It was great to have the Valley Times behind me for this fight. A big thank you to journalist, Kim Palmer, and photographer, Radim.
This article was published the day after the fight – February 20th, 2016
valley times – Feb 20
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It was great to be on the front page of the Valley Times as I prepared for this fight. Support from local media can make all the difference!
This article was published on my 54th birthday – February 17th, 2016!
Valley Times, February 17th, 2016
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When I initially took this fight I had no idea that I was becoming Australia’s oldest professional boxer of all time! What happened to all the others? They must have all had tougher lives than me and consequently have grown old ahead of their time! 🙁
This article was published on February 19th, 2016 – the day of the fight!
If you can’t view the article above, click here.
Picture: Danny Aarons
When I initially took this fight I had no idea that I was becoming Australia’s oldest professional boxer of all time! What happened to all the others? They must have all had tougher lives than me and consequently have grown old ahead of their time! 🙁
This article was published on February 10th, 2016
If you can’t view the article above, click here.
It was great to get some coverage for our Boxers for Peace program. Most media outlets have refused to touch us because we don’t echo the official narrative – vilifying the Syrian government and dividing the rebels between violent jihadists and s0-called ‘moderates’.
A big thank you to Abbie O’Brien and to SBS World News. The segment aired on December 11th, 2015.
And here’s the article from the SBS news site:
If you can’t view the article above, click here.
Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. 2 But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” (Luke 15:1-2)
Today is a special day for us here at Holy Trinity as it is the day we officially move in to our new youth and community centre. This is significant for us in many ways.
For one thing, it brings to a close (hopefully) a long chapter of pain, for the Wardens in particular, who have had to negotiate the treacherous path that led from the smouldering ruins of our old youth centre to the eventual construction and completion of this new building. Every step of that path has been strewn with obstacles of one sort or another – some technical and unavoidable, but many also the results of predictable human failings and weaknesses.
Just as this spells the end of one journey, of course, it more importantly signals the beginning of a new journey, and one that could quite possibly bring with it so many challenges and struggles that we could soon be wishing this new place had never been built! I don’t really want to case any air of foreboding over our new venture, of course, but at the same time we should resist being too sentimental about the past.
We’ve run a youth drop-in program of one sort or another from our church hall for at least twenty of the last twenty-five years, and it’s one that we became well known for, and one for which we received various community awards, and one towards which local individuals and businesses and organisations contributed many hundreds of thousands of dollars, and yet we would be lying if we suggested that it had all been plain sailing!
Not only do I carry multiple memories of difficult young people we have worked with who have lied to us, threatened us and robbed us, but we’ve received short shrift over time from many of our neighbours too. I’ve had people threaten to do harm to me personally and to my family, and it’s worth remembering that the young man who eventually burnt down our old youth centre was not the first person to threaten to burn the place down (or at least to blow it up).
Indeed, it did click with me over time that the people who most loved and supported us – the businesses and clubs and media – were never those who lived in our street! It was always people who were nearby but not too close – not so close that they were directly affected by our activities. Those who were our immediate neighbours were generally far more circumspect about what we were doing, which makes a lot of sense when you think what a miracle it was that none of our neighbours were killed when the place went up in flames in April 2013!
I believe this puts us into a strange alignment with Jesus, who has always had millions of admirers who have loved him from the other side of the globe and from the distance of many centuries (and even millennia)! It’s worth recognising that most of those who have loved and admired Jesus throughout history have done so from a safe distance, whereas those who were closest to Jesus in both time and physical location almost all ended up either abandoning Him or trying to kill Him!
And one of the reasons that Jesus was so radically unpopular with those who were closest to Him was (I’m happy to say) much the same reason that we at Holy Trinity were so unpopular with some of the people closest to use. It wasn’t simply that Jesus was a disagreeable figure who was difficult to get along with. The problem was more with the kind of people that He inevitably drew into His orbit!
Dealing with Jesus, one on one, was a challenge no doubt, but the bigger challenge for the upright citizens of Israel was that wherever Jesus went he hauled along with Him an ever-growing entourage of social misfits – beggars and addicts and mentally-ill veterans, and single women who should have had better things to do than wander around the hills of Judea with an itinerant preacher!
And so the Pharisees and the teachers of the law mutter to each other, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:1-2), and Jesus tells them a story:
“Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbours together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’” (Luke 15:4-6)
Jesus tells this story as if He’s posing a rhetorical question – ‘what one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one, doesn’t leave the other ninety-nine …’ – and yet you don’t have to be an expert in Ancient Near Eastern farming techniques to know that no self-respecting shepherd in his right mind would behave that way!
If you have a hundred sheep and one of them gets lost, you open your account book and remove one from the inventory column marked ‘sheep’. You don’t leave the ninety-nine alone and unprotected while you pursue the one that’s gone missing! This is not good practice – not now, not then and not ever – not for a shepherd who is running a business that depends on maintaining a solid stock of sheep!
I appreciate that this is no ordinary shepherd, but I can assure you that this is not a popular way to pastor a church either. I’ve been criticised more than once myself for spending all my time chasing stray lambs and giving very little time to the ninety-nine who are happily grazing away, and such criticisms are not without justification!
It does make me wonder what sort of pastor Jesus was when it came to the entourage that moved about with him. In addition to the twelve disciples, Jesus had a significant group with him of a size that would have been similar, I suspect, to a decent church congregation. I would love to know whether all those people enjoyed significant time with Jesus, one-on-one, or whether some of those people really got no time from Him at all! It’s impossible to know for sure, of course, but the pastoral model Jesus presents us with here is hardly reassuring!
“Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?” (Luke 15:8)
Surely ‘no’ is the obvious answer to that question!
What happens when you have ten coins and lose one? The answer is that you now have nine coins, and you learn to live with it!
It’s interesting that over the years commentators have suggested that the coin the woman loses must have had some special significance – that it must have been associated with her dowry or some such – but Jesus gives us no indication in the story that there’s anything special about this coin. Taken at face value, what’s unusual here is not the coin but the woman. She, like the shepherd, appears to be mentally ill according to ordinary standards of interpretation.
Jesus reinforces this appraisal of the woman, I’d suggest, by detailing how she holds a party once she finds her coin – a party that must have surely cost her more than the value of the coin. This woman is not behaving rationally any more than the shepherd was behaving rationally. This woman has an obsessive-compulsive disorder of some sort and surely is hardly the person we should model ourselves on!
I suspect we’ve all known people like this dear woman. Whenever I read this story my mind immediately goes to my dear belated friend Ruth Paddle. She was one of a number of hoarders we once had in our parish.
Ruth had so many things stacked in every nook and cranny of her house that she had no room to sleep on her bed, and she couldn’t cook anything in her kitchen because the table-tops were covered and even the sink was stacked with crockery. She’d have to have meals-on-wheels delivered to her and eat and sleep on a space on her couch in the living room.
Dear Ruth had so much stuff that to the outside observer she seemed to live in complete chaos. Even so, she seemed to have a mental inventory of every item that was in that house and she was the kind of soul such that if she lost one coin she would spend the whole night looking for it until she found it! She was a beautiful soul, but hardly someone anybody would want to model their life on!
It’s a great shame that mobile phones hadn’t been invented in the first century, as it would be great to have a video of Jesus telling these stories. If the people listening to Jesus had had mobiles, someone would have caught this on video, and it would be great, I think, to see how the Pharisees were reacting to Jesus’ stories thus far!
It all starts, you will remember, with these religious leaders grumbling about why Jesus wastes His time with so many drop-kicks, and Jesus responds by comparing Himself to an eccentric shepherd and a mentally-ill woman. I envisage the Pharisees having rather blank expressions on their faces at this stage. Jesus seems to be scoring home goals with these stories! But the brilliance of Jesus’ story-telling, I’d suggest, is that He uses these first two stories primarily to draw His listeners in to hear the last of His three stories where everything falls into perspective.
“There was a man who had two sons. The younger said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.” (Luke 15:11f)
We know the story well enough, I think, so I won’t go through it in detail. The depiction of the father who loses his son parallels the shepherd who loses his sheep and the woman who loses her coin, and it’s worth making the point that, rationally speaking, there is nothing more sensible about the father’s obsessive love for his son than there is about the shepherds love for his wayward sheep or the woman’s obsession over her lost coin.
From a rational point of view, if you lose one son then you give thanks that you have another one – a far better one in fact, as Jesus’ story makes clear! Getting obsessed about the lost son doesn’t make a lot of sense from a purely rational point of view. Why wait at the gate, hoping that your son will come home? Get on with life, forget the young fool who forgot everything you taught him and betrayed you, and move on with thankfulness for what you’ve got rather than lamenting what is gone!
From a purely rational point of view the obsessed father behaves as stupidly as the crazy shepherd and the mentally-ill woman, and yet for all of us who are parents, and for all of those Pharisees listening to Jesus who were also parents, all three stories now start to come into perspective in an entirely new way!
It’s not simple obsession or mental illness that is driving the father. It is love! And we who are mothers and fathers understand that, and we who are sons and daughters understand that, and so we start to look at these addicted persons – these noisy, dirty and intrusive persons, these lost sheep, lost coins and lost sons and daughters in a new way. They too are somebody’s children. They too are loved, and if you’re wondering why we behave so stupidly, what person in love doesn’t behave stupidly?
I read an excellent book a while back called ‘Do the Work’ where the author said that as human beings we have two great assets we can draw upon – stubbornness and stupidity. He said let’s not give them high-sounding names like ‘perseverance’ and ‘tenacity’ and ‘creativity’. Let’s call them what they are – stubbornness and stupidity. It’s the stupidity side of this duo that Jesus emphasises here, for real love is stupid.
A good friend of mine was telling me the other night how when he told his father he was getting married his father was very happy for him but pointed to the door and said “See that door. When you leave. You don’t turn around later and come back”.
His dad made it very clear to him that if the relationship failed that didn’t mean his son could come back to the family. He’d made his bed and now he had to lie in it (so to speak). And that makes sense. And that is certainly a rational way of parenting, and maybe that was what you got from your earthly father. Maybe so. Jesus tells us very clearly though that this is NOT what we get from our Heavenly Father – who is always there for us, always waiting, always forgiving, always loving!
I remember back in the early nineties, during some of the darker days of our youth work, when we had a whole series of addicted people drying out in our centre and one of those guys had just walked out onto the front footpath and thrown up, and I was trying to deal with that and deal with the chaos inside, and one of our neighbours walking past stopped and asked me “what are you doing to this place?”
It was an unhelpful question but not an inappropriate one. And I remember at the time simply having nothing to say in response. What can you say? There is no sensible answer to some questions. Perhaps I could have started sprouting stories about lost sheep and coins. I think I just forced out a pathetic smile.
Love doesn’t always make sense. Love doesn’t have to make sense. There is much in life and in God that doesn’t make sense. But God is love, not rationality, and so as we move into our new centre and as we move forward as a community, I trust that God will preserve us from having to make too much sense. Let us rather live in love!
First preached by Father Dave Smith at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, on Sunday the 6th of March, 2016.
Click here for the audio.
Rev. David B. Smith
Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of four. www.FatherDave.org
It’s the first Sunday in Lent and we are heading back to the wilderness with Jesus!
I’m choosing my words very deliberately here, as I think it is the intention of the church to travel with Jesus into the wilderness each year at this time.
This is the first Sunday in Lent, and Lent is that time in the church year that is set aside every year as a time of reflection and self-examination in the lead-up to Easter. Every year on the first Sunday in Lent we read about Jesus’ forty days of testing in the wilderness, and it is no coincidence that Lent itself is a period of forty days.
Jesus spends forty days in the wilderness. And so we likewise do our forty days in the wilderness every Lent – at least figuratively – taking time to do a personal moral inventory and test and strengthen our spiritual muscles. That’s the idea I think, at any rate, though it occurred to me this year as I read through the temptation narrative again what an entirely inappropriate response to this passage that is!
I don’t mean that there’s anything wrong with doing a moral inventory, nor with working on strengthening the spiritual muscle. What occurred to me though as I read again through this passage in from fourth chapter of the Gospel According to St Luke is that there is nothing archetypal about Jesus’ wilderness wandering. I don’t think the Gospel-writer gave us this story as a pattern that we were supposed to emulate!
And I say this as someone who has spent a fair bit of time in the wilderness – certainly more than most people in our church community, at any rate. Our bush retreat (Binacrombi) might not qualify precisely as wilderness in the Luke four sense of the word, and I’ve never spent a continuous forty days out there either, but I have been out there for weeks at a time, and I certainly have spent days on end where it’s just been me and ten thousand kangaroos, with not another human being in sight!
I appreciate that we normally envisage Jesus’ wilderness experience as taking place in a desert rather than amidst the gum trees. Even so, it really struck me as I read through the Gospel account again this year that this is by no means the only difference between the two experiences.
Jesus faces temptation when He is alone in the desert. I face most of my temptations when I’m with other people, as I suspect we all do! When we think of all the commandments that we might be tempted to break – everything from stealing to murder to coveting your neighbour’s ass – these temptations only happen when you’re with other people. You generally can’t get into too much trouble when you’re by yourself. This is indeed why we send people out to Binacrombi. It’s because it’s such a remote place that you generally can’t get yourself into too much trouble there.
I won’t mention the name of one of our dear brothers who was out there for a couple of months last year, but he was a member of our church community who had struggled with a long-term gambling problem, along with other related issues, and I thought Binacrombi might give him a chance to recover.
He used to call me up regularly, often late at night, saying “I’m having a bad day today, Father.” I’d ask him “did you gamble anything away today, brother?” He’d say “no”. I’d ask him “did you get drunk and misbehave today, brother?” He’d say “no”. I’d ask him “did you get into any fights today?” He’d say “there’s nobody here to fight with, Father!” I’d say “it sounds to me as if you’re doing really well!” He’d say “I’m having a great day, Father!”
It’s hard to break too many commandments when you’re out in the wilderness. It’s a place for sobering up rather than spinning out. You go there to get away from temptation rather than to get into it. Our wilderness experience is at sharp variance therefore with Jesus’ at this point for – let’s face it – when we go on a wilderness retreat we do so in the hope of encountering God, not to meet the devil!
I appreciate of course that the two often go together, and perhaps that’s the beauty of the way we’ve set up Binacrombi. We have both a chapel and a boxing ring, more or less side by side, and you can meet God in one and then go and deal with the devil in the other!
I mean that quite literally too. I have found over the years that nothing is more effective in helping young men to face their demons than the boxing ring. When you get a solid punch in the nose it really can bring out the inner demons!
If you’ve got anger-management issues or lack self-control, the boxing-ring is guaranteed to bring the devil out of you! I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve counselled young men who have come out of the boxing ring in a rage, with blood on their bodies and steam coming out of their ears, and we’ve talked about what they are feeling and why they are so angry and how they intend to get themselves under control. And, in all honesty, some of those sessions have been the most valuable pastoral moments I’ve experienced in my twenty-seven years as a priest!
As I say, at Binacrombi we have the chapel and the boxing-ring side by side, and there can be a very powerful spiritual movement from one to the other. Even so, when we send people off on a wilderness retreat, the ultimate goal is to always to see them spend time with God rather than with the devil, which is another reminder of the fact that Jesus’ wilderness experience and ours are quite distinct!
The third, and in many ways the most obvious, point of distinction in Jesus’ temptation experience is that the temptations He experiences are not ones we are even remotely familiar with!
To be blunt, I have never been tempted to turn stones into bread! Neither have I ever been tempted to throw myself off the Harbour Bridge, confident that angels will catch me before I hit the water! I’m not saying I’ve never struggled with the old black dog and the temptation to throw myself off something, but that’s quite a different temptation to the one Jesus experiences.
I’ve never been tempted to become ruler of the world either! I may have struggled at times with the temptation to become the sole and undisputed ruler of my household (which many in the Sydney Anglican Diocese would tell me is a duty rather than a temptation). Either way though, that’s hardly lust for power on the same scale!
“All power tends to corrupt” Lord Acton would remind us, but it’s the “absolute power that corrupts absolutely” that is on offer to Jesus. I’ve never been tempted to assume absolute power, and I doubt if many of us here have been either.
My point is a simple one – that the Gospel account of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness was probably never intended to be read as an archetype for our own spiritual experience. Jesus’ experience does not parallel our own. There are parallels to be drawn, but not between our experience of temptation and His. The connections in the mind of the Gospel-writer, I believe, are almost certainly with the wilderness concept as such, and with the number forty.
The story of the Torah is, from the book of Exodus onwards, the story of the people of God wandering through the wilderness on their way to the promised land. They wander for forty years rather than forty days. Even so, the parallel is most surely deliberate. Jesus’ forty-day wilderness wandering parallels the journey of the people of God as a whole, and the key point is that what Jesus accomplishes in forty days is what the people of God as a whole fail to do over forty years. Jesus overcomes temptation and thwarts the devil!
The story of the wilderness wandering for the people of Israel is largely a story of failure! I’m not suggesting that their temptation experiences match Jesus’ experience any more precisely than our own do. Even so, broadly speaking, the people of Israel deal with hunger and the need for food, they play power-games, and they struggle not to put the Lord their God to the test!
Jesus’ temptations are like intense condensed versions of the forty years of struggle experienced by the people of God in the desert, and the key point is that Jesus succeeds where they failed. He overcomes temptation and He beats the devil, and the point that the Gospel-writer is making, I believe, is not simply that Jesus is therefore the man, but more so that He is the man who represents the people of God in their battle with the devil!
The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews speaks of Jesus as our great high priest (Hebrews 4-5), designating Him as the one who represents us to God. Like the high priest of old, Hebrews says, Jesus stands between us and God, representing us to God. I think that’s the sort of role the Gospel-writer envisages for Jesus here too.
I suspect that the closest thing we can approximate this to in our experience is in sport (which is how most Australians experience religion). When we see an Aussie athlete on the Olympic podium, receiving a gold medal, there is a sense in which they represent not simply themselves but all Australians at that moment!
In truth, I tend to be quite cynical of this sort of vicarious sporting accomplishment, and suspect that most of these athletes have their own reasons for training that don’t go beyond their own personal ambitions. Even so, I appreciate that no one who represents their country in any sporting endeavour ever really experiences either victory or defeat alone.
If you’re like me, you probably appreciate this communal dimension of sporting achievement more when it’s someone like Cathy Freeman or Anthony Mundine or someone who self-consciously represents a minority group in the larger community. Even so, as I say, nobody who represents their country or their tribe ever truly experiences either victory or defeat alone.
This coming Friday night I’ll be competing myself, of course, and I’d like to think that when I enter the boxing ring on Friday night that I will, in a very real sense, be representing our church community in that battle.
I appreciate of course that not everybody is going to feel equally connected to me in that endeavour, and I appreciate that I am not solely there as a representative of the parish either. Even so, there are inescapable points of connection. For example, if, by the grace of God, I manage to raise a million dollars this year in boxing, nobody else here will have to worry about how we fund our youth work!
Of course it’s not likely that I’ll raise quite that much. Even so, I’m setting the bar high and I’m full of hope at this stage!
The point is that there are times when one person’s victory is a victory for everybody, and that, I believe, is how the Gospel-writers viewed Jesus’ victory over the devil in the wilderness. It wasn’t just that Jesus showed us that the devil could be beaten. He shows us that the devil has been beaten! That battle has been fought and the victory has been won – for all of us – and so we don’t have to live in fear of the power of evil any longer!
None of this is to say that spending time in the wilderness is not a good and worthwhile thing to do. Far be it from me to discourage anybody from taking time out from the hustle and bustle of daily life to spend time alone in the wilderness, to pray and to work through your spiritual self-inventory. Taking time out in the wilderness is always a good thing to do. You just don’t need to wait until Lent to do it, and you don’t need to feel that you have to repeat the experience of Jesus when you do.
Self-examination is a good thing. Struggling with our weaknesses and facing our demons is a good and necessary thing. The older I get though the more I appreciate that every step forward we manage to make in this area is just a gift of grace!
Forgive me if that sounds obsequiously pious. I can only say in my defence that this is something I think I’ve learned more from being a boxer than as a priest!
The great thing about being a boxer is that you bleed. When you lose, it hurts, and you bleed. When you win, you still bleed and it still hurts! There is no miraculous formula that allows you to somehow avoid the pain, just as there’s no way of winning every round. You win some but you never win them all. On the contrary, you get knocked down, you get up again, and if you feel you’re getting ahead by the time the bell goes then you’re thankful, as you always know deep down that you’re made of the same flesh and blood as everybody else.
This is the spiritual life, I believe – one of struggle and failure as well as glory and triumph – but I’m not suggesting that it therefore needs to be a depressing daily grind. On the contrary, it can be a joyous walk, but the key, I believe, is to recognise that the decision on this fight has already been given, and we won! Jesus, the pioneer and perfector of our faith (Hebrews 12:2), has already won this fight for us.
Jesus was tempted. Jesus resisted. Go Jesus!
First preached by Father Dave Smith at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, on Sunday the 14th of February, 2016.
Click here for the audio.
Rev. David B. Smith
Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of four. www.FatherDave.org
“And while [Jesus] was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white.” (Luke 9:29)
Yes, it’s the Feast of the Transfiguration, where we remember once again that bizarre occasion upon which Jesus’ face changed and His clothes became dazzling white – ‘whiter than any fuller could bleach them’ adds St Mark in Mark 9:3 (in the words of the old King James Version).
It is a bizarre and unique story in the Gospels, recounting an event that I’ve always found to be rather impenetrable. Perhaps you had to be there at the time to truly understand what happened.
There was a time when I felt very uncomfortable with this story, to the extent that I looked for ways to avoid preaching on it. I think the problem for me has always been that I can’t think of the transfiguration without thinking of some of those classic (and very Catholic) artworks that try to reconstruct the event for us. Jesus, who is always depicted in such art as a white man anyway, is even more white than usual! The scene is bathed in light, and there is the cloud, and inevitably there is an expression on Jesus’ face reflecting the fact that He is not really of this world!
When I see images like this I can’t help but feel that this is not the Jesus I know, or at least that this is not a Jesus I feel comfortable with, and it makes me question whether anything like this could ever really have happened. Maybe everyone believed in people who shone back in the day when every village still had a fuller. The fuller has long since become the laundromat and people just don’t shine anymore!
As I say, there was a time when I felt very uncomfortable with this story, and that time was last week when I realised that I was going to have to preach on this text! Of course I did the obvious thing and looked up the alternate readings for today but both of the other readings deal with the transfiguration of Moses, which is something I feel even less comfortable with!
And then it occurred to me that perhaps the reason this story seems so weird is not because people nowadays are never transfigured. Perhaps the problem is the opposite – that we are all too familiar with people being transfigured!
Coca-Cola are probably the chief culprits, bombarding us with images of happy, shiny people drinking Coke – girls who smile and reveal an array of teeth whiter than any fuller could bleach them!
In truth, we are awash in a sea of images of transfigured people. They adorn our billboards and confront us daily from the covers of women’s magazines, let alone men’s magazines! The problem isn’t that we don’t see shiny people any more. The problem is that it’s hard to distinguish the genuinely transfigured from that which is manufactured, and it is hard!
Women I’ve known have always been critical of the images of the female form that turn up in Playboy magazine and its ilk. I’m not sure how much of this genre still exists in print form, but the criticism is always that ‘Real women don’t look like that!’
My reply to this is always the same – that when you’re passionately in love with a woman she always looks like that! She shines! She looks perfect! And I’d say to anyone here that if you’ve never seen your partner shine, you’ve never been in love!
People shine! Of course they do. I’ve seen my children shine. I hold in my memory various wonderful shining moments with my children. We try to hold on to these moments through photographs, of course, but even the best digital image rarely captures the reality of transfiguration.
I look back over the last few years and I realise that I’ve seen quite a few transfigured people. The thing that I find confronting when I reflect on this is that not many of them have been Christians!
I think I’ve probably told just about everyone who’s been willing to listen about my first meeting with the Grand Mufti of Syria, Dr Hassoun, back in 2013. That first encounter was quite a bizarre religious experience for me! The man seemed to genuinely have an aura about him that I found almost overwhelming!
At the time that experience was for me as inexplicable as it was unexpected! I had known that there was going to be a meeting with the Mufti and I can tell you that my expectations were low! The appointment came at the end of a long and intense week and I had considered giving the meeting a miss, for in truth I always have low expectations of religious officials, and the higher up the ladder of officialdom they get, the lower my expectations become. I don’t expect much from our bishops generally, let alone from those who hold similar ranks in other religions!
And yet I felt impacted from the moment this man walked into the room, and then most especially when he started to speak about how his son had been killed by the rebels and yet how he forgave those who killed his boy and wanted no vengeance but only peace. I had at that point an overwhelming sense of the presence of God in the man. He seemed to glow with the presence of the Spirit of God, which is exactly how transfiguration works of course. It’s when people glow with the presence of the Spirit of God!
That was the experience of Moses that we read about in Exodus 34. The glow on his face was a reflection of his proximity to the Spirit of God. And this is indeed what the disciples perceive on the mountain-top in this moment of transfiguration. The veil is drawn back for a moment, so to speak, and they see in Jesus the glowing presence of the Spirit of God, and it’s all rather overwhelming.
They want to capture the moment. They don’t have cameras, of course, so Peter starts babbling about setting up booths or some such, which is his way of trying to preserve the moment (Luke 9:33). Of course the experience cannot be preserved. It is momentary and fleeting. No sooner do we begin to grasp what is going on than it’s all over and we’re wondering what happened! And yet something of the glow of these experiences linger!
We experience moments of transfiguration. I think we all do. They are our moments of encounter with the Divine, and I think the transfiguration story is a helpful archetype when it comes to knowing how to handle our religious experiences.
One thing the transfiguration reminds us of, I think, is that we do generally have our experience of God through other people.
I’m not wanting to deny that we can meet God in prayer and in dreams and in any way that God deems fit to meet us but the regular experience is that we encounter God through other people.
The disciples experience God through the person of Jesus. Similarly, the disciples of Moses had their experience of the presence of God through the person of Moses. The religious experience of Moses was evidently more direct, and Jesus’ very direct experience of the presence of God is something that we cannot enter into ourselves, but we experience God through Jesus, and we experience the Spirit of God (and the Spirit of Jesus) through one another.
This, it seems, is the way God normally chooses to meet us and so we should not balk at this. We should expect to encounter God through one another and we should expect others to encounter the spirit of God through us!
In April 2014 I was in Tehran, and we had our first big meeting of the group that was heading to Syria on a peace mission in the lobby of the hotel where we were staying. I sensed during that meeting that there was a young, bearded Sheikh on the opposite side of the lobby who kept staring at me. After the meeting he came up to me and said “I really want to meet you. I sense that you are someone very special”.
I said to him, “No, brother. I am not special. It is simply the spirit of God in you recognising the spirit of God in me.” From that point on, Mohammad Reva and I became good friends and worked closely together, both in Iran and in Syria, and I have a picture of the two of us together standing with refugees from Yarmouk. I haven’t communicated with the man since 2014, mind you, but something of the glow of that transfiguring experience still lingers.
We should expect to encounter the Spirit of God in one another, and we should not be surprised when others encounter the Spirit of God in us.
The corollary to this, mind you, which is also reflected in the transfiguration account, is that such encounters with the Spirit of God can be quite scary experiences!
Moses, we are told, had to veil his face to conceal the glow as was freaking everybody out! Likewise, as I’ve said, I’ve found my own experiences of encounter with the Spirit of God to be quite overwhelming at times, and I think this is what we see reflected throughout the Scriptures – that it can indeed be “a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!” (Hebrews 10:31)
Encountering God can be scary! We feel unworthy. We feel fearful. We feel exposed. And yet we need to embrace these experiences of the numinous and the holy that God gives us – that’s the mount of transfiguration model! Expect an experience of the Spirit of God and embrace it!
And the third thing that I think the story of the transfiguration reminds us of is something that I’ve already mentioned – namely, that these intense experiences of the presence of the Spirit of God are transitory. They do not last and they cannot be preserved. They grace us only for a moment and then are lost!
Why then, we might ask, does God give us these experiences? I think the answer to that is that God gives us these experiences to keep us going!
It’s worth taking a look at the context of the story of the Transfiguration. It’s given to us in the middle of the ninth chapter of the Gospel according to St Luke. The account is immediately preceded by a description of an intense and difficult conversation Jesus had with His disciples where He warned them that they were following Him down a path that led to certain suffering and death!
That’s on one side of the Transfiguration account and on the other side is a story of how these same disciples fail completely in their attempts to heal a young boy who is possessed! Jesus eventually deals with the situation Himself but not before roundly rebuking the disciples for their lack of faith!
And so it is in between these two portrayals of failure and foreboding that these men have this intense religious experience! Perhaps it was just coincidence that the transfiguration came at such a time, but my experience has been that it is almost always when you’re in the middle of a crisis – when you’re feeling completely deflated by your failures or paralysed with fears about the future (or both) – that transfiguration happens.
I suspect that many of you will have heard of the remarks made by John Wesley on the death of his contemporary, George Whitfield. Both men were highly influential church leaders in their day but they held sharply differing views on certain theological issues to the point where some evidently doubted whether Wesley would mourn Whitfield’s passing.
After Whitfield’s death though a woman who had been a fan of both men apparently asked Wesley very tentatively whether he expected to see Mr Whitfield in heaven. After a lengthy pause Wesley replied with great seriousness, ‘No, madam.’ He then went on to add “George Whitefield was so bright a star in the firmament of God’s glory, and will stand so near the throne, that one like me, who am less than the least, will never catch a glimpse of him.”
It’s a beautiful story, not only for the way it depicts the Spirit of God at work in John Wesley but also for the way it captures a vision of that coming day when all the saints of God will shine like stars, radiating the presence of the Spirit of God to the point where we may find it hard to look at one another!
Sometimes that day seems like it is a long way off. Ours is a world dominated not by visions of glory but by wars and by rumours of wars. Even so, as we trudge our way through this life, complete with all its failures and forebodings, transfiguration happens! Let us expect it and embrace it!
First preached by Father Dave Smith at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, on Sunday the 7th of February, 2016.
Rev. David B. Smith
Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of four. www.FatherDave.org
Sheikh Nimr is greatly missed – Khamenei.ir interviews Father Dave
It has been my privilege to appear a number of times now in Iranian publications. Not many Australian priests can make this boast, and the reason I am selected so regularly as an Australian Christian voice is quite simple – nobody else seems to be interested!
Perhaps I’m wrong, but I think this article reinforces my point. My comments are by no means particularly insightful or profound. Indeed, when I made them I hadn’t realised that they were going to be published or I would have polished them a little. So how did I become a spokesperson for the Australian Christian community? Lack of competition! 🙂
If you can’t view the article above, click here.