Issue 08 - Swan Valley Anglican Community School

From the Chaplain

CHAPLAIN’S NEWS

Christians celebrate festivals and their related seasons for about half the year. For the other half, we walk alongside Jesus and learn from his ordinary, everyday, yet transformational teachings and actions.

This year, Luke’s Gospel is our focus. Luke relates many great parables, where Jesus uses this ancient story-telling technique not to answer questions, but to question our answers. The stories demand our engagement so that we can hear their message to each of us.

This term, we have examined the parable of the Rich Fool: a man who stores up his abundant crops in rebuilt, larger barns, and retires, self-satisfied and smug about his achievements. He is rich in goods, but not in values.

Jesus asks us to consider whether we are simply collecting possessions (Treasures on Earth) as we go through life, or whether we are building strong values, faith, positive behaviours, by loving God and our neighbour. He calls these ‘Treasures in Heaven’ and being ‘Rich towards God’.

I used the analogy of baking a batch of cookies, and we considered all the things we can do with the ones we don’t eat fresh from the oven. Sharing them (thinking of others, not being selfish), is a concrete example of how we might avoid being rich fools. This parable connects with our focus value: Compassion, and the Christian virtue of putting God and others first.

The Parable of the Friend at Midnight tells of a man who, receiving an old friend into his home, needs bread to break with him. His neighbour is asleep, and he persistently knocks at his door until the neighbour, angry and frustrated by the man’s pestering, gets up and gives him bread in order to get rid of him.

Jesus explains that if an unkind, angry neighbour will give you what you ask for, using ‘pester power’, how much will a God of perfect love, and endless generosity, hear our prayers and give us what we need.

In Junior Years Chapel, Year 6 students performed this story brilliantly as a drama. In Early Years Chapel, some of our staff used their skills to act it out for the children. The sheer persistence of the man knocking at the neighbour’s house, and still getting what he wanted, is one of the comic moments in Jesus’ deeply engaging, wise storytelling.

It is great to hear laughter and singing in Chapel as well as peaceful silence. Students of all ages are establishing these habits and, we pray, benefitting spiritually from them.