 87 in Tower Number 1. There was a floor at about 75 to which the lift went express and from there, he took another lift to floor 87. A sighted coworker, I think he said his name was Dave, was in the office with him and they had just said good bye to their last client when they felt a shock in the building. At first they thought "earthquake" and they expected the building to rock back and forth. The building kept on moving in the same direction and they wondered whether it would ever stop, or just fall over sideways. Eventually it stopped and moved slowly back again. Clearly something very unusual had happened . Dave saw outside the window smoke from above and they realised they had to evacuate. He called his dog and both men left the office and set out towards the steps. There were injured people coming down the stairs in panic. They thought there must have been a terrible explosion in the building and started going sown.

At this stage the blind man realised that, whatever the reason for the panic, he had a responsibility. In the dog-person team it is the person’s role to give clear commands to the dog and the dog’s job to make sure the commands are carried out safely. He also realised that, if he panicked, it might make the dog’s job impossible. So he calmed himself, and amid the general panic he quietly ordered the dog to walk down the stairs. His coworker Dave had a much bigger problem. He, like all the others, was in a panic and imagined all sorts of horrible fates. Eventually Dave controlled himself by calling out to everyone the floor level they had reached and in this way marked the progress they had made. This helped to take his mind off the panic.

In the meantime the blind man, with his particular handicap of not being able to see and focussing fully on his immediate job of giving his dog the necessary commands, became a source of calm for the panicking people rushing down the steps. The blind man and his dog steadied the chaos and provided some order into the progress of the people moving down those steps. People in need were helped by others. At a level just below 20, there was a request for people to make room. Teams of firemen in their heavy gear were coming up. The firemen asked did anyone need help, and the answer was, "no we’re managing OK". They reached the ground and found their normal route to the subway was blocked off by police. I think that by this time Dave had seen a plane crashing into Tower 2. They took a different route and were overcome by a huge cloud of dust, which forced them to take shelter as best they could. Until now people had been helpful to each other. From this point on people just ran, each trying to get as far away as possible. With the dust clearing Dave said "There is no longer any building where Tower 2 had been". They walked on to another subway station and Dave saw their own Tower 1 collapsing, with its following dust cloud from which they sheltered in the subway station.

In hindsight we know that those firemen, rushing up the stairs in their heavy gear were running to their death. The blind man said to us "I’m not going to ask you to stand for a minute’s silence. Rather, I want you to clap to acknowledge that they did their job regardless of the consequences." You can just imagine the rousing clap that he listeners gave.

The blind man had telephoned his wife that he and Dave were safe and that he would now go home by the subway. But traffic was in chaos and it took a long time before he arrived at his station and his wife could pick him up. Some neighbour hearing this story rang one of the major papers and the story was published. Since then this blind man has been telling this story over and over gain. He told us that, as long as there is a chance that guide dog schools will get support because of his story, he will continue to tell it.

What I learned is that it was not the dog that was the hero. It was the handicapped blind man, taking his responsibility for the team of dog and himself, which had the wonderful effect. A blind man in his small world, concentrating on his dog, became an island of calm, which steadied a mass of people in panic and allowed an orderly progression to survival to take place down this awfully long set of stairs. I had never thought of blind people in this way.

We can generalise from this story. We do not have to see life and people around us as always struggling and competing. When a blind man can calm a crowd, we might also, by acting peacefully and cooperatively, contribute to changing a situation for the better. We do not have to always assume that others will attack us. Others also want peace and quiet. Our example of calm and peace might help towards this. And I, personally, don’t have to be distracted by the impossible miracles in biblical stories. There are other ways of interpreting very old writings so as to get closer to the proper understanding of the message the authors were trying to convey.

Let’s finish with the Lord’s prayer.

Our Father in heaven,

Hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come,

Your will be done on earth as in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread.

Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.

Lead us when in temptation and deliver us from evil.

For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours forever.

Amen.

21^st September 2003, Bentleigh Hall, 10.15am
Elder: Renate Beilharz
Pianist: Veronika Rutowicz

Welcome to today’s Sunday Service. The theme I want to share with you today is that of faith, trust and hope. I hope my opinions will give you food for thought. There is opportunity at the end of today’s service for discussions to take place on the issues raised in the service.

We will start by singing song number 113, the beautiful hymn of trust and faith called The Lords’ my shepherd. All three verses.

Today’s Bible text, according to the new set of Tables of lessons, comes from Mark chapter 6. This chapter recounts the teaching of Jesus and his disciples in his home town, and their travels in the region around and north of the Sea of Galilee. We are told of Jesus teaching to a large crowd that gathered in a remote spot near the sea, and how he fed the crowd of five thousand with five loaves and two fish. Verses 45-52 take up the story.

Mark 6:45-52

This story of Jesus walking on water is told in three of the four gospels, with few differences between each of the accounts. First of all lets do a little bit of Bible-study, and put the actions of Jesus and his disciples into a wider context.

Soon after the feeding of the crowd, Jesus compelled, the disciples to get into the boat and go on ahead to Bethsaida, on the north-east shore of the Sea of Galilee. This may seem strange, but if we look at the gospel of John’s account of the incident we find an explanation. John tells that after the feeding of the five thousand, the crowd wished to come and to make him a king by force. Sentiment in Palestine at that time was volatile, and a revolution could easily have been ignited. It was a dangerous situation, and the disciples might well have complicated it, for they, too, were thinking of Jesus in terms of earthly power. Jesus sent his disciples away because it was a situation he could best deal with alone and he didn’t want them to be involved.

After Jesus has dispersed the crowd, he went up a hill to pray, by himself; by this time night had come. The disciples were still on the sea, and while it isn’t clear in which direction the disciples were heading, either still towards Bethsaida (east) or coming back (west), they were not making any headway, rowing into the wind. Apparently the Sea of Galilee is notorious for its sudden storms, and the disciples were caught in one. This is where, in all three accounts of the event, Jesus came to them ‘walking on water’ when he saw that they were in trouble.

I think we have all seen the pictures drawn in Children’s Bibles, of Jesus walking on water. The image of a physical human being walking on water is a powerful one. And, of course, as a result, it has been used in advertising. The one that springs into mind is where the man is fishing on a lake, and he jumps out of the boat, walking on water back to his cabin, where I think there is some great food awaiting him. I’m not sure of the product being advertised – but the walking on water image is clear in my mind.

Angel and God movies have also used the walking on water image. The recent movie ‘Bruce Almighty’ had Jim Carey, as Bruce, walking on water. I can cope with spiritual beings walking on water, because the interaction between physical and spiritual world has its own laws. Where I have trouble is when I am told that the physical, still human, Jesus walked on water. That would be a miracle in my mind. But I am always a bit sceptical about miracles, and am obviously not the only one. Many people look for logical explanations of miracles. Having a look at the various accounts of the life of Jesus, I have found many and varied explanations for why it was said that Jesus ‘walked on water’, which I would like the opportunity to explain to you. I am aware, that this is really only an academic exercise, and has no real bearing on the significance of the story, but I found it fun and fascinating, and hope you do too.

One commentator went back to the original Greek language and found that the following phrases were interchangeable: ‘walking over the sea’, ‘walking towards the sea’ and ‘to walk about the sea’ are very similar in Greek. So as far as the Greek goes there is a possible interpretation that Jesus did not actually perform the miracle of walk on water, rather walked towards the sea to help the disciples who may have been close to the northern shore at this time. A nice explanation of the miracle.

A different interpretation of the words was done by Barbara Thiering, in her controversial book, ‘Jesus the man’. She said the phrase ‘walking on water’ refers to the use of jetties by priests to get into boats, instead of wading through the shallows like the ordinary person. She put this event into the context of Jesus establishing himself as a priest in the Jewish hierarchy.

There was a television documentary aired in the 1980s called ‘Jesus: the evidence’, which put forward the theory that Jesus had the highly developed gift of hypnosis. This was what enabled him to heal people, and perform the other miracles mentioned in the Bible, through mass hypnosis. Is this what he did then, hypnotise the disciples into believing that he was walking on water?

Or did Jesus have the spiritual power to put himself above the physical elements and laws of physics, and actually walk on water? What do you think? A topic for an interesting discussion.

Anyway, whether Jesus actually walked on water or not, the story in all three gospels goes on to say that the disciples were terrified when they saw him, with Mark mentioning that they thought he was a ghost. In all accounts, Jesus had to identify himself to the disciples in the boat, telling them to have courage and not to be afraid. With these words came a calming of the wind or storm.

This was not the first time Jesus calmed a storm, according to the New Testament. Once again on the Sea of Galilee, Jesus and his disciples are caught in a storm, Mark tells it like this in chapter 4:

Mark Chapter 4, verses 39-41

It was important to Mark, or who ever wrote the gospel according to Mark, to depict Jesus as having a divine nature, being directly linked to God. In the context of the period, all natural happenings were ascribed to supernatural beings. God was responsible for the good things, while Satan and his demons, were responsible for the ‘bad’ events such as illness and storms. For Mark to make the point clearly, that Jesus was divine and from God, he had to be shown to have power over the elements, over Satan and the demons. So Jesus, was able to perform miracles, such as calming the storm, and demonstrate his faith and his direct connection to God.

"Have you still no faith?" Jesus asked his disciples. Faith in what? In Jesus’ ability to calm the physical storm on the Sea of Galilee? Or is it a faith in something deeper, more relevant to all humans, whether in 1^st Century Palestine or 21^st Century Australia? Does Jesus’ ability to calm the storms in the disciples’ lives have meaning for us today?

Of course, as in most Bible stories, we can get a glimpse of a divine message for us all, that we can carry with us in our day to day lives. This is the message as prepared by William Barklay in his Daily Study Bible.

"Whatever our interpretation of the walking on water, or the ability to calm storms, the significance of the story is clear: In the hour of the disciple’s need, Jesus came to them. When the wind was contrary and life was a struggle, Jesus was there to help. No sooner had a need arisen, than Jesus was there to help and save.

In life the wind is often contrary. There are times when we are up against it and life is a desperate struggle with ourselves, with our circumstances, with our temptations, with our sorrows, with our decisions. We don’t need to have a miracle to help us. At such a time, no one needs to struggle on alone, for Jesus comes to him across the storms of life, with hand stretched out to save, and with his calm clear voice, bidding us take heart and have no fear.

It does not really matter how we take this incident; it is in any event far more than the story of what Jesus once did in a storm in far off Palestine; it is the sign and the symbol of what he always does for his people, when the wind is contrary and we are in danger of being overwhelmed by the storms of life." End quote.

William Barklay’s explanation reads beautifully, with a faith and trust in Jesus that shines through.

Let us sing Befiehl du deine Wege Commit whatever grieves you. This traditional hymn is about faith and trust in God, based on a psalm from the Old Testament. Song number 15, first four verses.

I would like to ask, who is Jesus, and how do we experience Jesus’ love and comfort? In Mark’s gospel, the disciples, who supposedly knew him as well as any other, asked each other, as we heard before, ‘Who can this be?’. And we heard in today’s text the statement ‘…they were utterly astounded, for they had not understood…’ If the disciples had trouble defining and understanding Jesus, it is quite understandable that I ask this question two thousand years later.

I know how I perceive Jesus and his role in my life at the moment, and you will have your own ideas and beliefs. I’d also be interested in hearing how my ideas fit in with those of others.

For me Jesus is not a human-like figure seated in heaven on the right side of God, who I can petition to help me in my distress. Also, I find it difficult when people say they have ‘taken Jesus into their lives’. It sounds like it is just a step to be taken, you can tick it off your list of things to do in life, and you have it made, you’ve got salvation.

Jesus, and all he represents, is so much more than that. Jesus’ actions 2000 years ago in Palestine made people believe that he was very special, and divine. This is the Jesus that I follow. The one whose actions and teachings, even if not accurately reported in the Bible, have made a huge difference to how society, especially the western world, has developed its values and beliefs. In Jesus’ actions and teachings I can find reminders of how to behave, act towards others and an affirmation that, in my mind, there is more to us humans than our physical being. There is the divine, the spiritual, I call it God, in of us all and in the world. And I can tap into this and give something back to.

Jesus as a being, or entity, cannot calm the storms and adverse winds in my life, but what he stands for and taught does make a difference. And what also makes an even bigger difference is that there are people all around me, in the Temple Society, at school, on the radio….that help me cope with the adverse winds – all of these people have some Jesus-like qualities that make a difference.

Following this line of thought, it could be argued that ‘having Jesus in your life’ is just a state of mind. That God is just a state of mind. I think it must be more than that, because, once again, that is an individual, solitary thing. It discounts the feeling I get, that all life is linked by the divine and spiritual, and that there is a power that I can connect to.

An essential part of my faith is the hope and trust I have in the divine that ‘things will work out in the end’.

Bishop Spong summarises this idea in his book Rescuing the Bible from fundamentalism. ‘He (that is Jesus) has been many things to many people in many ages – all of them different, not all of them mutually exclusive. The response has run between the poles of fully human and truly divine. What manner of human being is this about which the human response has been so intense?….His legacy was the intense human hope that a universal shalom could be created that would enable the world to say that the Kingdom of God has come, that our God reigns.’ End quote.

Please, if you can, stand for the Lord’s Prayer

Our Father in heaven,
Hallowed your name,
Your Kingdom come,
You will be done on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins,
As we for give those who sin against us.
Lead us when in temptation and deliver us from evil.
For the Kingdom, the power and the glory
Are yours forever.
Amen.

Let’s sing the last four verses of Befiehl du deine Wege Commit whatever grieves you. Song number 15, verses 5 – 8.

Veronika will follow on directly with the final music.

Thank you Veronika, and all who have helped prepare today’s service. There is now the opportunity to have a community discussion on the issues raised in the service. Two questions I’d like to leave with you.

• Did Jesus have the spiritual power to put himself above the physical elements and laws of physics, and actually walk on water? How do you view the ‘miracles’ that Jesus did?
• Is having Jesus/God a state of mind? Or is there a power that can be tapped into?

Please if you wish to join a discussion either of these questions, or any thing else that occurred to you during the service, quickly grab a cup of tea/coffee, and join Rolf Beilharz, who will be leading the discussion, in the alcove to the side.

Alfred Klink, CC Bayswater, 12 July

Occasionally we all have the feeling whatever will be will be, and that the future just happens; there is nothing we can do about it. But a moment’s reflection makes us realise this is not so. If it was, humans would still be living in trees; the Temple Society would never have happened. Whatever is happening in society today, somebody or something has been working towards it yesterday. We all have a project we are planning, a job we would like to finish, and what will be is in fact a combination of all the millions of things ongoing at the moment. How big a part our project, our vision, will be of that conglomeration of ideas which we call the future, depends a lot on the amount of work we put into it. The research we do, the eventualities we prepare for and the support we can enlist for it. If you do not cultivate your vision, or whatever it is you have set your mind on, then quite likely somebody else’s vision will grow instead of yours, because they are preparing the way for it and you are not. Your share of that future will shrink.

There is only a limited number of ways an organisation or a society can grow and remain viable, and all of these involve people participation. If you have an idea, you must tell the people, and if you are a religious organisation you need people to share in your belief. And the proof of success of those strategies is again vested in people: Is the list of supporters increasing? Are people listening to what you have to say? Is the number of believers and your membership growing? If the reply to those questions is no, then you must look to other (or additional) ways to reach people with your message. Experiment with other known ways of promoting you philosophy.

Culture is a defining aspect of a human society, recognised as such all over the world. It helped humanity out of the trees and into universities. Culture we call the human characteristic of acquiring knowledge and skills during your life-time and passing them on to following generations, through practice, teaching, training or copying. That includes tools, language, writing, art, music, buildings, structures and religious practices. Humans are the one species on Earth that leave behind more than bones when they die. They create cultural artifacts, which can be interpreted by future generations as to the level of their existence. They provide a measure of the intellectual, spiritual and humanitarian progress and growth of a particular society over the ages. The level to which a society acknowledges and values its past culture is an indication of how serious that society takes its own philosophy.

I have said it before, Templers in Australia have, due to political necessity, been estranged with their cultural heritage, they lost the direct contact and the influence, the physical presence cultural heritage has on people and on society. They have been forced to change their land, their language and their allegiance, and, having done reasonably well without it, have in the process lost sight of the essential part cultural heritage plays in society. It has become seemingly irrelevant.

But it is not. Because all the above mentioned factors are just as important today as they were hundreds or thousands of years ago. A society is still judged by the way it values its culture and the degree to which it learns from its cultural heritage. When strangers ask questions about your way of life, what your beliefs and practices are, they want to know how you arrived at those conclusions and what you base your convictions on. They want to hear how your awareness evolved and how you plan to utilise it and make it grow in the future. It needs a continuous line from the past to the future to confirm your current position and its relevance to society at large. Your children will see in your reverence of past achievements the substance of your philosophy. Our History and Cultural Heritage does matter, and we will be considered negligent if we do not make effective use of it.

Brigitte Kneher, the TGA archivist, has said somewhere, she would welcome an effective Australian Archive facility because it would increase the flow of information about Templer History and Heritage into the wider community. Its reward to the Temple Society will be a greater general awareness of our existence and our achievements as a group, our contribution to the country and to society and our vision for the future. She is a person fully aware that people are very interested in Templer Culture and Templer Heritage. That may well be for their own purpose, so they can write whatever thesis or book they are currently doing research for. But whatever they do with the information they collect from us, their use of it, their citation, becomes an effective way to spread the word about Templers in the wider community. It is free advertising, it stimulates an awareness growth that may provide the seed and the motivation for additional memberships. A functional cultural heritage archive for the Templers is something that will benefit all of us

In the July Templer Record Renate Beilharz has outlined a plan to open up the TSA Archive in Bentleigh to the public. Make it more accessible. I wholeheartedly endorse that appeal. I would go one step further and say the effectiveness of the Bentleigh archive would be greatly enhanced by enlarging its exposure to the public in having a convenient outlet in the one genuine and ready-made Heritage facility the TSA possesses, the government registered and recognised Boronia Templer Hall. For virtually zero capital cost you could double the effectiveness of the Bentleigh archive facility overnight.

I will let others speak more about the practical considerations. AK

 Wir singen zum Schluß das Lied Nummer 126 im roten Gesangbuch 'Wie groß ist des Allmächt=gen Güte...'  die Verse 1,2 & 6.

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Mother’s Day Service in Bayswater 11 May 2003

Elder: Annette Wagner-Hesse
Pianist: Krista Imberger
Text: Mark 8: 22 – 26 Healing of a blind man
Hymns:    

• No 100         Sollt ich meinem Gott nicht singen (Vs 1 & 2)No

• No 62           Let us sing to the God of Salvation (Vs 1, 2 & 4)

• No 65           Lord, let me see (Vs 1 – 5)

• No 126         Wie groß ist des Allmächt’gen Güte (Vs 1, 4 & 5)

Welcome to today’s service during which we’ll talk about Mother’s Day and also address the Bible text for today. But to begin let’s all join in a hymn to unite us. I’ve chosen No. 100 Sollt ich meinem Gott nicht singen and we’ll sing verses 1 and 2.

I’ve chosen this hymn because it’s such a happy, hymn of praise. It reminds us how uplifting and how infinite God’s love for us is. The second verse in particular appealed to me because of the metaphor of God’s protection as an eagle spreading his wings over us, from the time we came into being in our mothers’ bodies. So after an introduction from Krista, let’s sing (no. 100). Please sing in English or German.

Mother’s Day! It’s not a day we can just let slip by, even if the advertising and excessive marketing associated with the day gets on our nerves. However sceptical we might be about a designated day to celebrate mothers, most of us cannot help but stop on the actual day and remember our mother. This usually involves remembering and treasuring the special bond we have or had with our mothers, happy memories of shared occasions often taking us back into earliest childhood. We might also remember relationships we’ve had with other mothers we have known, the mothers of friends and relatives and for those of us in that position, it might well lead to thoughts about our own role as mothers and the bond we have with our children.

Recently at the family service at the Kids’ Club Camp, we spoke about counting our blessings. These inevitably included parents and all the things they did for you. I’d now like to ask our children, but also anyone who is young at heart (or brave enough to speak up) a few questions.

• Did you do anything special for your mother this morning?? Or are you planning to do anything special for your mother today?

• What do mothers do for you in everyday life?

• What sort of people are they? How would you describe your mother?

• What sort of mother do you think you’d like to become??

When I was a child, I used to say I’d make my children work really hard in the household, because I felt I was often asked to help at home. Goodness me!! How the past catches up with you. I don’t really think we were expected to do anything extraordinary and particularly as we grew older, it was just the only sensible thing to do. Nothing else really teaches young people to appreciate what they have, than expecting them to do some things for themselves and learning to start take responsibility for themselves. We used to have to help tidy our rooms, help with the Friday house cleaning routine when we were home, water pot plants, feed the dog and take him for a walk, feed the budgies, set the table and so on. We were also asked to help weed the garden, and I remember dragging around buckets of water to water the garden in the drought in the sixties. None of this really unusual and yet the memory of me whinging is really clear and makes me feel very embarrassed even now. Even clearer is the memory of a story or text my parents or mother once read to me to counteract my feeling that I was being asked to do too much. I recently asked my mother about this, but neither of us could piece together where this text came from. I can’t remember all the precise details and apologize if somebody knows the story and I tell it all wrong. The gist of it will always remain with me though.

A child was asking her mother why she couldn’t have more pocket money (I think) and being quite demanding about it, counting up all the small jobs that she was asked to do at home. The mother didn’t say no to her request, but she didn’t say yes either. Instead she presented the child with a similar bill for all the things she had done for the child in the child’s lifetime – prepared meals three times a day, seven times a week, for 52 weeks of however many years the child was aged, washed and mended clothes several times a week, read to the child, played with the child, comforted the child at night, keep the child warm and safe and snug, helped with all the myriad of things a child has to learn….. As the child read the bill (and as the listening child heard the story) she started to feel increasingly foolish and selfish and realized how self-centred her attitude had been. The real crunch came when the bill finally was added up and the balance that was being requested was merely that the child was thankful. It certainly made me think then and now.

It’s so easy to forget to express our thanks and appreciation of things that happen over and over again and without anyone having to ask for them. Yet how would it be, if mothers just didn’t bother to make sure there was enough food in the house to make a meal, or didn’t wash the clothes, or sheets or towels, or clean the house, pick you up from school, help you with your homework and so on.

Now as I’m in the process of trying to learn to be a mother, I’m finally beginning to realize just how big a task this whole business is. The demands on your patience, your intelligence, your emotional sensitivity, your noise and mess level tolerance….. the fact that nothing you do remains without effect on your children and that you never again will be a sole being. There’s nothing like it. Every interaction with your child becomes part of a pattern which ultimately will influence your child and contributes to the sort of person they will become, how they will tackle the challenges in their life, how they learn to deal with anger, stress, sorrow. By observing their parents, they also learn how to celebrate, how to love and how to live. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling overwhelmed from time to time with this responsibility and yet however mixed this bag of motherhood is, however frustrating, challenging and demanding it is, I cannot for a moment think that I would want to have been without this experience and I honestly thank God that I have the opportunity to practise and learn something about “mothering”. And that I myself had and still have such a wonderful, wonderful mother whose example I wish I could follow at least some of the time in some ways, and whose wise, down-to-earth advice today is generally still the best around.

So today, we give thanks for and celebrate the role of mothers in our families, in our own Templer community and in the broader society. We remember with fondness all the good we received at the hands of our own mother.

I often wonder how people who aren’t mothers feel about this day. The number of women who can’t have children or don’t wish to become mothers are increasing. Is this perhaps also a day to celebrate and nurture the mothering instinct or the supportive, nurturing side of our natures regardless of whether this is expressed in the traditional bond of mother and child? Is it perhaps also a time to think about what it is in a positive mother-child relationship that brings out the best in people? Is that a love, which allows freedom, which doesn’t judge, which stands back when necessary, which is infinite and boundless, warm and full of humour??

At the same time as consider this love, we give thanks for the connectedness with the world that we gain when we become parents. I’ll never forget how elated and amazingly invincible I felt after giving birth to both my children and in particular to my first child, Franz. After coming home from the hospital and settling into our little first floor flat in those first few days, I felt unbelievable, like marching out into the middle of the road or stopping on every street corner and yelling out to the world: I have just given birth!!!!! Have you any idea what that means??? I felt like the first woman ever to give birth and at the same time, I was suddenly starting to understand something so deep and as old as the Earth. I felt united with all the women who had ever given birth and a part of life’s cycle. It did make me want to sing praise and so I hope you’ll join in such a hymn now. It’s No: 62 Let us sing to the God of salvation. The text is available in English and German, so please sing either. If you’re singing in German you need to watch how you fit in the word Hosianna in the Refrain. Only three beats are allowed so you need to say Ho-sian-na, not Ho-si-an-na. We’ll sing verses 1, 2 and 4 in English. There are only three verses in German so you can’t go wrong. Krista will play one verse through for those who aren’t so familiar with this hymn.

I would now like to turn to our text for today. It comes from the Gospel according to Mark Chapter 8, Verses 8: 22 – 26 and is headed the healing of a blind man.

They came to Bethsaida, where some people brought a blind man to Jesus and begged him to touch him. Jesus took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village. After spitting on the man’s eyes, Jesus placed his hands on him and asked him, “Can you see anything?”
The man looked up and said, “Yes, I can see people, but they look like trees walking around.”

Jesus again placed his hands on the man’s eyes. This time the man looked intently, his eyesight returned, and he saw everything clearly. Jesus then sent him home with the order, “Don’t go back into the village.”

In the gospel according to Mark we hear a great deal about Jesus’s actions and healings – he heals a man suffering from a dreaded skin disease, another who cannot walk and one who has a paralysed hand. He calms a storm on the lake, heals a man possessed by evil spirits by commanding the spirits to enter a herd of pigs, which thereupon rush down the side of the cliff into the lake and drown. He cures a woman who had been bleeding for 12 years when she touches his coat and raises Jairus’s daughter. He feeds the five thousand with 5 loaves and 2 fish, walks on water, chases a demon out of a woman’s daughter, heals a deaf –mute. The Pharisees ask for a miracle to show that God approved of him. Just after this comes the healing of the blind man from our text and puts into context the fact that Jesus did not want the man to go back to the village and say what had happened. His healing was for the sake of the man, not to appease the Pharisees.

It is yet another example of Jesus making man whole – enabling him to see detail, to see properly, to benefit fully from his sense of vision. He helps him to see people clearly instead of seeing tree-like shapes. The metaphor is pretty obvious – he helps him to recognize humanity and differentiation and colour, shape and in what might otherwise be interpreted as forms which really have little similarity to human beings. I love trees and trees are all individual, but the fact that the man sees humans that look like trees, indicates he can’t see what is human about them. He merely sees them moving. They seem stiff and straight and similar to one another. He is missing the uniqueness of the people.

Jesus spits in the man’s eyes and his eyesight returns. Jesus interacts with him and “opens” his eyes. If it were so easy for us!!!! We can’t just ask for someone to make us whole. Yet throughout Mark’s Gospel we keep hearing Jesus explain, it is the people’s faith that cures them. He is more like a catalyst. If that is the case, then why shouldn’t it be possible for us to become “more whole” by allowing Jesus’s message to take root in us?? Maybe our eyes too, can be healed and we can see more clearly and maybe we can rid ourselves of the demons that plague us.

I’d now like to invite you to join with me singing a newer hymn whose text extends this idea of “seeing more clearly” and understanding the world more. It’s No. 65 Lord, let me see and as the verses are fairly short, we’ll sing all five verses. We practised this with the choir recently, so I’m hoping some of the choir members will sing out very confidently (if they remember it!!). Krista will play one verse through for us before we start.

As we come to the end of today’s service it’s time to pray together. Please stand if possible.

• Lord, open our eyes to the uniqueness of our fellow human beings,

• Let us see more clearly, with greater depth and understanding,

• Don’t let us be fooled by appearances.

• Help us to care and love without seeking our own advantage.

• Remind us daily to treasure every moment of this adventure called life and not to keep waiting for someone or something to make us happy.

• There probably is no better time than right now to be happy.

• So please help us to work like we don't need money, to love like we've never been hurt, and to dance like no one's watching.

• And please look after all our mothers and bless them and encourage them to keep going and doing the best they can. Fill their hearts with love and let that love touch us all. AMEN

Please join in praying aloud if you would like. I hope you don’t mind if I use German. The text is in our hymnbook near the end, just after hymn number 129 and before the indexes start.

• Vater unser im Himmel!

• Geheiligt werde Dein Name.

• Dein Reich komme.

• Dein Wille geschehe, wie im Himmel so auf Erden.

• Unser tägliches Brot gib uns heute,

• Und vergib uns unsere Schuld,

• Wie auch wir vergeben unsern Schuldigern.

• Führe uns, wenn wir in Versuchung sind,

• Und erlöse uns von dem Bösen.

• Denn Dein ist das Reich und die Kraft

• Und die Herrlichkeit in Ewigkeit.

• AMEN

 To conclude our Mother’s Day service today, let’s sing one more hymn together. Before we do so though, I’d like to mention that the collection from today’s service will go towards the Royal Women’s Hospital Mother’s Day Appeal. In particular this hospital has provided almost miraculous assistance to prematurely born babies and their mothers. I’d also like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a very happy Mother’s Day. I’d like to thank Krista Imberger for playing for us today and learning several new hymns at short notice.  And I’d like to thank you all for your presence and for being part of the strength and spirit of our Templer community.

 Our final hymn is No: 126 Wie groß ist des Allmächt’gen Güte Verses 1, 4 and 5. Please sing in English or German.

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GOOD FRIDAY SAAL   Ba:  18.04.2003. 

Introduction and accompaniment by Veronica Rutowicz on the piano.

Welcome to our Good Friday service.  As there is no Easter Sunday service here in Bayswater, I’ll include thoughts about Easter Sunday in this service as well. 

We start this Good Friday service by singing the hymn Nr. 81 “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” (“O sacred head, now wounded”).  We’ll sing verses 1, 2 and 3.

            While we have the Sunday School children with us I’ll tell the story of Good Friday and Easter as mainstream Christianity has told it for many years.  Children, this is specially for you although the adults should listen too. 

Do you remember, children, that a long time ago, more than 3 months ago, you celebrated Christmas.  Christmas is a birthday party.  Whose birthday was it?  Can anyone tell me?  It was the birthday of Jesus. 

Jesus was born in Palestine many years ago.  The Jews lived there.  They were not free.  They had been conquered by the Romans and this made many Jews unhappy.  Some Jews became very fond of Jesus and these Jews started the new religion called Christianity.  All Christians are very happy that Jesus was born and that is why we still celebrate the birthday of Jesus even after 2000 years.

Who is Jesus?  He is the baby that was specially sent by God to us on earth, to help us.  He grew up to become a travelling teacher, someone who was very wise.  He taught people how they should behave so that they will be happy.  He also cured many of their sicknesses.

Many people were attracted to him and wanted to join him and to learn from his wonderful teaching.  He had a few years of great success as a teacher.  He helped people to get well.  But then something terrible happened. 

The leaders of the Jews became worried that this new teacher, Jesus, might change the Jewish religion or make the people leave the Jewish religion.  So they took Jesus prisoner, gave him to the Romans, and asked them to kill Jesus, because he had caused disturbances among the people.  While Jesus was a prisoner the people mocked him and hit him and the Romans nailed him to a cross.  There he died.  This terrible thing happened on a Friday.  And today, Good Friday, the Friday before Easter, is when we remember how terrible this death of Jesus was.  It is a very sad day, so we don’t have a party, like at Christmas. We feel sorry for the terrible death Jesus had. 

But God did not let the death of Jesus be the end.  Friends of Jesus put his body into a grave dug in a rock and they put a big stone in front of the opening to close the grave.  When the friends of Jesus came on Sunday morning to the grave, to prepare his body for a proper burial, they found the stone rolled away, and the body was not there.  Somebody at the grave, it may have been an angel, told them that Jesus had risen up from the dead and that he had gone to God.  Many of his friends in the days that followed saw Jesus and talked with him. 

These people became convinced that death is not the end.  God can make people rise up from the dead and take them to live with him.  This was a wonderful message from God.  It made the friends of Jesus very happy.  And that is why a new religion, Christianity, grew from these friends of Jesus.  They are convinced that Jesus, the Christ, has proved that all people can be saved from death by God.  This wonderful news is celebrated at the feast of Easter, on the Sunday after Good Friday. 

Easter is not a birthday party.  But it celebrates a beautiful idea. Life arises again after death, like chickens that hatch from eggs, or like the many little bunnies that are born in springtime.  In the other half of the world, where Palestine and Europe are, and where the Christian religion grew, Easter is in springtime, when all forms of life spring up again after the cold and hard wintertime. 

So, on the coming Sunday, Easter Sunday, make that a party.  That day celebrates young life growing up, and it is particularly appropriate that you young children should enjoy yourselves. 

Now you may go out to the Sunday School room with Christine.  If you have any questions about our story, Christine can tell you more about Good Friday and Easter.  Are there any other children who would like to join Christine?  Please join the Sunday school. 

We grown-ups will now hear the text suggested by the Temple Society’s newest set of Tables for Good Friday.  There is a choice of two.  I chose Matthew 27: verses 31 to 66.  Read text

This text ends Matthew’s chapter 27.  His last chapter is 28, where he describes what happened on Easter Sunday.  The details vary in the different gospels, but they are similar to what I told the children.  In Matthew, an angel came to roll the stone back.  The guards were blinded and fell unconscious. The two Marys were shown that the grave was empty and were told by the angel that Jesus had risen from death.  Jesus met them as they were on their way to tell the disciples.  The disciples then went to Galilee were they also saw Jesus and he instructed them to carry his message to all the world.  Meanwhile, the guards told the priests what had happened and the priests offered them much money to say that the disciples of Jesus had taken away the body of Jesus while they slept. 

What are we to make of these texts.  Firstly, the complete version of what I told the children about Good Friday and Easter is as follows.  God sent Jesus, his own, even his only, son, as a sacrifice to die on the cross so that the sins of all believers could be forgiven.  This then happened, it was God’s will.  To achieve this, Jesus, the sacrificial lamb of God, had to go to the depths of death, in order to conquer death and to rise from death to sit by the side of God.  Jesus is the example.  We can believe this and be saved by this faith.  God will not let us down. 

This is a wonderfully reassuring faith.  And I believe that many people over many centuries have used such faith to make their difficult life bearable.  For those of you who share this faith, I wish you well in it.  In the Temple Society we welcome all beliefs that allow people to strive for the betterment of the world. We often express this making the world better in the biblical words striving above all for the Kingdom of God here oh earth.  This goal can also be expressed in simpler words, “living in such a way that the world becomes a better place for everyone”.  The detailed form of the faith which motivates each of us to do this is left to each individual’s own conscience. 

But what do we say to all those people who do not believe in angels, or in the possibility of a sacrificial death.  After all, does God have to kill an innocent son in order to save sinful people?  Here I draw attention to another feature of the Temple Society. The TS wants every person to be honest with herself or himself. It does not expect any individual to believe what he or she knows to be false.

People now understand the world very differently from the way people did 2000 years ago, or even 200 years ago.  It is no longer as easy to see why God, or whatever we now call the ultimate creator of the universe, would be interested in human individuals having to die in order to be raised from death. 

Her are some Features of the Temple Society’s belief

In the year 2000, the TSA and the Temple Society in Germany printed the little golden summary of the Religious Perspective of the Temple Society.  It is, of course, only a very small summary of a complex faith.  But let’s use it, as something we should all be able to lay our hands on, to explain to ourselves as well as to others what our religion is.  If anyone can’t find the copy we sent you, ask for more. 

There are two features of our religion that I see as very important.  I’ll point them out and tell you why they are important. 

The first is under the heading “1. Identity”.  “The Temple society is an independent, non-dogmatic Christian Society, embracing the values embodied in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.  We are open to diversity in religious and spiritual matters, and we recognise a bond with all who share our concerns.” 

Then follows a comment on the word “Temple” in our name. It has two meanings. Each individual has God’s spirit.  And in a community, all people should act together to build God’s temple.  The last sentence of this section captures the practical meaning.  “We seek to do justice to this challenge, both individually and as a community, by striving to put into practice in everyday conduct what Jesus taught.”  In the simplest words this means that in our daily life we strive to make our world better, that is more honest and peaceful.  And we welcome everyone who also works towards this goal. 

The second is under heading “4. How we see ourselves and practical consequences”. 

“We consider that practising an active Christianity of trust in God and compassion for our neighbour, as expressed in the twin commandments of love,

Love God with all your being, And love your neighbour as yourself, is more important than the mere affirmation of particular creeds and specific articles of faith. 

We therefore do not require of our members an obligatory profession of the beliefs outlined above.  What is important is the willingness to affirm our aim and participate in working towards it in daily life.” 

This means that we are free to believe that which appears true to us.  This freedom allows us to appreciate and utilise all knowledge science has made available.  But we are bound to apply available knowledge towards making the world a better place for all of life.  This is both simple to comprehend and entirely appropriate in this modern world where people are struggling to find values to live by. 

Back to Good Friday and Easter

In the last 200 years much research in archeology, history and theology has been done on the origins of Christianity by an increasing number of scholars.  I am very pleased by this.  Interestingly, these scholars are confirming what the founder of the Temple Society, Christoph Hoffmann, recognised long ago.  I’ll briefly read what scholars now write about Jesus and the religion named after his other name, the Christ. 

Bishop John Shelby Spong of the Episcopal (Anglican) church in the USA recently wrote the book “Liberating the Gospels” with the subtitle “Reading the bible with Jewish eyes”.  In this book Spong points out that Jesus and his followers were very typical Jews, with Jesus having taught in Synagogues.  He then argues that the gospels are collections of teachings about Jesus.  These describe in the same way as for the Jewish heroes of old such as Moses, how his followers saw the God-presence being manifested in Jesus.  The gospels are Jewish liturgy, designed around an annual calendar for preaching on the different Sabbaths of the year.  I particularly want you to hear passages from chapter 14 “He Died According to the Scriptures”. 

“Even the last words of Jesus from the cross have been preached on in three-hour services from so many pulpits that phrases like “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” ... are etched into our memories.  We also know, though perhaps in a more vague way, the story of Jesus’ burial that featured Joseph of Arimathea, primarily because that burial story was closely linked to the familiar Easter tale of the visit of the women to the tomb of this Joseph on the “first day of the week.” 

            So vivid are these details, so clear the pictures they paint, that there remains a general consensus in both church and society that these stories surely were literally created from vivid eyewitness recollections. …

            “We are told in Mark, the first gospel to be written, that when Jesus was arrested, “all” of his disciples “forsook him and fled” (14:50).  A noticeable moderating influence appears in the later gospels to repair the reputation of the disciples and to temper that stark and original biblical reality that Jesus died alone, abandoned by all his followers.  ... 

            “Now, for a moment, embrace the truth of that reality.  Jesus died alone.  Next, recall that the first written account of the last events of Jesus’ life did not come into being for a minimum of thirty-five years after his death.  By the time that this narrative was written down, the disciples were thought of as heroes, and heroes always have their embarrassing edges smoothed over by the passage of time.  That would have been easy to accomplish, since by the time the Gospels came into written form all eyewitnesses had apparently passed away.  A story that travels along a word-of-mouth route for thirty-five years usually abandons unpleasant or even irrelevant details.  It also tends both to enhance and to exaggerate the more favourable accounts.  So the fact that this negative portrait was still present, showing the unflattering behavior of the disciples who abandoned Jesus in the moment of their Lord’s arrest and death, makes it ring with enormous authenticity.  The disciples all forsook him and fled.  Jesus died alone.  When we can accept the reality of this fact on an emotional as well as an intellectual level, then we are forced to face the overwhelming probability that every detail in the biblical drama of the crucifixion is historically suspect.  These are not the memories of eyewitnesses, for Jesus died alone.  There were no eyewitnesses.”  (p.236 - 238). 

Another book I have recently read is “Jesus” by Michael Grant, an eminent British historian who taught at Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities.  Here are some passages from this book. 

            “All that can be said is that he [Jesus] died a miserable and horrible death, the death of a failure.  ...  ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ - must likewise stay in the record, because the evangelists would gladly have expunged it, as they would have expunged his despairing prayer in Gethsemane, had it not possessed the strongest historical warrant. 

            Jesus uttered this tragic cry because he was suffering almost unendurable pain, in the depths of humiliation, and above all because it seemed, as it had already seemed in the Garden of Gethsemane, that his mission to introduce the Kingdom of God had been betrayed by God himself, who was allowing him to suffer this pain.  In supreme agony, his belief that it was redemptive pain no longer seemed convincing.  But this was only for an agonizing moment, which in the agony of Gethsemane he had all too clearly foreseen.  Except in these instants of weakness, under the stress of intolerable mental and then physical pain, Jesus lived his last days, and died, in the belief which had lately grown upon him that his death was destined to save the human race.  Yet it appeared on that black day, when the hopes of even his closest followers lay shattered in ruin and confusion, that no one on earth could any longer share such an improbable belief, and that Jesus was dying in total isolation. 

            FROM DISATER TO TRIUMPH

            When Jesus died that appallingly harrowing death, his life seemed to have terminated in complete failure and disaster.  The world’s opinion of the event, instead, proved to be strangely different, providing the greatest paradox in all history.  How this came about must shortly be discussed.  But first, it may be desirable to sum up briefly what the nature of that life’s work had been, in so far as I have been able to interpret it in the foregoing chapters. 

            Jesus’ career had been completely dominated by his conviction that, in obedience to God’s order, he himself was inaugurating God’s Kingdom upon earth; its establishment  was to be completed later on.  Jews had long believed, as a consolation for their material miseries, that this fulfillment would one day take place.  But Jesus’ conviction that it was taking place already, under his own guidance, was an astonishing novelty

            The precise character of the Kingdom’s complete realization in the future was not, could not be, put into effective words.  But it would be a state of perfection.  And Jesus felt that this perfect consummation was going to come very soon indeed.”   (p. 167 - 169).  This passage includes the end of the chapter “The End” and the beginning of the chapter “From Disaster to Triumph”) 

The next passage from Grant comments on the empty grave seen by the women. 

            “Even if the historian chooses to regard the youthful apparition [the youth or angel seen by the women] as extra-historical, he cannot justifiably deny the empty tomb.  True, this discovery, as so often, is described differently by the various Gospels - as critical pagans early pointed out.  But if we apply the same sort of criteria that we would apply to any other ancient literary sources, then the evidence is firm and plausible enough to necessitate the conclusion that the tomb was indeed found empty.  

            Mark, as we have seen, had heard that three women saw it together.  But according to John, the first to see it was Mary Magdalene all by herself.  Either of these reports is likely enough to represent the authentic occurrence, since the early Church would never have concocted, on its own account, the statement that this most solemn and fateful of all discoveries was made by women, including a woman with an immoral record at that.  Perhaps John’s version is the original one, and the other women were added to the story later to make it slightly less shocking. 

            Who had taken the body?  There is no way of knowing.  Mary Magdalene thought at first that the cemetery gardener had removed it - whereas the Jews, not unplausibly, maintained that it had been taken by Jesus’ disciples.  At all events it was gone.  And because it was gone, and no one knew where it was, this made it easier for people to believe, three days later (a period equated with scriptural predictions,) that they were seeing Jesus alive again and returned to earth, risen from the dead.  The Resurrection is the subject of some of the greatest pictures ever painted, but there is no actual description of it, and nobody claimed to have seen it happen.  Yet those who believed that Jesus had appeared to them on the earth after his death have their alleged experiences recorded in a number of passages of the New Testament.  Their testimonies cannot prove them to have been right in supposing that Jesus had risen from the dead.  However, these accounts do prove that certain people were utterly convinced that is what he had done. 

            This throws a remarkable retrospective light on Jesus’ personality.  It must have made, while he was alive, an overwhelmingly forceful impression on his followers if they believed that even his death, his violent humiliating death, was unable to remove him for more than three days from the earth and from their presence.”   (p. 176). 

Grant goes on to describe the different variations recorded in the bible about the resurrection and that beliefs arose about a subsequent ascent to heaven by the resurrected Jesus.  He comments that Paul, who was not interested in the life of Jesus and presumably knew very little about it, took these two events (resurrection and ascent to heaven) and the preceding Crucifixion, as the dominating aspects of the fledgling new religion.  The gospels were written in the communities founded by Paul, outside of Palestine.  If only we could disentangle what is authentic from what the writers or their sources have interpolated! 

We will never know exactly what happened when Jesus died.  So, let us now, just like we would do in any Templer funeral, concentrate on the life of the deceased and celebrate this life.

Taking Jesus seriously, and doing what he said we should do, is the best way we can honour his death on Good Friday. 

Let's start with the Lord's prayer.

• Our Father in heaven

• Hallowed be your name,

• Your kingdom come,

• Your will be done on earth as in heaven.

• Give us today our daily bread.

• Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.

• Lead us when in temptation and deliver us from evil.

• For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours forever.

Amen

We'll finish by singing all 6 verses of a Hymn suitable for Easter, Number 49 “Immer noch strahlst du”. 

Sing the 6 verses.  Then Veronica plays the postlude.

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Service at the TTHA on Palm Sunday, 13 April 2003.

Elder Kurt Beilharz

introductory music by Irene Blaich.

Willkommen heute am Fest des Palmsonntag. Wer war der Palmesel? Ich nicht, ich auch nicht. Gebt's nur nicht zu. Wir feiern den Einzug Jesu in Jerusalem und alles Volk jubelt ihm zu. Jesus aber wußte, daß er sich kaum auf das Volk verlassen konnte. Ist das heute anders? Ich glaube nicht. Und die Politiker tun heute auch noch was sie wollen,als ob sie so etwas noch nie gehört hätten. Menschenleben zählen nicht; besonders nicht diejenigen der niederen Schichten. Diese sind dann aber doch die Überlebenden, denn sie sind nicht nur in der Mehrzahl, sondern haben größere Überlebensmöglichkeiten. Warum wohl? Doch nur weil sie mehr ertragen können.

Der Text für den heutigen Tag kommt aus dem Lukas Evangelium und heißt im 13. Kapitel Verse 6-9: Er sagte ihnen aber dies Gleichnis: Es hatte einer einen Feigenbaum, der war gepflanzt in seinem Weinberge; und er kam und suchte Frucht darauf und fand sie nicht. Da sprach er zu dem Weingärtner: siehe, ich bin nun drei Jahre lang gekommen und habe keine Frucht bekommen. Haue ihn ab er behindert das Land. Er aber sprach, Herr, laß ihn noch dieses Jahr, daß ich ihn grabe und dünge, wo er nicht Frucht bringt haue ihn ab.

Wir wollen aus dem Lied Nr 62 die Verse 1 u.2 singen.

Vor diesen Versen hören wir, daß Pilatus das Blut von Galiläern mit dem Blut der Tieropfer gemischt hatte, was in den Augen der Juden eine der größten Sünden darstellte. Jesus sagte zu den Berichterstattern, glaubt ihr, daß diese Galiläer sündhafter waren, als all die andern? Vor dieser selben Geschichte steht im Matthäus Evangelium, daß die Pharisäer sich bei ihm beklagten, da die Kinder, die im Tempel waren Jesu zujubelten und riefen: Hosianna, dem Sohn Davids. Er antwortete ihnen: Habt ihr nie gelesen: Aus dem Munde der Unmündigen und Säuglinge hast du Lob zugerichtet! Mit anderen Worten, von dort erfährst du Wahrheit.

Um auf das eigentliche Thema zurück zu kommen: Jesus hat den Feigenbaum verdammt weil er keine Frucht brachte. Dachte der Feigenbaum vielleicht daß er das nicht brauchte? War er etwa zu erhaben dazu? Wer trägt Frucht? Natürlich derjenige, der sich einsetzt. Ein Feigenbaum kann für viele Frucht bringen. Jesus hat ja all das auf die Menschen gemünzt. Ein Feigenbaum, der Frucht bringt, kann das viele Jahre tun. Wenn die Zeit kommt, und sie kann sehr früh kommen, dann wird er umgehauen um für einen andern Baum Platz zu machen.

Wenn er zu Ostern, dem größten Fest der Juden nach Jerusalem ging, war Jesus sich seiner Herrausforderung der Obrigkeit bewußt. Er wußte genau was er zu tun hatte und was das Entresultat sein wird. Die Pharisäer und Schriftgelehrten hatten ihm schon immer Fallen gestellt Sie waren auch mächtig genug den römischen Gouverneur zu zwingen etwas zu tun was eigentlich gegen das Gesetz war. Er wußte auch, daß er sich auf kaum jemand verlassen konnte, nicht einmal seine Jünger. Er wußte also, daß er sein Leben für eine Sache opfert, die wie im Falle des Feigenbaums fehlschlagen konnte. Ein Feigenbaum kann durch einen andern Obstbaum ersetzt werden, der also kein Feigenbaum ist. Wer ersetzt Jesus? Er wußte es jedenfalls nicht. Ob seine Jünger seine Botschaft weiter tragen würden, konnte er nicht sicher wissen. Im 2ten Vers unseres Liedes heißt es, der heilige Krieg wird geführt, nicht für Throne noch Altäre, aber für ein Volk das diesen Krieg führen kann. Man mordet nicht in frommem Wahne, man kämpft für Recht, man siegt zu gründen eine neue Welt. Wenn auch erst den Enkeln das Ziel beschert wird. Dieser Kampf steht uns heute erneut bevor.

Jetzt hätte ich gern drei Verse aus dem Lied Nr102 gesungen:

    1. Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten,
    und hoffet auf ihn allezeit,
    den wird er wunderbar erhalten,
    in aller Not und Traurigkeit.
    Wer Gott, dem Allerhöchsten, traut
    Der hat auf keinen Sand gebaut

    2. Was helfen uns die schweren Sorgen?
    Was hilft uns unser Weh und Ach?
    Was hilft es daß wir alle Morgen
    Beseufzen unser Ungemach?
    Wir machen unser Kreuz und Leid
    Nur größer durch die Traurigkeit.

    3. Zu Gott sei deine Seele stille
    und stets mit seinem Rat vergnügt;
    erwarte, wie sein guter Wille
    zu deinem Wohlergehn es fügt.
    Gott, der uns ihm hat auserwählt,
    Weiß wohl am besten was uns fehlt.

Wir sollen auf Gott vertrauen, haben wir eben gesungen. Das heißt aber nicht, daß wir alles was uns geschieht einfach hinnehmen, und vielleicht noch sagen, das ist Gottes Fügung. Wir dürfen wenigstens in unserm Land Australien noch protestieren wenn uns etwas nicht gefällt. Deshalb sollen wir nachdenken ob etwas von Menschen oder von Gott auf uns kommt.

Man könnte beinahe sagen, Jesus hat am Ende doch gefehlt. Schon kurze Zeit nach seinem Tode wurde die Kirche, welche sich nach ihm benannte, das Gegenteil von dem was er gelehrt hatte. Sie unterstützte den Aberglauben, der schon vorher bestand, aber mit anderen Zeichen. Die Menschen wurden durch Drohungen gezwungen Unglaubliches zu glauben. Welche wirkliche Kraft hat so ein Glaube. So übte die Kirche Politik, indem die Menschen unter immerwährender Angst gehalten wurden.

Wenn Jesus wieder erscheinen würde, wie ja immer gepredigt wurde, wäre er irgendwann in den letzten 2000 Jahren wieder ans Kreuz geschlagen worden. Der Glaube an seine Botschaft ist aber Gott sei Dank zu unserem Glück im Volk nie gestorben. Dafür wollen wir dankbar sein. Ich glaube jedenfalls, daß die Menschheit gewisse Fortschritte in diesen 2000 Jahren zu verzeichnen hat. in der westlichen Welt werden die Leute durch Schriften und Computer besser informiert. Auch in der übrigen Welt lernt man heute viel mehr. Da ich an das Gute im Menschen glaube, denke ich, daß viele zwischen Gut und Böse unterscheiden lernen.

Ein Beispiel davon, wie die Dinge oft verdreht wurden, gab uns Papst Leo der dritte, den Karl der Große wieder eingesetzt hatte nachdem er abgesetzt worden war. Es hieß er täte einen durchs Fegefeuer gereinigten Schwur, und sagte: Ich wurde von keinem Menschen gerichtet oder unter Druck gesetzt. Als eine Tat meines eigenen Willens schwöre ich. Nun ist er vom Kaiser wieder eingesetzt und erlaubt sich so einen Schwur zu tun.

Mit dem Palmsonntag feiern wir nicht nur die Kreuzigung Jesu, sondern auch den Frühling, was man auch die Auferstehung genannt hat. Die Auferstehung neuen Lebens in der nördlichen Halbkugel, war schon bei den alten Germanen ein Fest der Wiedergeburt in der Natur. Man kann sich vorstellen, daß die Menschen den langen kalten Winter mit Schnee und Eis gerne los waren. Wir, meine Frau und ich, durften das bei unserem ersten Besuch 1991 erleben. Die Bäume hatten noch kein Laub und wir sahen wie dann alles sprießte. Aber etwas in der Welt ist ja beständig. Das hat uns Jesus gelehrt. Das ist die Liebe Gottes und der Menschen, wenn sie sich darin untereinender befleißen,. Die Natur ist das andere Beständige, und sollte uns damit helfen, unseren Glauben, unser Vertrauen an die Besserung und Zukunft unserer Welt zu stärken. Das ist das wichtigste Wort in unserm Wortschatz, nämlich sich zu befleißen; und Kleinigkeiten zu übersehen, denn keiner muß deswegen ans Kreuz. Vor kurzem fand ich einen kleinen Spruch von einem David Grayson, und er sagt: Gibt es etwas Schöneres oder Größeres in der Welt, als andern Menschen in ihrer Not zu helfen. Diese Not muß nicht körperlicher Natur sein. Wenn jemand niedergeschlagen ist, können wir versuchen ihn wieder aufzurichten.

Palmsonntag: Unter Druck gesetzt verliert das Volk den Mut, und ein Mißverständnis des Volkes, nämlich der Glaube an das regierende Reich Juda, bringt sie davon ab Jesu zu unterstützen. Erst einige Zeit nach Jesu Tod besinnen sich die Jünger auf ihre Aufgabe. Dies wäre nun die eigentliche Auferstehung, der eigentliche Frühling.

Wir wollen Beten:

Vielen Dank tür Ihr Erscheinen und damit wünsche ich noch einen schönen Sonntag.

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SAAL IM ALTERSHEIM 16.2.03

Hulda Wagner

Text: Exodus 22:20-26

Hymns: No. 134 "Befestge in der Wahrheit uns" 1-4   No. 90 " Alles ist an "Gottes Segen" 1-6

Organist: Sonia Glenk

Unser heutiger Text steht im alten Textament der Bibel und zwar im 2. Buch Mose. Die ersten 5 Bücher des alten Testaments werden in der deutschen Übersetzung der Bibel von Dr. Martin Luther die 5 Bücher Mose genannt. Allgemein gültig sind die Bezeichnungen für diese 5 Bücher: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

• Genesis oder Entstehungsgeschichte
• Exodus oder Auszug
• Levitikus oder Priesterkodex
• Numeri oder Zählung und für das
• Buch, Denteronomium oder Wiederholung des Gesetzes.

Im Buch Genesis, dem ersten Buch im alten Testament, finden wir die Schöpfungs geschichten, Adam und Eva im Paradies, Kain und Abel, Noah und die Flut, den Turmbau zu Babel, die Erzählungen über Abraham, Isaak und Jakob, über Joseph und seine Brüder und wie sich die verschiedenen Stämme in Ägypten ansiedelten. Das zweite Buch Mose, das Buch Exodus, berichtet von der Bedrängnis der Kinder Israel in Ägypten, von Moses und von dem endlich erlaubten Auszug; von dem Zug durch die Wüste bis zum heiligen Berg Sinai, wo Moses nicht nur die heiligen zehn Gebote im Auftrag Gottes dem Volk verkündete, sondern viele andere Gesetze und Vorschriften.

Die 5 Bücher Mose tragen auch den Sammelnamen Pentateuch oder Thora. Die Thora ist das Gesetzbuch für den jüdischen Glauben. Aber die ersten beiden Bücher, Genesis und Exodus, enthalten die lebendigen und spannenden Erzählungen, mit denen wohl die meisten Christen unserer Generation vertraut sind, was man nicht als selbstverständlich bei der heutigen Jugend voraussetzen kann.

Die amerikanische Schriftstellerin Pearl Buck, die 1973 gestorben ist, hat wenige Jahre vor ihrem Tod das Buch: "The Story Bibel" veröffentlicht. Sie schrieb im Vorwort der deutschen Übersetzung: "Die schönsten Erzählungen der Bibel" wie folgt:

"Während meiner Kinderzeit im Haus meiner Eltern in China regte man mich nicht zur Bibellektüre an; mein Vater, der Hebräisch und Griechisch beherrschte, hielt die Übertragungen des Alten und des Neuen Testaments für unzureichende Wiedergaben der alten Texte, und verärgert über das, was für ihn schlechthin Übersetzungsfehler waren, ließ er die englische Fassung beiseite und las die Bibel in den Originalsprachen." (Hier möchte ich einfügen, daß Pearl Bucks Vater Missionar in China war; und nun geht es in ihren Worten weiter). "Da er mir weder Hebräisch noch Griechisch beibrachte, war ich auf die englische Ausgabe angewiesen, die ich indessen auch nicht las, weil mich niemand dazu anhielt.

Natürlich hörte ich kurze Abschnitte, wenn mein Vater morgens und abends die Familie zur Andacht versammelte; morgens las er einige Verse, die er für seine amerikanische Familie ausgesucht hatte, abends ein paar andere auf chinesisch zum Nutzen unserer chinesischen Bedienten. Darüber hinaus beschränkte sich meine Bibelkenntnis auf die Seligpreisungen, die Psalmen und Teile aus den alten Propheten, die ich als Sonntagsbeschäftigng auswendig zu lernen hatte. Doch mit ganz besonderem Vergnügen las ich in einem dicken braunen Leinenband, auf dem der Titel: Stories ofthe Bible - Erzählungen aus der Bibel- in verschlissenen Goldbuchstaben stand. Meine Mutter, die viel Freude an der englischen Sprache hatte, ließ mich die Stellen der Bibel auswendig lernen, die sie für die schönsten und poetischsten hielt, und um meinen unstillbaren Hunger nach Geschichten zu befriedigen, gab sie mir das dicke Buch in die Hand.

Wie jeder weiß, der in der Bibel gelesen hat, gibt es keine bessere Quelle für Geschichten als diese gewaltige Sammlung von Versen und Prosa, Lied und Klagegesang, Schuld und Strafe. Die Schriften jeder Religion bieten fesselnde und tiefe Enthüllungen des menschlichen

Verlangens, die Quelle des Seins, das Rätsel von Leben und Tod zu ergründen." (Soweit die Worte von Pearl Buck).

Sie hat in ihrem Buch das Erzählenswerte und Spannende herausgezogen und die Geschichten nacherzählt, die ihren Kern und den roten Faden enthüllen, der sie alle miteinander verbindet: Es sind Geschichten und Berichte über das Wesen des Menschen, über seinen nie schweigenden Zweifel, seine Fähigkeit zur Treue, aber auch seine rasche Untreue, von seiner Überwältigung durch plötzlichen Glauben und dem ebenso plötzlichen Abfall von allem, was er bis dahin hochgehalten hat, von den vielen Versuchungen zu falschem Verhalten, denen der Mensch immer und in jeder Gesellschaftsform und zu allen Zeiten, ausgesetzt war und ist.

Und doch ist die Bibel, vor allem das alte Testament, ein viel angefochtenes Buch. Die Erzählungen lassen sich nicht als geschichtliche Tatsachen nachweisen, und was über die Erschaffung der Welt zu lesen ist, sagt man, stimme nicht überein mit dem, was die modeme Naturwissenschaft lehrt. Aber die Bibel will uns ja nicht naturkundlichen Unterricht geben, sondern das erste Kapitel wurde geschrieben, um uns die Augen zu öffnen für Gottes Herrlichkeit, Größe und Wundermacht und unsere Seele zur Anbetung, zum Lob und Preis Gottes zu erheben. Das Staunen und die Freude über Gottes Schöpferherrlichkeit wird nur umso größer, je tiefere und weitere Blicke die fortschreitende Naturerkenntnis uns in Gottes Schaffen und Wirken tun läßt.

Wir wissen, daß die Bibel eine Sammlung von vielen einzelnen Büchern ist, die ganz verschiedenartig sind, und daß die Schriften des alten Testaments in einem Zeitraum von etwa 700 Jahren entstanden sind. Die ältesten Schriften des alten Testaments reichen bis ins Jahr 800 vor Christus zurück, die jüngsten etwa bis zum Jahr 100 vor Christus.

Damals war das Schreiben noch ein Ereignis. Ein Buch oder eine Schriftrolle war eine große Seltenheit. Durch einen Vorfall, der tief in das Leben des Volkes Israel einschnitt, nämlich die babylonische Gefangenschaft, wurden diese Schriften besonders wichtig.

Denn erst, wenn man alles Gewohnte verlassen muß, gewinnt es eine viel größere Wichtigkeit. Da das Erhalten der Schriften ein mühsames Abschreiben war und man deshalb oft nur ein Exemplar hatte, ging viel verloren.

Nach der babylonischen Gefangenschaft sammelte der Schriftgelehrte Esra diese Bücher. Sie wurden in ein Buch vereinigt und das wurde dann für heilig erklärt. Ohne die Heiligerklärung hätte sich dieses Buch nicht so vollständig erhalten durch all die Jahrhunderte.

Doch nun kehren wir zurück zu dem Buch Exodus, zu der Zeit, als das Volk Israel am Berg Sinai die Gesetze empfing. (Exodus 22:20-26)

Wenn wir nicht nur diese 4 Verse im 22. Kapitel lesen, sondern die ganzen Kapitel 20-23, so finden wir so viele Vorschriften und Gesetze, daß es schwer ist, sich alle zu merken. In unserem Text geht es darum, daß man auch den Schwächeren gegenüber rücksichtsvoll und gerecht sein soll. Ein Fremdling, zu dessen Hilfe keine Verwandten kommen können, eine Witwe oder Weisenkinder, die keinen Beschützer haben, der ihnen ihr Recht verschaffen kann, die soll man nicht bedrängen oder übervorteilen. Einen Armen vom eigenen Volk, dem man Geld geliehen hat, soll man nicht in Not bringen und hohe Zinsen verlangen, und wenn man ein Pfand von ihm genommen hat, das er wirklich braucht - wie sein einziges warmes Gewand - so soll man es ihm vor dem Abend zurückgeben. Es sind Verhaltensregeln, denen wir durchaus zustimmen können. Nun war es zur Zeit J esu so, daß längst nicht jeder lesen konnte, so daß es schwer war, sich all die Regeln zu merken. Deshalb ist es kein Wunder, daß Jesus von einem Schriftgelehrten gefragt wurde: "Meister, welches ist das vornehmste Gebot im Gesetz?" Und Jesus antwortete ihm: Das vornehmste Gebot vor allen Geboten ist das: "Höre Israel, der Herr, unser Gott, ist ein einiger Gott; und du sollst Gott, deinen Herrn, lieben von ganzem Herzen, von ganzer Seele, von ganzem Gemüte und von allen deinen Kräften." Das ist das vornehmste Gebot. Und das andere ist ihm gleich: "Du sollst deinen Nächsten lieben wie dich selbst." Es ist kein anderes Gebot größer denn diese. Und der Schriftgelehrte sprach zu ihm: Meister, du hast wahrlich recht geredet; denn es ist ein Gott und ist kein anderer außer ihm. Und ihn lieben von ganzem Herzen, von ganzem Gemüte, von ganzer Seele und von allen Kräften, und lieben seinen Nächsten wie sich selbst, das ist mehr denn Brandopfer und alle Opfer."

Schon im 5. Buch Mose steht das Gebot von der Liebe zu Gott und im 3. Buch Mose das Gebot der Nächstenliebe. "In diesen zwei Geboten hanget das ganze Gesetz und die Propheten" heißt es im Matthäusevangelium.

Unsere Liebe zu Gott können wir zum Ausdruck bringen, wenn wir in ihm den Schöpfer des ganzen Weltalls erkennen und alle Werke der Schöpfung mit Ehrfurcht betrachten und behandeln. Gott ist in allen seinen Werken, also auch in uns. Wenn er mit der Stimme unseres Gewissens zu uns redet, beweisen wir unsere Liebe zu ihm, wenn wir auf diese Stimme hören und ihr gehorchen.

Weil nicht nur wir selbst, sondern auch unsere Nächsten Geschöpfe Gottes sind, die wir um seinetwillen achten sollen, fällt das Gebot der Nächstenliebe auch unter das Gebot der Gottesliebe. So konnte Jesus sagen: "Beide sind einander gleich".

Gegenseitige Hilfe und Zusammenarbeit sind fur die Sicherheit und das Glück aller notwendig. Wenn wir Menschen das einsehen würden und danach handelten, könnte es so viel besser um die Menschheit und unsern Planeten Erde stehen.

Wenn wir auch das große Geschehen auf der Erde nicht direkt beeinflussen können, so können wir doch in unserem Kreis unser Möglichstes tun, indem wir in der Natur das Wirken Gottes erkennen und uns einfugen, indem wir Rücksicht und Verständnis fur unsere Nächsten zeigen, indem wir Freundlichkeit und Geduld üben und hoffen dürfen, daß unsere Nächsten uns auch so behandeln.

Wir schließen mit dem Vaterunser.

Schluß Choral No. 90 "Alles ist an Gottes Segen..."

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Service in Bayswater - Chapel Open Day
Sunday 9th February 2003 - 10.15am
Elder Harald Ruff
Accompaniment: Jessica Blackwell

Hymns: Seek ye first the kingdom of God (1 & 2) The Templer Hymn (1,2,4 & 9) Amazing Grace (1 - 4)
Text: Matthew 4: 1-11 The temptation of Jesus (Precedes Ch. 5 - 'the Sermon on the Mount')
Musical introduction: Jessica Blackwell

Good morning and welcome to you all;

A particular welcome to any members of the local community or friends of members who have joined us this morning - we hope you feel welcome among us. A 'hello' also to the Sunday-School kids, who will be with us for the fist part of our service this morning. Let us start our service by singing together both verses of the hymn 'Seek ye fist the kingdom of God', number 96 in the hymnbook. Could we please. sing .in English.

This .hymn is one of my personal favourites, not only because it echoes our motto, displayed on the wall, to set our minds on doing that which God expects us to do, but also because of its call for us to be active Christians, that is, that we cannot wait for things to happen, not to expect the good we want to fall into our laps, but to go and make it happen. To put it more simply, we can't complain and whine about things that make us unhappy; we have to get off our backsides - both for our own sake, and for that of our local and wider community. We make our own good fortune, and we can help to make others' life more fortunate - but we, in turn, should not expect others to make it for us! Ro!f Glenk once told me a great little expression, an ideal lesson for life:
"There are those who make things happen; there are those who watch things happen; and there are those who say, 'What happened?' "

If we are to be good Christians, active ones, we need to fit into that first category. We need to be aware of what is going on around us, and more importantly, of what needs to be done, and then do it, but with the guiding principles of Christianity ever foremost in our minds.

Hymn ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God (no. 96 - both verses –in English

I would now like to put some ideas to the Sunday School children - if my voice fades, please sing out from the back. Let' s read back over the second verse of the hymn: What is it telling us to do? Why?
Don't wait for things to happen/fall into our laps - go out and make it happen.
But be careful- don't be tempted to do the wrong thing!
Does this mean if I want more money that I can just ask you for it, or even steal it from you?

Use the jelly bean example. Have to keep the first verse in mind - the most important rule! When we see someone being bullied, how often do we help them? How often do we walk away because we don't want to become a victim also? We have to help ourselves, but also others, and above all, we have to be careful that we don't hurt others when we do what we want to do. We will often be faced by tests like this in life, when we are tempted by something that seems very good to us, but may be bad for others.

How do we then make the 'right' decision? Who can help you? Parents/teachers/friends/etc. In the Bible we can read about how Jesus was tested, or tempted, Text: Matthew 4: 1-11

Here the Sunday-School children depart

Now I would first like to discuss the text in broad terms, and give some background. Right at the beginning of his public ministry the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke all report that Jesus had his most prolonged encounter with evil and of course successfully resisted it. Our reading reports that Jesus was lead into the desert for this test by the 'Spirit of God' (what better setting than such a challenging and harsh environment, devoid of life?!). He was not tempted by the Devil until 40 days and nights had passed, so he was already drained by his time there, physically and mentally weakened. But of course this test was more about the mind, the emotions, convictions and so on, rather than a physical test.

Mark reports that the adversary was named Satan, Matthew and Luke that it was the Devil.

Both Judaism and Christianity have resisted the idea that that the forces of evil are independent and equal in power to God. No monotheistic religion could accept such a belief, as that would necessarily imply a force as great as God (another small 'g' god, if you like), and both Mark and Luke's accounts of the temptation also seem to imply that the Devils' powers were derived from the Spirit, that is God, even if they were then used for evil purposes. Only Mark reports that Jesus was aided by angels.

In the Book of Job (Jobe), Satan is a servant of God whose function it is to demonstrate how strong God's servants can be in the face of adversity. Like a modem day trial lawyer or a test pilot, Satan tested Job with repeated misfortune so that God was able to prove that Job's faithfulness was not based on any material benefits - is this not where so many of us in today' s society tend to 'fall down'?! We seek material riches or power and advantage over others. A similar idea to the testing of Job lay behind the temptations of Jesus. It is argued that these temptations demonstrated that he (Jesus) could neither be diverted from his Messianic mission, nor from the means that he had chosen to achieve it.

The three temptations (our text for today) all propose ways in which Jesus might use the power at his disposal for his own selfish ends or for merely mundane purposes. In the first the Devil suggested that Jesus should perform miracles to meet normal material needs, such as food. Jesus himself recognised, of course that we humans still need food; thus the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. And of course this was not the only time miracles were demanded of him - the Pharisees and Sadducees were keen to test him in this fashion. Jesus replied that the revealed word of God was more important, and thereby implied that any miracles he might perform must serve the truth he had come to reveal, and not simply to help or prove himself. In the second temptation Jesus was asked to prove that he was the son of God by throwing himself from the height of the Temple in Jerusalem to show that he could not come to harm, as angels would be sent to protect him; such a sign would surely compel belief in every one who saw it. Jesus replied that people must not try to force God to protect them against deliberately rash acts; a very sensible position not only for Jesus, but also for us to take. After all, 'the Lord helps those who help themselves' - but he should certainly not be put to the test by us. Think of our hymn and discussion earlier.

Finally, the Devil offered Jesus power over the whole world if he would worship him. Jesus replied that God alone is to be worshipped, and ordered Satan away. It is this lust for power, and of dominion over others that has lead to so much conflict and pain over the centuries.

Everything that happened to Jesus during the temptations was also a symbol of Jesus' beliefs about his mission. All the replies he gave consisted of quotations from ancient Hebrew religious law, so demonstrating that whatever he did would be faithful to the principles already revealed by God (but interestingly, this God was the Jewish God of the Old Testament, not the Christian God, the loving father, which Jesus sought to introduce). His task was to fulfil the law and God's promises enshrined in it, not to break it. The ancient Hebrew references also implied fulfilment of the ancient prophecies regarding the Messiah.

The temptations and the replies given by Jesus, also defined the nature of his mission and the way he intended to achieve it. He would not be diverted into using his powers to satisfy material needs, for that would be to worship a false god. The human need was far deeper. He would not use miracles to force people into believing in him, but only in the face of their immediate needs and in association with their faith in him. Above all, he would not call on any suspect means or powers to gain his ends; everything he achieved would be by unswerving loyalty to God.

While researching this text, I came across an interesting point on the passage, relating to its translation. Not only does it help us to better understand the passage, it also leads you to reflect on the accuracy of the oft-times translated Bible. One of the most vivid metaphors for temptation, concealed in the derivation of one of the Greek words for temptation used in the Gospels, is that of the gold refiner. The metal is heated to melting point and beyond in a furnace, so that any impurities float to the surface as 'dross', where they can be skimmed off. The pure gold is undamaged by the melting, and its worth is proved – so too with the temptations of Jesus. They proved that whatever he did was a pure expression of the love and will of God - he was as pure as the gold, verified in the crucible of the desert. Whether we accept this text literally or not, the meaning is clear - Jesus gives us three vital rules for life.

Firstly: We cannot simply live to satisfy our physical needs - 'bread alone is not enough'. Unlike animals, we must go beyond basic needs, but like animals, it is up to us to provide for ourselves (if we are able). Our ability to think, consider, and change is that which differentiates us from them. We can survive and have consideration for others; in fact, we should help-to make others' existence better. For us it is not a matter of 'survival of the fittest'. This teaching of Jesus is reflecting in the second verse of our hymn before.

Secondly: We should not put God to the test That is, we cannot sit back, say' God will provide', and then wait. We all know that life does not work that way. Opportunities do present themselves, but generally only if we set the scene for them. We all know the expression 'you create your own luck'.

A story about testing God that I always enjoy recounting is of a man whose town is threatened by a flood. Please bear with me if you have heard it before. It goes something like this: As the waters approach, a policeman calls on him to evacuate, but he tells him no, he has faith that God will provide for him and protect him. The waters arrive and he takes refuge in his house. A fireman in a boat approaches and offers to take him, but he receives the same answer. As the waters continue to rise the man takes refuge on his roof. A rescue helicopter spots him and flies over to pick him up, but no, the same reply again. Finally the waters sweep the man away and he drowns. On reaching heaven he seeks out God and asks why did you forsake me when I had such faith in you. God's reply was, three times you refused my help. The lesson? God works through people! He is in us and acts through us.

And thirdly: We should worship only God. That means, we need to put God and all he stands for above all else. The first verse of our hymn echoes this, as does our motto on the wall. We need to live our life ever mindful of how God would want us to, using Jesus' living example as our yardstick.

Succumbing to any sort of negative temptation is a real human weakness - as the saying goes, 'we are just human after all'. It is this 'weakness', whether deliberate or accidental in our make-up, that makes living as a Christian such a challenge, but also so rewarding, when we manage to overcome our human frailties. We appear to be so very different in this regard to Jesus - he seems to have withstood or passed the tests with ease. We are similarly tested in life, but often 'fail' to pass, succumbing to the easier or advantageous opportunity presented us, rather than taking the harder but right path.

A question that often springs to mind is, "Does God deliberately test us?" The testing of Jesus is, by the passages I studied, by 'the Spirit', that is, by God, although through 'the devil'. No matter who is tempting in the passage, the temptation appears quite deliberate, so does this then imply that God may tempt us deliberately also? This idea of whether God would or would not deliberately tempt us has lead to much debate over the line in the Lord's Prayer 'Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil'. This is for some a particularly difficult part of the prayer. It can be quite contentious, and is frequently raised in debates. We, that is, Templers, have altered the prayer in order to reflect our belief that He would not do this, and so we pray' Lead us, when in temptation'. We don't accept that God does this deliberately or overtly; it is just a fact of our human existence. We just happen to have a built-in good and/or evil model, and we can, or rather 'must', choose for ourselves and strive to overcome this hurdle.

Others believe that the prayer is fine as it is, and have no problem with either interpretation. Whichever way you lean, I do not think that it is so important what is said. What is important, is the intent, and the conviction with which the words are uttered.

Jesus was making a point in our text: that we can resist and overcome, just as he did, and he gave us the reasons why, and these form the foundation for our defence against the temptation. Could we really face challenges on a scale like those presented to Jesus if we were alone? Like Jesus did? Maybe not after 40 days of fasting in the desert - perhaps there is an element of 'old time' exaggeration here to ensure that the original audience was suitably impressed by the teachings of this fellow Jesus. I truly feel that we can of course face such temptations - many do it around the world, every day. But just to add to the difficulty, we also see people around us succumb every day, and we can see how they have profited from it, and we start to think, "Well, maybe I deserve it; maybe just a little bit; why should they get it all". And then we are already on the slippery slope.

However, if we consider carefully, we can also recognise how they have lost, morally and spiritually. As our pamphlet 'Religious Perspective' states when referring to mankind, "Through God's creative powers we are given a free will, albeit limited, and tendencies toward good and toward evil. We are called to work on ourselves and the world of which we are part and for which we share responsibility." I can see no greater task, nor challenge. In meeting this challenge, we are doing that which God requires of us.

Let us now sing the Templer Hymn, number 1 in the hymnbook. Again, please sing in English if you are comfortable doing so. We will sing verses 1, 2, 4 and 9.

Christoph Hoffmann's words in this hymn are clear in their meaning. We know, as Christians, exactly what is expected of us, and we know, as humans, that these times of testing will come, and so we should arm ourselves, so that we can overcome them. We need to set our sights on the true goal, for that is the only thing of real and everlasting value. Should we have to face these challenges alone? Sometimes we have no option, and unfortunately it is then that the test is most difficult to meet, but we have an example to follow, as the hymn reminds us.

As we tend to succumb when we are alone and unaided, we need to make best use of the support that family, friends and community offer us - I certainly do this, in fact, quite frequently of late, and for this I am extremely grateful. There is no doubt that others can help us overcome our own weaknesses. We have the ability to choose, whether to do right or wrong, but the decision is so much easier when others help us to make it and then support us along the way. Ultimately, with their help and guidance, and with practice and inner growth, we will learn to always listen to our conscience - God's voice in us.

One great danger, perhaps the greatest test or temptation, is to lose our faith in God. With all of life's trials and tribulations, it is not surprising that people are sometimes tempted to question the presence of a loving God. When we consider all of the evil, the terror, the conflict and pain in the world, the disasters like bushfires, the accidents like airliners crashing, then it is easy to understand why victims or their families ask, "how could God let this happen?" or "How could there be a loving God if this happens?" This is a question that I still struggle with - I have no answer for these people, only that this is the greatest test of all to overcome. And blind faith in this situation is no real answer, as true faith is considered faith, not blind. We can only console ourselves with the idea that everything, and everyone, has a purpose, and our role is to make the best of that which we have. Put your faith in God (and yourself), but don't test Him.

In the face of all this, it is amazing just how resilient we humans can be, both to temptations and to adversity, when we have a strong foundation of core values to cling to, and a supportive network of family and friends to strengthen our resolve, and to help remind us of our core values. They can guide us through our thoughts; help us to clarify conflicting ideas and values, sometimes just being a sounding board. With real resilience, and real support from others, we can even be repeatedly knocked down emotionally and still keep bouncing back. We can keep our eyes on the true goal, and ultimately we are better and stronger for it, but at the time this can seem little consolation.

Our state of mind, our set of beliefs and values, determines not only our resilience, but more importantly, our ability to think rationally and to consider all sides equally and fairly in times of conflict, not only conflict within ourselves, but conflict with others. How we respond to others in these times is a great test. One great human weakness is to lash out at the other party - that cannot be considered as anything else but great personal tragedy, and a failure. In order to be resilient humans and true Christians we need to be tolerant and open-minded. Resilience requires flexibility, and our flexibility also increases resilience!. Flexibility across a range of attitudes and beliefs is the key to understanding others and finding compromise in times of conflict. Then a great battle needs to be fought within us, not with 'the devil’ but with our own human frailties. Then we really need to listen to our conscience, and we really test the strengths of our own beliefs, values and morals.

We need to be willing to consider another's position, in order to understand where they are coming from. And we all know that that is so hard to do when you are balancing their needs, goals and priorities against your own. The temptation then is to see your own as being more important. This temptation inexorably leads to beliefs, values and patiences being tested, and finally it leads to conflict, resulting in anger, frustration, confusion, unclear thinking and irrational or hurtful behaviour. This is when we see others, or others see us, at the worst. Then we need to weigh up what is more important: belief or practicalities. A current example is the looming conflict in Iraq. Our nation's leader has made a decision that is not supported by the majority. Why did he do this? Does that country need to be dealt with? If yes, how would this best be done? Peacefully and slowly, or violently and quickly? Can you really hope to defeat something irrational and violent, by remaining rational and peaceful? And how should people best express their opposition to the entire issue? This is of course an extreme example, but if, in our everyday lives, we feel we are up against something irrational or unfair, we know how hard it can be to not respond in a similar fashion, especially if we feel that our convictions are being used against us, to manipulate us.

Often the problem is just caused by a lack of understanding. We may see someone else's ideas or methods as ineffective or unacceptable, not compatible with our set of values; we may have inaccurate or incomplete information - how often is this the case, when we hear only rumour or one side of the story and then make a judgement based on that; a major clash may occur through inappropriate or incompatible goals or methods. And finally, antagonistic or negative feelings, for whatever reason, on either or both sides, can ruin all chances of the test being successfully met. It is sometimes as simple as a situation where either or both are just having a bad day and it snowballs from there. The final straw, if you like.

Unfortunately for our more human natures, in the end, even a good compromise generally means not meeting all needs and goals, but on the human side, some would argue it still to be the best outcome. Such is life, to quote Ned Kelly. What can help us in these times, when we are sorely tempted, is to remember, that despite all of our imperfections (and we all have these!), how we respond to others who have slighted us, or how we act after we have slighted someone is just as great a test of character. To apologise and/or to forgive is the true sign of having met and overcome the test of such a human conflict. Two wise sayings that come to mind with this final idea in mind are:

1. Challenge is inevitable - defeat is optional." We know these things will pop up. We cannot allow ourselves to succumb to them.

2. "Making a mistake is falling down; failure is not getting up again." This line from Helen Keller, a person who persevered and succeeded despite overwhelming adversity, says it all. We can match this to all I have presented today. When we make a mistake, which we inevitably will, we just need to make up for it, learn from it, and move on. And we must grant others the same right.

When we realise that we can achieve this, we will feel empowered and refreshed. The burden lifts away from the shoulders. You no longer feel slighted, but rather renewed. You have resolved the inner turmoil and overcome the bitterness, frustration or despair. You realise just how pointless and destructive your earlier state of mind was. And if you are particularly lucky, you have a wonderful family and outstanding friends who have helped you through it - I hope that you may all be similarly blessed.

We should never be tempted to believe that it is our right, or just that it is right, to have all the jelly beans for ourself. With these thoughts in mind, would you please rise, and let us pray the Lord's Prayer together.

To conclude this morning's service, let us sing together all four verses of 'Amazing Grace', number 10 in the hymnbook. God's grace, His forgiveness and understanding, His divine kindness and mercy, can sustain us all through all the times of trial, all tests, all temptations. It will lead us safely through our own times of darkness into the inner light for our selves, and the outer light for our fellow humans, that is the result of the two great commandments of love, for God, and for our neighbour as for ourselves.

Thank you for your attendance today. The Open Day atmosphere today will continue with a sausage sizzle and coffee/tea and cake; please stay and enjoy it.

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Christmas Service in Bayswater

Wednesday 25th December 2002 - 10.15am
Accompaniment: Sonia Glenk
Hymn: Mit Jubelklang stimmt an das Lied - 71 (1-3 & 6); Ihr Kinderlein kommet - 48 (1-4); Joy to the world - 54 (I, 2, 4). Choir: Es ist ein Ros' entsprungen; Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht; Joy to the world - (with congregation)

Text: Matthew 1: 18-25 The birth of Jesus Christ - Karl Wennagel
Readings: Luke 2: 1-7, The birth of Jesus - Mieka Decker

The time of Advent is over, the preparations done, the expectations hopefully fulfilled. The very peak of the Christmas period is upon us. Last evening and today we celebrate the birth of Jesus. And so we have gathered together here this morning, as is our tradition, but in surroundings -nowhere near as humble, or, presumably as uncomfortable, as those of the stable of the Christmas story of Jesus' birth. We have gathered to commemorate, reflect on, and give thanks for, the birth of a man over 2000 years ago, a man who holds special significance for us and many others all over the world.

Welcome!

Now that we are all here, and sitting comfortably, I invite you to take a deep breath, and relax - it's crazy that at this time of joy, this occasion so central to our belief, we tend to wipe ourselves out in the frenzy that this ancient celebration has become. It appears that being rushed off your feet has just become another of the so-called Christmas traditions, in some cases to the extent that friends of ours, in their annual letter to summarise their year for all and sundry refer to Christmas as 'the final hurdle to overcome for this year'! And yet, because it is a tradition, we cling to it for myriad reasons. For the older generations, we do things 'that way' because that is how we have always done them, or because our parents did it that way. It reminds us of times pas, and more importantly, of special people who shared this time with us, but who are no longer here. Doing things the same way also makes things easier - we fall into a pattern, knowing what to do when, and how long each step in the process will take. We take comfort in the familiar, the predictable, the traditional.

Tradition is a powerful force, both positive and negative. It coddles and protects us, yet also differentiates and divides us. It leads to lovely things, like the singing of favourite carols and our traditional Gutsle, yet serves to confuse us in services when the verses of carols are sung in different order, because that's how we sang it at home! It amuses us when we remember how our families changed lyrics, the 'Pflaum' hanging in the 'Weihnachtsbaum', or the interminable jokes about the God's son 'Owie', in 'Silent Night', and why he is laughing. From the Christmas pastries and cakes, to the meal, the carols selected, the entry of children in age order to the celebration first, and so on, everything is firmly set in a complex system of individual family customs and rules. In every home 'weihnachtet es sehr’ – ‚its very much Christmas’ - a lovely German expression not readily translated, as in English we don't have a verb 'to christmas', but you get the gist.

Let us now sing together 'Mit Jubelklang stimmt an das Lied - Oh come and sing the song of joy' , number 71, verses 1,2,3 and 6. I have chosen this hymn because it builds a bridge between two sets of beliefs. I will expand on this later. "Behold a rose is growing of loveliest form and grace, as prophets sang, foreknowing: It springs from Jesse's race".

Both our choir's introductory hymn and the hymn we just sang refer to a passage in the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament The first verse of its eleventh chapter reads: "Then a branch will grow from the stock of Jesse, and a shoot will spring from his roots."

'Die Alten', the prophets of the Old Testament referred to in the hymns, predicted the coming of the Messiah. The Jewish people had spent generations awaiting his arrival, but when he did come they failed to recognise him. They were hoping for a savour who would free them from the yoke of the Roman occupiers, and re-establish the old kingdom of David. But they waited in vain, for Jesus was not the great military and political leader they had hoped for, but a moral and spiritual saviour, charged with bringing his people back to the true course, and to encourage them in their spiritual development. As he said himself: his "kingdom was not of this world". But I do not believe that his world was physically else where, but rather spiritually. That is, the current conditions on earth were not as they ought to be. He ruled, unlike the worldly kings, not with weapons and might, but with tolerance and love.

I chose the choir's opening hymn after reading the text for today It comes from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter one, verses 18 to 25. What an inspiring and magical, but also heart wrenching, story, of the birth of Jesus, but also of a man who felt forced to leave his betrothed because of the pressures of society through his purported sin. But for me there was so much more to this story, and largely disappointment. I hope you do not feel as disappointed as I did, when I first read this passage. Disappointment is not an emotion we usually link with Christmas, unless we think of children not getting the much longed for gift, yet it was a very powerful response in me. It surprised and disappointed me that Matthew, the man who gave us the Sermon on the Mount, such a practical guide to everyday living, and from which we take our Templer motto, should present us with such a version of the birth of Christ. I suppose what added to my reaction was that I had never really knowingly studied this text. My sum Christmas experience of the Bible had always been Luke's famous passage. This passage by Matthew appeared foreign to me, not only because it was so new to me, but even more so because the sentiment was so far from what I have come to believe. This was a not a description of the birth of the man Jesus, the living example for us, but a version written to match the prophecy, placing great emphasis on the virgin birth. I get the feeling the writer was forced into this version. As verse 22 of our text states, "Now all this happened to make come true what the Lord had said through the prophet". I fear people made rather more of the issue than Jesus himself made, which should tell us something.

Though Christmas is often described as a time of magic, and Jesus life and actions on Earth can be regarded similarly, the concept of the virgin birth is something I do not accept as a fundamental part of my belief, nor as an absolute requirement for anyone. It drives the man Jesus, that is, the being who is the yardstick, the role model, for all Christians, out of our realm, out of the worldly Kingdom of God, and into the heavenly. It drives him to a level we could never aspire to, and so leaves us almost in limbo. Jesus means more to me as a man than as 'the Son of God'. Yet this very questioning and rejection drives me to ask myself frequently: Is his message of love really devalued if he is not born of a virgin? Is the spirit of God in him (or in me, for that matter) somehow lessened if I find myself unable to accept it? Is my own Christianity not correct? It seems that more and more people, even clerics, are beginning to question the idea of a virgin birth - it was reported only two days ago in The Age that one quarter of Church of England clergy do not accept it, yet continue to preside over traditional Christmas masses as they don't want to lose their jobs, and because it is what the people, their congregations, expect and enjoy, either as a fundamental part of their faith, or simply out of tradition! One vicar put it very nicely, I think, reportedly saying: "There was nothing special about this (Jesus’) birth or his childhood. It was his adult life that was extraordinary". I find that statement very reassuring.

But it was not only the religious meaning in our text that was problematic for me. I think what I was missing most of ail was the tradition that Luke's story has become. I can't remember a Christmas when I have not heard it either in the service. and certainly not at home, where it is traditional in our family to have the story read as part of the Christmas Eve celebrations. The story, had become as much a part of Christmas as the decorated tree, the carols, the 'Gutsle', and so on. The story holds so many memories - as a child of having to suffer through it, often twice, once at home and once at the grandparents, before gifts could be opened. Then, me being the youngest in the family, in having the honour of reading it to the family, while the other siblings had to suffer through it. And now, as the upholder of the traditions of my own little family, acknowledging that all celebrating with us should also hear it, as it is part and parcel of the celebration. But also missing for me was the human side of the Christmas story, of a family having to move at bureaucracy's behest for the sake of a census, of having to live in a stable, a substandard establishment fit only for animals because nothing else was available, the lovely image of the proud parents and curious animals gathered around the manger, of the arrival of the shepherds, the ordinary people, and then the arrival of the wise men, bearing that modern symbol of Christmas - gifts.

You can see that the whole subject has left me grappling with many conflicting emotions. Am I being too negative, rejecting something because it did not suit my image of Christmas? Am I bogged down in my own belief, too ready to reject other options? This question in the long term is positive, because it forces me to consider where I stand, and also to consider where others stand, and accept that it is unlikely to be on the very same ground as me - a closed mind is not a desired state; and certainly not a very Christian one! So I was left with the joy of my Christmas traditions, balanced against the traditions that lead to inflexibility in belief. Just because something is a tradition does not necessarily make it right, but it also should not leave it open to condemnation as old and outdated. Tradition is a powerful force, and a powerful tool of persuasion, wether in our own minds, or when employed by others. For this reason it is often used as an appeal in advertising or arguments. But this is a far too negative image for today - for the moment let us regard tradition as a comfort, and a stable foundation from which to launch oneself forward, whatever the topic may be.

Before we near from Luke, let us now sing a classic, the carol that heralds the start of festivities, and the entry into the lounge room, in our family 'Ihr Kinderlein kommet - oh come, little children'. Number 48, we will sing all four verses.

This hymn neatly encapsulates the bulk of the Christmas story by Luke, which we will now hear - after all, it's traditional! It will be read by .Mieka Decker.

Most of us have heard this story so often we know it almost by heart, yet it loses none of its charm. It is one of the most lovely things I associate with Christmas. And whether one believes in it literally, or whether we feel it has been embellished and poeticised, as was the practice of the age, is irrelevant. Even if we scoff at what seem unlikely events, we can still appreciate the story's beauty and take heart from its symbolic significance. The lesson that we take, not only from the story of Jesus' birth, but also from his ministry, is what it is that will elevate us, not our 'faith' in some miracles alone. That is another reason I prefer Luke 's account - in a sense that story contains more magic - it isn't such a cold factual account - it is a story that sets a beautiful image - inspires me more. Why is this inspiration so important?

When commemorating Jesus' birth, by gathering together and singing, we also need to reflect on why we do this. So often we hear about what he brought us, and so often the hymns and stories refer to him bringing light into the world. If we are, as claim, to follow Jesus’ example in life then we too must bring light into the world - we must make this another of our traditions, and elevate it to the first rung in the order of merit.

Light is a glorious metaphor for the message of love that Jesus sought to spread amongst his followers, and not just for ourselves or our nearest, but for all people. The nativity should act as an inspiration, reconfirming our conviction to live as Christians. During his life on earth, Jesus demonstrated how we should think, be and act - he presented us with a practical guide to life. He refocussed our relationship with God, changing him from one to be obeyed, to one to be loved, expressing this- in the image of a father/child relationship. This again is important as it puts in a context we can relate to and feel comfortable with. Our relationship to God should be like that of a child to a parent, one who. is loving and caring, pardoning and merciful One who can guide –us through life, so that we all listen, to those around us and to our conscience, and then act accordingly. Christmas provides us with the ideal opportunity to refocus and recommit to this most important of all aims. Steve Bracks should not be alone in claiming to 'listen' and 'act'!

I think this draws us nearer to the goal Christoph Hoffmann set, of 'obeying with head and heart' - we should not be forced, or force ourselves, into a faith that is without conviction. That is why the reality of the story is so important to me, and that is why Jesus’ living example is the key for me, rather than a virgin birth or a bodily resurrection. And it is through the realities, through actions rather than just belief, that we give our life the meaning that so many seek for so long for and often only find through magic.

We do have a purpose here on Earth, of that I am convinced. What put us here I have no clear explanation for, and a grand reason for all our existence is beyond me, but individually we can all have a very clear goal, whether there is an afterlife or not. To live our life as closely as we possibly can to that of Jesus example. Once we believe in this, our set of values completely changes. Things that used to be very important to us before loose their significance, and vice versa. But the danger is, of course, that we are too drawn into the trials of daily life, and are blinded by what is going on in the world around, and the competing values of society. Competition, materialism, the pressures of modern society all weighs down on us and distract us from the true goal. It's a dangerous trend, and resisting it on your own is near impossible. Fortunately we have other people around to help us - our partners, our families, our neighbours, our community. Our modern lifestyle is so hectic, that we are often drawn away from that which gives true meaning to our life. Refocussing takes personal effort, and perhaps a very different approach for each individual person.

I would like to share with you an article I found in the Age during the recent state election campaign. It's from the regular Saturday 'Faith' column, and is titled "Casting a vote for the leader whose platform is love". I enjoyed it so much, because it illustrates a service so different to ours, yet not that different at all, because the people in it, and their emotions and thoughts during the service are just like ours. We are in church for all the right reasons, yet often it is only our body that is here - our thoughts are very much elsewhere.

The article neatly illustrates that challenge we face as Christians - our faith can't just be squeezed in on Sundays - we need to live it, and doing so in communities, makes not only the striving easier, but also puts us in the position to put our faith into action. Yet life tends to make what should be easy seem so very difficult, as our desire to do right conflicts with the many realities of modem life. I would say to the writer (although I guess she already knows this): Don't just throw in your lot with God on Sunday- it has got to be there everyday. And there is the challenge, because the 'every day' is such a challenge, so full of competing demands and contradictions. There comes a time for all of us when we have to look at ourselves and our lifestyle, and decide where the true priorities lie. Do they lie with just the worldly, or with the light that first Christmas brought, and continues to bring. And this light is available to all who wish to receive it. This is so simply expressed in the hymn we sang - 'the parting wall' ‘tween God and man is lifted up and borne off then' - there is no barrier, only one's own hesitation or reluctance. And it is so beautifully expressed in the nativity story. It was the shepherds in the fields who received the revelation about the birth of the Saviour. These shepherds were poor people living close to nature. They were modest and humble. It was they who were first to see the light and to hear the divine message. This good news of the Christmas story has given hope and comfort to millions of people from that time on. It provides the inspiration to reignite our wonderment and our conviction. We need to use Christmas to set our focus for the year to come. That way, like Jesus' entry to the world, Christmas becomes a starting point rather than an end.

Don't regard Christmas as a hurdle - you would be missing the point. It should not be the end of the year, but a climax, and a strengthening and a time for reflection, for evaluation, and for reorientation. Accept the light into your life, and then help to spread it to others. But don't just regard it as your duty - regard it as your right. It is not a chore; it is a delight. It is not a hurdle to be cleared, but an ideal to be embraced. Let's not just give our gifts at Christmas, but every day. Let's give gifts because we want to, not because we have to. And let's not just give gifts to our loved ones, but let's share our gifts, what ever they may be, with our community and all around us. We need to put true Christianity into action, every day, for everyone, for our community, because community is our strongest tradition. However, we need to move beyond our immediate, small community, into wider society - that's a message we will hear more and more. Our focus for 2003, perhaps?! The challenge is there for all of us, and only our own inhibitions stand in our way.

And we hope that we are not the only ones contemplating this message today - it has been another tumultuous year for our country and the world. Terrorism leapt back into the spot light with Bali, and our thoughts go out to those families spending their first Christmas without their loved ones. War seems imminent in Iraq. We could dearly do with some rain, not only to fill our reservoirs, but also to fend off the ever-growing threat of bushfires, and to relieve our ailing farmers. And we seem so powerless, when faced with these events. Yet we must not forget, though when faced by problems of this magnitude, that we still have the light with us, and this, together with our families and community, will see us through the dark times.

As we near the end of our Christmas service, let us now hear our choir sing a very traditional and beloved hymn- Silent night, holy night.

As an introduction to the Lord's Prayer, I would like to read you a poem I found in The Age yesterday. It was sent in by Gillian Yung, and is titled "Thoughts for the day before Christmas".

To close our Christmas service let us sing together, lead by our choir, 'Joy to the world', number 54 - all three verses.

Close:

Exult and sing the song of jov.'
Of bliss and jubilation,
The darkness cedes, the night retreats,
The glorious sun has risen.

The light of the world has come to stay,
The mighty hero is born today:
Glory to God in the highest!
And peace on earth to those with whom he is pleased.

Merry Christmas! Frohe Weihnachten!