Richard's Ramblings

I’ve been shouting at my computer again.  It insisted on auto-populating an email address field with an invalid address, and when I corrected it, it just jolly well overwrote the correction and re-inserted the invalid address.  Of course, there was no point in shouting at the computer, I’ve disabled speech recognition, and its vocabulary probably doesn’t encompass the words which I was shouting anyway. And the dog gets very upset.  I have to assure her that I’m not shouting at her, and give her a treat or two by way of apology. King David might have had my computer prophetically in mind when he writes in Psalm 32 about “the horse or the mule, which have no understanding”. (Don’t be like them, he’s saying).  Luckily, he goes on: “but the Lord’s unfailing love surrounds the one who trusts in him. Rejoice in the Lord and be glad, you righteous; sing, all you who are upright in heart!” Singing is a great anger management therapy. ...

Almost a couple of weeks ago, Leisa packed away our Christmas decorations (because she knows where they’re stored, and she can pack ten times the stuff which I can in the same space). Then this week, I changed the lectern frontal from Christmas white to Ordinary Time green. That’s a silly name for the seasons of the Church liturgical year which are marked by the colour green. I mean, on the one hand we say that we’re expecting God to work great things at KUC, extraordinary things, and then we say “We’re in Ordinary Time”. OK, you might not, but liturgy groupies like me do. It’s easy to fall into the notion that we’re just ordinary folk, getting out of bed and going along to church Sunday by Sunday is ordinary, for an ordinary service.  Setting a budget is just ordinary, leading musical worship is just ordinary, praying for our sisters and brothers who are ill or sad or at their wits’ end is ordinary.  Weekday and weeknight activities in the church are just ordinary. The r...

Every Christmas, folk who wouldn’t otherwise go to church take themselves off to a cathedral or their village church or their parents’ or partner’s church for a carol service. Some feel a teeny bit guilty that they don’t attend the place more frequently. And their parents and partners wish that they did, too. But where were the principal actors at Christ’s actual birth? And who were they?  Were they respectable, upstanding regular church goers? First, the shepherds. They were “abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night”. They weren’t goody two shoes in the temple, they were agricultural tradies getting on with their job.  Yet it was to the shepherds, not to the clergy or temple-goers, that the angel announced good news of great joy. Then the wise men. They weren’t even Jewish. They were foreigners, and probably they believed in or kept an open mind about other religious faiths of the region. But like good scientists, they made an observation - the...

If you were at Kirwan Uniting last Sunday, the first Sunday in Advent, you’d have seen the miracle of a plain white LED candle being turned Advent purple by a simple button press on a remote.  A day or two before, I had changed the handle LED on my electric toothbrush from Ordinary Time green to purple, just because I could, and I’m a geek, I effected this transformation by the Oral B app on my iPhone. It was meant light-heartedly so that I could tease my more earnest liturgist mates on Facebook.  This isn’t the place to discuss liturgical colours or their meaning, they come well toward the bottom of what’s really important in our corporate worship. My toothbrush, on the other hand … A lovely little book was published only a couple of days ago, Liturgy of the Ordinary (sacred practices in everyday life), Tish Harrison Warren, IVP Books 2019. Tish is an Episcopalian (Anglican)  priest whose book looks at ordinary things we do each day, waking up, making the bed, argui...

During a mad few years at the end of the 90s (that’s 1990s, don’t be cheeky) and early 2000s, I was an international manager for start-up software companies. I had company apartments in Boston, Munich, Johannesburg and Kuala Lumpur. Customers, or pilot sites, were scattered all around USA and Canada, Europe, Africa and Asia.  I circumnavigated the globe at least once every month, sometimes several times a month. It was very disorienting. Leisa would look at her diary and mine, an atlas and airline timetables, and we’d meet up wherever it was best for her to intercept me on my peregrinations.  In particularly frenetic periods, I’d forget where I was or where I was going to. Once, I went up to a check-in desk at Hong Kong, and boldly announced that I was booked to Hong Kong.  “You’re in Hong Kong”, said the nice Cathay Pacific lady. So I am, I remembered, and told her OK, I must be going to Melbourne then. A tip which many of you will know for longhaul flight is to set yo...

I have Ramblers’ Block.  A Bible app (Olive Tree, great value) and a couple of commentaries are open on my iMac in front of me, I have besought the Lord at least thrice for inspiration, but my mind is blank.  In Matthew 6, Jesus tells us to go into our room and pray. I’ve done that, I’m in my study right now, the walls lined with assorted theological and devotional treatises. Also in my room is the dog, barking at everyone who has the temerity to walk past or live over the road. As if that wasn’t distraction enough, off to my right is an iPad streaming the Australia Pakistan Gabba Test. OK Boomer, you say, but I bet I’m not the only Christian who is the cause of his or her own distraction.  Adept (ish) multi-tasker as I am, I can’t give serious attention to God’s Word and something else at the same time.  Prayer is a little different, I can pray while I’m driving (don’t try the old evangelist’s “While every head is bowed and every eye closed” thing), or walking,...

“Thou shalt not covet thy Presbytery Minister’s Tesla” - but I do, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa .  (A couple of explanations of terms, for non-Uniting and non-motorhead folk respectively, the Presbytery Minister is a sort-of bishop, and a Tesla is a dead cool electric car.).  Rev Garry took me for a drive. He can just sit there, arms folded, while the car steers itself around corners and roundabouts, and generally behaves like a model citizen except the citizen has got nothing to do with it.  I think KUC can earn brownie points by installing a fast charger in our car park for when Garry visits. Then other electric car owners would know that it’s there, it will come up on their satnav when they look for charging points in Townsville as they swish silently from Port Douglas to Port Macquarie, and we can serve coffee and let them use our toilets, and share the Gospel, while they wait for their batteries to be topped up. This auto magic is enabled by the array of satellites...