Southland Christian Ministry Training
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By Ian, on February 21st, 2012%
This Wednesday, 22 February 2012, marks the beginning of Lent and so we will be holding a special Ash Wednesday service. This is a simple service with the reading of scripture, blessing and distribution of ashes. I don’t come from a tradition that celebrates either Ash Wednesday or Lent, so I may not be the best authority, but from my perspective it comes down to three basic things:
Repentance! Ash in many cultures is a symbol of sorrow, and in the Ash Wednesday service ashes are applied to the forehead suggesting that the wearer, after due self examination, is sorrowful for their sins and has confessed them to God. But that is just the beginning it also requires a
Response! This ritual must be followed by penitential actions, which usually apply to the whole period of Lent, that is, the time between Ash Wednesday and Easter. These actions are not specified but generally involve things like fasting, praying and almsgiving. Thus some people will choose to stop eating or drinking certain things for Lent (such as meat or alcohol). But there is also an expectation that this sacrifice is not to be advertised! Finally it is about
Reflection! Prayer is the focus here, not just asking God for things but a conversation in which also involves listening. Lent is all about taking extra time out to stop and review your life, to cut down on ambient noise, get away from the world (figuratively) in order to cut down the interference to hear God speak. Thus the sacrifice some people make for Lent is to give up watching TV!
It seems to me that Lent offers each of us the opportunity to rethink who we are and where we are going, regardless of your theological or denominational background. So if you want to start Lent on the right foot, why not find a local church and become part of their service.
Chaplain Ian S Whitley
By Ian, on January 25th, 2012%
 As I pondered what Australia Day means to me, I went back to basics and read the speech of Arthur Phillip, when he was officially named as Governor of New South Wales on 7th February 1788. As the Commander of the First Fleet he had spent nine and a half months at sea and finally landed in Sydney Cove on 26th January 1788.
After a few days of basic organisation, he got down to clarifying the real reason of why they were there. They were a motley bunch, about a thousand people all up, half of them convicts and the rest government officials, soldiers and sailors, (some of the latter being allowed to bring wives) though you get the impression that NONE of them wanted to be there!
Pamela Robson in writing about this speech describes the scene:
“Uncertain and rather forlorn, they sat or stood in a small arena cleared from the scrub for the occasion, precariously clinging to the edge of the known world. They were penned in by the menacing and mysterious wilderness behind them and the vast expanse of blue ocean that stretched to the horizon in front.” (Great Australian Speeches p5).
Yet, for all that, it was a gala affair, with the colours flying and a band playing, a ceremony in recognition of the fact that they were creating history! The language of the speech is fairly stilted and the spelling odd, but the sense of his message for me was encapsulated in just one sentence – a personal commitment from Arthur Phillip that he
“…should ever be ready to show approbation and encouragement [to] people of the most abandoned principles.”
Seems to me that he recognised how difficult it was going to be to grow a nation out of a penal colony, with both prisoners and conscripts feeling beaten and despondent. Yet, their very survival depended on their ability to overcome their differences and work together. They did, and so formed the foundation of what we celebrate on Australia Day. Many of them lacked the right principles (both convicts and supervisors) as our checkered early history records, but it evolved under God’s grace, and I think we turned out OK!
The challenge of the future is to continue to show “approbation and encouragement” which loosely means “approval and active support” in short, offering a fair go to all, who, like those in the First Fleet, had been cast off from their mother country. There are plenty today who feel the same, who want a better life for their children, who see Australia as their only hope for the future. May we, with Arthur Phillip, recognise the need to work together, overcoming our origins, our past mistakes, our ethical and cultural backgrounds and celebrate being Australians!
Chaplain Ian S Whitley
By Ian, on December 4th, 2011%
 If you come to visit me in my office you will notice that I have a lot of books.
They used to be neatly organised and arranged… but after so many defence moves they are now much more random.
In many respects my understanding of God is like that too, so that over time there is much more flexibility, replacing some of the rigid structures and divisions I used to have.
One of the implications of this is that I now read more widely and try to think more deeply, and sometimes God surprises me. Recently while reading about prayer I came across the following one written by an Arab Sufi woman:
Lord, if I worship You from fear of hell – then cast me into hell.
And if I worship You for hope of heaven – then deny me heaven.
And if I worship You in hope of gaining anything – deny me everything.
But grant that I may worship You for Your own eternal beauty and matchless grace.
That stopped me in my tracks, and this woman did not even come from a Christian background! Why do I pray? Do I worship out of fear or for what I can get? Or is it because I have begun to grasp who God is, his eternal beauty and matchless grace?
The amazing thing is that is what Christmas is all about. When Jesus came as a human, he moved the focus of God’s presence from a building or temple to a most unlikely place – a person! Philip Yancey puts it like this:
“…God who knows no before or after entered time and space.
One who knows no boundaries at all took them on:
the shocking confines of a baby’s skin, the ominous restraints of morality.”
That is the mystery of Christmas, so how and where does worship fit in for you? Look out, you may be surprised to find it when and where you least expect it!
Chaplain Ian S Whitley
By Ian, on November 10th, 2011%
 This week while planning the Remembrance Day service, I was surprised to find that it was a Melbourne based journalist, Edward George Honey, who first proposed a period of silence for national remembrance in a letter published in the London Evening News on 8 May 1919. The suggestion came to the notice of Georve V, who on 7 November 1919 issued a proclamation that called for two minutes as part of Armistice Day celebrations. So, at 11.00am on 11 November 1919, Australia stopped, “all locomotion ceased so that in perfect stillness the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on a reverent remembrance of the glorious dead”.
92 years later we are still doing it, although in 1997 the Governor-General reduced it to one minutes silence! How typical of the current trends in our world. We cannot bear to waste that extra minute of work time! It seems to me that we need to pause more often to consider the ultimate questions – not just our rich history and the sacrifice made by so many to give us what we take for granted, but to also consider who we are and what is our role in the bigger picture of history unfolding today!
Chaplain Ian S Whitley
By Ian, on April 1st, 2011%
 What does ANZAC DAY mean? What is its purpose? As a Defence Force member, it is part of my job, but it is important that we don’t just go through the motions but seek to understand what it is really all about. For me there are three basic aspects:
- STOP! Often the trouble is that we are so busy that we never stop long enough to think about what we are remembering. Some have suggested that it would be better to forget many of these sad events in our past, but it was these same conflicts which forged us into the nation we are today. The spirit of ANZAC does not focus on a few heroes but the ordinary bloke! As we stop to remember, not just the pain and suffering, but also the good things like bravery, sacrificial giving and simply giving a mate a hand. But we must not stop there, we must
- LOOK and LISTEN! We must look to understand how that applies to our lives today. Many of us have never seen war first hand and it is all too easy to gloss over the cost of our freedom. We live in a very different world but war still exists and though it may have changed in some ways, it still brings pain, suffering and casualties. As we listen to the daily new coverage we are reminded that in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, winning a war is not the same as bringing peace. But stopping, looking and listening are not enough, we must
- GO! What are we going to do about it? Are we prepared to GO and allow the spirit of ANZAC to guide our lives? Will you go and courageously seek to bring that same meaning and purpose those around you? Are you prepared to fight for peace and justice? To do that we need to move forward, to learn from our past and seek innovative approaches to the same old problems of how to get along with each other, making sure that armed force is the last option not the first.
It seems to me that if we stop, look, listen and then go with that knowledge and wisdom that we will begin to experience what ANZAC Day is really all about. It is my hope and prayer that as we approach 25 April this year that it will begin to make sense to you too. As we pause, maybe we will also experience a miracle as God shows each one of us how we can make a difference.
Chaplain Ian S Whitley
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