麻豆约拍

Saturday March 14th 2015<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

听

Good morning. 听It鈥檚 the weekend. Time for kicking back and having some fun. But the truth is that some weighty ideas will be tested today, not least among them notions of tolerance and intolerance. After sporting events up and down the country tolerance will be tested as matches are analysed, team performance assessed, referee decisions questioned and excuses made for intolerant speech and behaviour. The problem is that when we permit intolerance without question in any area of our lives it has the power to spill over into every aspect of them.

听

Stephen Cosgrove, writer of children鈥檚 books and maker of toys, wrote this:

Never judge someone

By the way he looks

Or a book by the way it's covered;

For inside those tattered pages,

There's a lot to be discovered.

听

There is a human tendency to judge those who are different. We resist tolerance and long voyages of discovery. Intolerance, on the other hand, is a short journey with a dead end and a clarity that belies the complexities of life in the human family.

听

On this day in 1913 the South African Supreme Court declared invalid marriages that were not celebrated according to Christian rites and registered by the Registrar of Marriages. The outworking of this decision was that all Muslim and Hindu marriages were declared invalid.

We do have problems when intolerance declares anyone in the human family invalid.

听

Today we give you thanks Lord for voyages of discovery already made and those yet to be made and we pray for that societies everywhere will resist the dead end of judgment and exclusion. Amen