Binacrombi Bush Camp – June 5-6, 2021
We had a great pair of boxers to take me on in the Binacrombi Bush Bash on the Saturday night (Karim and Mohammad) and a wonderful collection of Bible readings at our Sunday Eucharist. The highlights of both are in the video below.
As to the boxing, both of my opponents were skillful pugilists but they lacked the fitness to really push me. A long day of bike-riding and an over-fondness for the sisha pipe had them performing as a tag team between rounds.
As to the Eucharist, our reading from the Hebrew Bible (1 Samuel 8:4-20, 11:14-15) focused on that pivotal point in Israelite history where the community made the transition from a being a loose tribal confederation to a monarchy.
We might be tempted to see this only as an issue of political expediency but the prophet Samuel saw it as a faith issue, believing that the move towards monarchy displayed a failure of trust in God.
Paul’s words to the church in Corinth (2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1) are filled with emotion as, once again, he comes to terms with his personal pain in the context of the great future that God has in store for us and for all creation.
The Gospel reading from Mark 3:20-35 is one of those very sobering passages where we sense how isolated Jesus was from the structures we might have expected would support Him.
His religious institution, which you might have thought would be a force for life and healing, was turning on Him to destroy Him. You might then expect that His family would step in and stand by Him, but they didn’t. Instead, they tried to shut him up and shut him down – perhaps more for their sakes than for His.
“Who are my mother and my brothers?”, Jesus asks. They were not the people anybody had expected.
