#htrinity.ie

This Sunday, Rob Jones spoke about the woman at the well in John 4.

With the women at the well, Jesus:

Accepts her

Cares for her

Takes seriously her struggle,

Challenges her gracefully

Invites her

Inspires her

  “Living in community is inevitably a choice to lie down on God’s operating table and open our hearts to the Holy Spirit’s healing through one another. It is an invitation to spiritual surgery, made all the messier by our inexperience in using and submitting to the “surgical tools” of gracious truth-telling and patient listening. It surprises me how the Spirit shows up again and again to help us through these messy surgeries. God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness”

- The Intentional Christian Community Handbook: For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus by David Janzen

Cultivating Passion

Greg Fromholz spoke last Sunday on Cultivating Passion. "Freedom is the sound of crashing tables in sacred spaces" - Greg

Quote: “Faith is the highest passion in a human being.”-Soren Kierkegaard 

Scott Evans spoke on Sunday with a talk entitled; Your Exodus, Their Exile.

 Just wanted to send you on a quick funding update! So we just had a meeting with the coordinator about how to sustainably invest the money Holy Trinity gave us. Here is what we are doing with your generous donations: 

1. We are buying school supplies (copy books and pens) for every single child in the primary school we are working with here in Malawi. When we were teaching we were shocked to see many kids didn't even have a pencil or a scrap of paper for themselves, so this will change a lot. 2. We will be able to single handedly fund the painting and decoration of the new nursery school block. This new block is important because at the moment 1-6 year olds are all in the same classroom which makes lesson planning close to impossible! Funding to build the block has already been secured. 3. My absolute favourite- in August, the final year in primary school will be getting their state exam results. It is expected that one or two will get high enough grades to qualify for entry to secondary school- but it is far too expensive to afford. We will be able to offer TWO FULL SCHOLARSHIPS to boarding school. This could change the whole course of these kids' lives and I can't describe how exciting that is!! No one deserves that chance more than these precious kids. 4. We will be able to buy toys for the nursery class- they currently have none at all. I'm sure you can imagine how special that will be for the small ones! 5. We have brought two suitcases full of clothes, books and school supplies for the kids in Tanzania already. We had some funds left over and we bought a few football kits and bottles of nail polish (the most coveted items in this village) to give as gifts to a few kids here in Malawi who we noticed being bullied and left out. We wanted to let them know that they were special to us, and to the Holy Trinity community too. Thank you so much!! I'm so excited!!

This Sunday, Andrew spoke on what we can learn from the spiritual rhythms that Jesus lived by and also considered the question : is busyness next to godliness? 

Andrew Asked 3 good questions:

1) On a scale of 1-10 (1=not busy & 10 = very busy) are you on an average day?

2) How much is your answer to question 1 based on your own choices to be busy or to do with circumstances that make you busy?

3) Is the lifestyle of busyness next to Godliness?

Bill Johnston "Busyness is the enemies way to remove the sabbath day of rest"

Andrew Somerville - "nothing will give your soul rest, like hanging out with God".

“By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us” 1 John 3:16

A few Sunday mornings ago, we had our first ‘Uncover’ bible study that looks at the Gospel of Luke. This week’s study looked at the story of the healing of the paralytic man.

Just to give you a background to why I chose to write about this...well, maybe you, like I was, are reading this and thinking “Man, I’ve heard this story so many times...Jesus heals this guy who they lower down through the roof, Jesus forgives his sins and hey presto, he walks home a new man”. But I found there is so much more to this story than just a man being healed...

Someone in our study pointed out that in our children’s bibles growing up, we saw an almost clinical picture of this man and his friends; the man being lowered through a neatly cut hole in the roof with some ropes which they somehow happened to have nearby! Really easy, right? In fact, delving into this passage from the beginning shows us, it’s possible that this man’s friends may have travelled quite a distance to bring him to Jesus – maybe 4-5 days from Judea to Galilee. I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been to carry this man on a mat for a couple of days; the men leaving their responsibilities (family, jobs) behind for a few days to carry this man through hot desert plains on a mat?!

But even more than that, as a paralytic, society would have considered their friend an outcast – society perhaps even believing his sin or the sins of his parents had brought this paralysis upon himself. Not only isolated, his very being would have been considered shameful and he was not worthy of engaging with. What a sorrowful place to be found in alone?

    But regardless of all of this, these men decide to bring their friend to Jesus...in the hopes that all the crazy stories they had heard of late could possibly be true, this man who calls himself the Messiah, was capable of healing. Finally, the group reach their journey’s end but they realise that it’s totally jam-packed. There were too many people trying to capture Jesus’ attention – it was a hopeless situation. But these guys persist, they go up on the roof and start tearing it apart just in the hopes that Jesus can do something...

I guess reading this story again with fresh eyes, I was just so struck by the friends’ compassion  - as a community of friends literally taking on and bearing the weight of someone else’s burden. There’s something so beautiful about that. Doing for this man what he could never have done for himself, by himself. Not because of anything they would get in return. Just to love someone.

They were relentless in their pursuit of wholeness for their friend.

 I’m so challenged by these men who remain nameless. It’s got me asking myself so many questions. Do I love people as sacrificially as these guys did? Do I pray for and “bear the weight” of others through tough times and rejoice with them in the good? Am I so moved by compassion for people in my community that I have to, need to love them proactively? And in this way, does my life depict to others, the incredibly vast love that Christ has shown me?

“This is the God of the gospel of grace. A God who, out of love for us, sent the only Son He ever had wrapped in our skin. He learned how to walk, stumbled and fell, cried for His milk, sweated blood in the night, was lashed with a whip and showered with spit, was fixed to a cross, and died whispering forgiveness on us all.” Brennan Manning, the Ragamuffin Gospel

Jack Heaslip was our guest speaker on Sunday looking at Romans 8. Aisling McCormick has written an excellent reflection on some of the ideas from this sermon. See below.

  You can listen above or download the talk here

  “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God. And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. (Romans 8, vss. 20-28)

Arriving home from Holy Trinity today, I opened the front door, took one look at my flat and thought, “Ugh, what a mess!” I began to regret inviting 5 friends over to mine for a late lunch! As I started to do a quick clean up before my guests arrived, I began to reflect back to the words spoken only an hour before that Ruth-Anne had read for us beautifully and from which the preacher Rvd Jack (‘Preach it, Bro’) Heaslip had explicated a couple of important ‘nuggets’ for us to chew on! Romans 8.

We all know and have experienced that life is full of difficulties and ambiguities. One can easily become consumed with those big questions, ‘Why is there suffering?’ ‘Why so much discrimination and injustice?’, etc. Many turn to Christians and ask them why does their God ‘allow’ these things happen? What should we say? Jack suggested that the best answer he has found to life’s difficult questions is “I don’t know”. So often we find ourselves needing to find an answer and try to defend God and attempt to tackle that question about why does God let these things happen to us or to others. But the thing is, it’s ok to live in uncertainty and confusion, the messiness; it is a natural part of life. It was encouraging to hear someone who’s been a pastor and leader, and mature in the ministry say that it’s ok, life is messy, things often don’t work out the way you hoped they would. I’ve come to learn that God is right there with me in the messiness. Beauty can be found in brokenness, holiness can be discovered in times of uncertainty and integrity can be built amid ambiguity.

Pretty regularly I have the feeling that I will be happier and more fulfilled in life if I ‘get there’, if I reach that point where things are a little less fuzzy and grey and more clear. It’s not so much about possessions or having stuff, but more about sorting out issues, problems, relationships, etc. and ‘being in a good place’. What is that, really? Jack exclaimed that if one finds themselves at a point where they’ve got everything sorted and are completely certain about everything in life, one is probably a corpse in a mortuary somewhere! Paul wrote to the first-century church in Rome, “But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” Jesus calls us to live in this uncertainty, it’s in this place, we find we are really living; we learn and find fulfillment!

The BBC News magazine published an article today about a word-wide study done about happiness. The results show that people can make themselves happier through leading a pro-active life; taking risks and just getting stuck in! Professor Ruut Veenhoven, professor of social conditions for human happiness at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam explains the negative correlation discovered among those interviewed between working towards set goals in life and happiness in life!

"Though it is generally assumed that you need goals to lead a happy life, evidence is mixed. The reason seems to be that unhappy people are more aware of their goals, because they seek to change their life for the better."

So, forget about constantly needing to improve yourself, don’t get too caught up in reaching that goal, whether it’s with work, relationships, or trying to keep up with those around you.  Let yourself go, be yourself, live life with all the messiness. Embrace the messiness, because “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” (vs 37) and nothing can separate us from Gods love. He (and hopefully others) won’t love you any more if you have your life sorted!

And with this in mind, I turned to see books out on the table, wilting flowers in a vase, half-folded laundry, cereal left out and milk spilt on the table and thought – these are signs that I am living in this house! The pristine, immaculately clean house which I think I want would actually be a sign that I am not really living in that house!! Well, that’s my excuse anyway! This is similar in life – we shouldn’t feel we need to present ourselves like we have it all sorted, sometimes we experience real life when things are a bit all over the place!