Matthew 28:11-15

In the past few decades there has been a trend to look at history from all angles. This has meant revising how history is perceived and told by people.

In Australia, as a child, I was taught at school that the white settlers came and the aboriginal people just acquiesced and moved aside for the superior white settlers.

It was only when I was in my 20s that a great many books were published, with attention being drawn to them, and there was a gradual recognition that what we were taught was a lie.

In fact Australia had been invaded by white settlers, who continued this frontier war with the last massacres of Aboriginal people occurring in the1930s. Children were taken from their families into the 1970s and often adopted out, being unaware of their aboriginal ancestry. Of course Aboriginal children are still taken from their families, but these days it is disguised as taking them for their safety. Or putting them in juvenile detention for behaviours that white children are never detained over.

THE CRUSADES

In the Middle Ages, enthusiastic and misguided crusaders set out to conquer the Moslem Ottoman Empire as it spread across North Africa and the Middle East, and even into Europe. This was disguised as freeing the holy land from the barbarian. This is how it is told in history. 

The reality is that the crusaders were misguided and had limited impact on the Ottoman advance, especially in the Holy Land. In fact the crusaders launched an attack on Jerusalem that killed a significant proportion of the local population, a blend of Jew, Christian and Moslem who had coexisted peacefully for hundreds of years. Yet this fact has been largely omitted from the history people are taught.

WRITING HISTORY TO MAKE YOU LOOK GOOD

We humans are great at moulding history to make us look good. We do this on a worldwide and individual level.

Australia just had its national day, a day that is mixed with those who ignore it marks the day white settlers first arrived on Australian Soil and those who mourn the day as invasion day.

History is being rewritten so that many question whether it is an appropriate day to celebrate nationhood.

THE MISSIONARIES

The history of missionaries in the New World countries and their role in destroying cultures and destroying communities is being recognised now and many churches are acknowledging the harm they did. As one Aboriginal commentator commented this week: The missionaries had trouble separating God from Western Ideology.

HARSH CHURCHIANITY

The history of the churches and their attitudes towards unmarried mothers and the children placed in orphanages is also involved in truth telling.

Many churches are now acknowledging the paedophiles who hid in their midst, abusing powerless children and being actively hidden by the churches. Sadly some churches are still more interested in protecting their reputations and power and will not acknowledge the harm caused by the attitudes that allowed predators to remain unpunished and to be moved around to protect them and the church.

But there is nothing new about this.

THE LIE AROUND JESUS RESURRECTION

If we look at Matthew 28, the soldiers guarding Jesus’ tomb were instructed to say his disciples came and removed him from the tomb. Rewriting history to suit those in power.

People who look for evidence to discount the existence of Jesus look to these lies as proof He never rose from the dead.

People try to dispute what the Bible says. They also claim the Bible has been mistranslated and Mary was not a virgin. They claim Jesus did not die on a cross but was crucified on a tree. They are trying to rewrite history to leave Jesus out of it.

Of course none of these things matter. Just as it does not matter whether God created the world through creation or evolution. 

WHAT REALLY MATTERS

Nothing matters but God and Jesus as His Son and the Saviour of you, me and the rest of the world.

That is what matters.

The proof we need is written on our hearts, is revealed to us by the Holy Spirit, is enabled to be believed by God (Matthew 16:13-15).

HOW WILL YOU WRITE THE HISTORY OF JESUS?

So when you write the history of Jesus, write the truth of what you believe and know. Write the evidence of the way you live your life. Don’t get bogged down in the arguments of people who try to prove Jesus never existed. They believe what they believe and you believe what you believe. Don’t argue with them, leave that up to God.

Rewrite your history of Jesus in your life through the love your show. Remember 1 Corinthians 13 discussed the most excellent way to follow Jesus. Love, faith and hope are important, but love is number 1.

Memorise Galatians 5:22-23. Live your life by the fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace (serenity), patience, compassion (kindness), goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control.

Write your own history full of the truth of your faith in Jesus. Live that history and that belief.

Be the victor who writes the history of your faith in Jesus.

As a child I was amazed, overwhelmed, full of wonder at the natural world. When my children were little I tried to instil that wonder in them. I still catch my breath in awe at a magical sunset. At a full moon. At a majestic cloud. At a beautiful tree. At nature. When I am cut off from nature I lose my sense of self. 

The child, full of the wonder of nature. Of what God has created. Of God’s life in all nature has a full soul. The child naturally worships God. But organised religion that has become about creed, discipline, habit, authority, the past takes the wonder away from the child and strips away its soul. 

Then in the emptiness the child walks away from God because he sees God as being religious institutions. The determined child will continue to worship God but will know that worship as New Age movement or some anti God worship. 

But in fact the child is worshipping God but in a way that excludes Jesus. Because God is about faith, worship, live, today, and the voice of compassion. 

As a child I sat in a church my parents attended and saw it for the first time. A retired minister had come to speak at that service. I had accompanied my father on the long drive to collect this wonderful man from his home to bring him to the church. I had sat in the car, in awe of his gentle presence and his beautiful way of speaking about God. 

Then in the service I sat, all attention, to this man’s gentle words of love, straight from God. As he gave his sermon I felt my whole being expand to the top of the vaulted ceiling of the church. I was so aware of God’s presence at that moment. 

That stayed with me as I turned away from religion in my teens. As I saw the clay feet of the leaders of the church my parents attended. As I saw the human politics played out in the church. As I saw children abused and adults look the other way.

Finally at a rebellious 15 I spoke aloud what I had been feeling. I said that God didn’t exist. Immediately I was in God’s throne room hearing His words. “How can you say that. You know I exist”. And I knew that He did. 

Since that time I have walked away from physical churches many times. I have tried to come back because I was always told I had to go to the physical church in order to worship God and follow Jesus. But now I don’t try. 

I realise it is my responsibility to form a relationship with God. A one-to-one relationship. It is my responsibility to read the Bible and seek understanding. It is my responsibility to seek God’s guidance in living my life. It is too easy to rely on other human beings and be corrupted in my faith. I never want my faith in God to be anything but pure faith in Him.

What I have seen in churches is people more interested in their own agendas than God’s agenda. I have seen enfeebled religion that is harsh and judgemental. Religion that is not sufficiently moved by human compassion and exalted by passionate admiration of the universe that God created. 

I have seen churches quick to offend on their pet hates such as homosexuality and transgender people but frightened to give offence in standing up for God and taking a stand for the weak. Instead I have seen time and again the rights of the strong being put first.

I have watched fellow Christian counsellors so caught up in the formula of religion that in their work as counsellors they were unable to work as God intended them to work and instead bought books of frameworks to follow. I chose to hear God and listen to my clients, trusting God for the insights and words I needed. And every time God gave me what I needed to meet people’s needs. I didn’t need a human created framework. I just needed God.

I have listened to a newly graduated curate in a church speak about the importance of having authority and using Jesus as an example. But then he said having authority was about book learning! He ignored the fact that this is exactly what the religious leaders of Jesus’ time said. Jesus had no book learning so therefore He should not be listened to. 

From my observations, education should be about cultivating wisdom, cultivating creativity, allowing knowledge to be information to reflect on and seek God’s understanding and guidance about. What I am seeing is that religious education is more about imparting knowledge to give yourself power within the church.

God is the God of life not religion. If we do not know how to live our lives and include God in them, then we are unable to live. We will exist, but not live as God intended.

Learn what you need for understanding but trust God on how to apply that knowledge.

Learn to live in a way that is opposite of Lukewarm. Opposite of Inertia. Opposite of cynicism, couch potato-itis and passivity. Opposite of the quest for power for human sake. Opposite of you controlling things.

Learn how to live with Joy. Learn how to live with the intense experience of the beauty of this world, of this universe, that God created. Learn to let go and let God.

I often speak of the need for us to have a personal relationship with God, not one through an intermediary like a religious leader, but directly with God.

Many years ago, a sceptic friend asked me what God sounded like.

Before I could answer, another friend, who thought she was rescuing me, cut in and changed the conversation. She thought she was helping me, but she wasn’t. I was more than happy to answer the question.

For those of you who know the answer, that is fantastic. It means you have that one-to-one relationship with God.

For the rest of you, keep trying.

Many years ago I asked God all day, every day, to know I was hearing Him. I had been so caught up in the religious system that I had forgotten how to hear God. So I prayed my yearning. After several days God answered and I knew I had heard Him.

I was reading a book just now that was gifted to me by a friend. It has been sitting on my book shelf waiting to be read.

Over the weekend I have struggled to know what to write. I was resigned to having to post an apology and a promise to try again next Saturday. As I sat down to do that my eyes rested on the book sitting on my shelf behind my computer. I was urged to pick it up. 

There I read about how God talks to us.

The writer of this book (“Conversations with God” Neale Donald Walsche) wrote that God talks to everyone, but few listen.

He went on to write that God communicates more than He talks. Our immensely wise Father knows that words are severely limited in their ability to express everything we experience. 

Instead God frequently communicates with feelings. They are the language of the soul. 

Feelings are something our Western society has cast out. They are the inconvenient experiences that make a lie of what other people want us to believe.

Interestingly feelings were cast out by enlightenment philosophers who set out to provide a format for a life without God. 

If they were so keen to cast God out, why are we listening to them and casting out the practices that brought us closer to God?

Feelings are hard to interpret, but you can learn to stop and explore your feelings to understand what they mean. Feelings, despite what you are taught, reveal your highest truth.

God also puts thoughts in our minds. Thoughts are not just words, they can be images and pictures. These carry more meaning than words alone. And it is harder to misinterpret feelings and thoughts than words.

Words are noises that stand for feelings, thoughts and experiences. They are symbolic of our experience, but they are rarely effective at describing what we really know and experience.

Often when I write blogs I struggle to explain what God has communicated to me. I end up writing long blogs in an effort to communicate to you the reader.

In the book the writer makes the comment that we place so much importance on the Word of God and little on the experience of reading the Word of God. That really hit home for me. I am currently reading a part of the Bible which is very dry and I am experiencing as uninspiring. I can see that Paul is trying to communicate an important message but my experience of his message is one of difficulty engaging. 

It is challenging for me, as previously I was reading Romans and found the words very engaging.

The message from what I was reading in this book is that we devalue the experience of God when it differs from what we read about God. We place more value on words than experiences. But we should actually place more value on the experience than the words.

In reading this I remembered that the verses I put together for the Advent blogs were ones that moved me. What I am reading now is not moving me. That is why I couldn’t find anything to write my blog about. 

Maybe it is not the right time to read what I am reading now. Maybe it needs to be read in a different season of my life.

My experience and feelings about what I am reading represent what I factually and intuitively know about those readings. Words symbolise what I know and can confuse what I know. That is exactly what has been happening to me.

According to the book, we receive messages from many different sources and they can cloud what we are hearing from God. It is important to learn to discriminate what we are hearing.

The suggested basic rule is that our Highest Thought is the one from God. The clearest message, the grandest feeling. They are from God.

The highest thought always contains Joy. The clearest words always contain Truth and the Grandest Feeling is Love.

That is very true of my own experience.

Maybe you are still struggling to understand. That is okay.

Ask God. Spend time with Him. Have conversations with Him when you have a moment. I am not saying you have to formally pray. I rarely formally pray. You can communicate with God anywhere and at any time. You can send up arrow prayers, you can talk with Him as you drive along. You can talk with Him as you walk, or wash the dishes, or vacuum the house. You can talk with Him as you lie awake at night.

Spend time with God and He will reveal Himself to you.

I have been aware of hearing God since I was 15 and I have had many years to learn to hear Him. I now recognise I had been hearing from God all my life. I just didn’t know it then.

It takes time, trust, faith and perseverance to learn to hear from God.

Remember, what God tells us is full of Joy, Truth and most importantly Love.

Matthew 23

God has been laying heavily on my heart the destruction wrought on indigenous cultures around the world as Western Europeans, full of greed and the desire for power, invaded the newly discovered (by them) lands and destroyed the people there. 

One of the most destructive acts was to introduce Western Christianity, with all its greed for power and wealth, and all its ignorance of God. Christianity, in the way it was forced on the indigenous peoples invaded by Western European Countries, has a lot to answer for. It destroyed the societies it was unleashed on. It was used as a weapon to defeat and subdue the people invaded by Western powers. For that Christianity has a lot to answer for.

Indigenous cultures were cultures of equality of men and women and Western Christianity inserted a destructive European culture of subservience of women. In these healthy indigenous cultures women, who were the matriarchs and responsible for much of the strength and healing in indigenous culture, were destroyed and turned into objects and possessions. 

The work of satan was done. not the work of God. So much of the damage and destruction seen in indigenous communities around the world is the fault of Christianity as taught by the missionaries.

I have spoken before in my blogs about Christianity becoming a dirty word in the modern world. Not because of anything God has done, but because of what we who use the term Christian to describe our beliefs have done.

In the name of God churches have covered up abuse, rape, murder of indigenous people, the deaths of children, the stealing of children from their families, covering up what they have done, fighting to disempower and silence those who raise claims against them, failing to acknowledge of apologise for the many atrocities committed, the “holier than thou” sermons, discrimination against anyone who doesn’t fit in: including the members of the LGBTQI community – extending to vulnerable children. 

Nowhere in the Bible does God tell us to behave this way. In fact this behaviour is the type of behaviour Jesus condemned when he was ministering on earth.

So many people tell me what they miss about attending Church is the songs or hymns they used to sing. I agree, there are many beautiful songs and hymns. But as everyone tells me, they mean nothing. They are just words. People enjoy the uplift of the beautiful music and speaking such virtuous words. And then they leave church and think nothing of following those words.

It is like the platitude “I’ll pray for you”. So what. What are you doing to support the person? Sure, sometimes people appreciate the encouragement of prayer, especially when there is a desperate need, but so often it is the cop out. “I think your story is hard but I am going to do nothing about it”. 

The spark to write this blog came from an article by Adrienne Tam about Christian Pacific Islanders refusing to wear a rainbow-coloured jersey for one game to support inclusiveness in the game of Rugby League in Australia. As Adrienne, also a Christian Pacific Islander, said instead of attending the game they would probably be at church listening to a sermon on love, peace and tolerance and practising anything but those three things.

Of course, as she pointed out, such hypocrisy is a cultural issue amongst Christian Pacific Islanders. But they put it on their religion and claim it is a Christian.

These same players happily wear football jerseys that display gambling and alcohol ads supporting the gambling and alcohol sponsors of their code. They have no issue with the destructive peddling of gambling and alcohol drinking to followers of the game, including children. But they stand on their “Christian principles” over some rainbow stripes on a jersey. 

Me? I would refuse to wear a jersey that promoted destructive gambling and alcohol abuse. Because I hate what they stand for and I see gambling and alcohol abuse as destructive, whereas gender fluidity is not.

Adrienne also speaks of the high rates of Domestic Violence (60% of women) in the Pacific Islander Community. In this “Christian” community.

All this comes from a culture of toxic masculinity imposed by Western Christianity.

Before the Pacific Islands were colonised by Westerners and their Western Christianity, sexuality amongst the Islander communities was more fluid. Western Christianity with its “white way” of doing things destroyed that. 

Pacific Islander communities accepted a more fluid sexuality with men having sex with other men without shame. The people also wore no clothes and, like Adam and Eve, felt no shame about this. The missionaries, with the knowledge of good and evil, were the ones who felt shame at this and they told the people they were dirty and shameful and must cover up. They taught the people that sexuality, rather than being an expression of social connection was dirty and shameful.

Western Christianity has been good at teaching people that their bodies, beautifully created by God, are dirty and sinful and they should be ashamed of them.

People have been taught to see their healthy sexuality as wrong and corrupt and terribly sinful. Not just in the Pacific Islands, but around the world.

People have been taught that men should be in charge and have destroyed healthy cultures with equal roles between men and women that made the cultures healthy. Western Christianity has destroyed healthy Indigenous societal structures across the world where Europeans have invaded and settled. Mind you, such destruction of culture makes it easier to suppress and defeat the indigenous communities. So Christianity has been used as a weapon of invasion.

Western Christianity also taught people to blindly believe those assigned as leaders and to have a relationship with God through those intermediaries, instead of a personal relationship with God.

Western Christianity, bound up in capitalist philosophy, also destroyed the collective culture of the indigenous community and introduced destructive individualism into them. Instead of caring, inclusive communities, communities with divisions were created.

We cannot undo that past, but we can be aware of it and seek to acknowledge the destruction in humility. 

Most of all we need to ensure our relationship with God is directly with God. One on One, not through intermediaries.