Last weekend we attended, for a time, the Sea Festival here at the beautiful Frankston foreshore. There were crowds of people taking advantage of the sunshine, glistening bay, and array of rides, foods, stalls and other activities – it was a chance for many local companies and interest groups to display their wares (love to see a St Lukes stall there next year!).
This is Australia – a land of plenty, a land of sun and fun, a land where consumerism is king. At one point, walking through the rides (as distinct from taking the rides!), I was aware just how overwhelming to the senses it all was: There were lots of various sounds – music blaring amid the noise of the rides and the people, the movement and the flashing colours. It felt like a kind of life-sized video game in which we were all participants!
Yet I was also reminded of how illusory this can be. We are easily captivated by the here and now, the current sporting spectacular, or holiday (‘holy day’) escape, or product to make us look or feel better. We are promised happiness, just around the corner, always there – just a little bit out of reach – we are like those greyhounds bounding around the track seek to get their paws on that elusive rabbit but never quite making it!
Jeremiah once spoke the Lord’s word to ancient Israel, “my people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, that cannot hold water” (Jeremiah 2:13).
The same might be said of Australia today. We are fast forgetting a heritage that included an appreciation of (if not always commitment to) foundational biblical values which shaped our relationships and our legal system. And what are we replacing that with? The broken cisterns that hold no water – the passing fads and fashions of thought as mediated through the media in which there is no longer any truth but only opinion – and one opinion is not any better than another (though it might be more influential!).
The consequence is that we are largely a nation adrift, and a nation vulnerable to whoever might be the most powerful purveyor of opinion at any particular time. We are pushed towards being increasingly pragmatic, less honest (I’m still recovering from the Lance Armstrong revelations, American though he be), less sure of who we are. We don’t know what to believe any more, nor how we are to live.
This Australia Day weekend it is good for the Christian community to pray for the heart and soul of our nation. Many years ago Geoff Bullock wrote a famous song in which the chorus says:
“This is the Great Southland of the Holy Spirit,
A land of red dust plains and summer rains,
To this sun-burnt land we will see a flood,
And to this Great Southland His Spirit comes.”
We do live in a land which is bountiful and peaceful compared with many lands upon the earth. Yet the more we drift away from God’s purposes, the more we will see lawlessness and poverty take a grip. Whilst there is time, may we pray for God’s Spirit upon our land and its people, and build those cisterns that hold water – the spring of the living water of Jesus in our lives and in the church.