25th December 2007 : CHRSTMASS Morning : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 62:6-12 : Titus 3:4-8a : Luke 2:1-20

To love is not just to do something for others, but to reveal to them their own
uniqueness, to tell them that they are special and worthy of attention. We can
express this through our open and gentle presence.
Jean Vanier

Jean Vanier was the founder of the L’Arche communities, which are faith-based communities centered on people with learning or developmental disabilities. Now an international phenomenon, the first Western Australian L’Arche – the French for “Ark”, as in Noah’s Ark – is due to open in the near future.

Vanier’s words speak eloquently of the rationale and guiding principles of L’Arche. That the profound, abiding basis for their actions comes from the Living God is clear because Vanier could just as easily be speaking about God’s love for humankind and in particular God’s basis for deciding on the Incarnation as the means for bringing salvation to the earth.

Hear the words again:

To love is not just to do something for others, but to reveal to them their own
uniqueness, to tell them that they are special and worthy of attention. We can
express this through our open and gentle presence.

I don’t know whether Vanier had such thoughts in mind or whether the Incarnation – the birth of Jesus – held any inspiration for them but we truly see in his words the action of the Living God in engineering and executing Jesus’ coming to be among us.

First, God’s loving initiative in sending Jesus is not “doing something for us”, as if it were some kind of über-magnanimous gesture on the part of the Being who wrote the manual on generosity. God is not doing us a favour, a superior being rescuing a bunch of hopeless losers – yet again.

Rather, God is using the divine generosity to extend the riskiest invitation of all time – an invitation into relationship, as equals. Remember the last supper in John’s gospel? Jesus sez, “I do not call you servants any longer … but I have called you friends …”

What Jesus comes to do is to lead us back to God. Again, this is not some kind of physical journey, but a journey of the spirit, towards a discovery of the kingdom within and among us.
That discovery is one we have to move towards ourselves. God cannot do it for us while we continue to possess the grace of free will. Out of the same self-imposed constraint, God encourages us to recover a lost confidence in our ability to tap into the inner resources that will enable us to advance in this journey.

To do otherwise would be to treat us with contempt and, at the very least, disrespect. God knows that we are capable of embarking on this journey – because God gave us those inner resources in the first place.

The second point would be that the birth of Jesus is itself a powerful sign of God’s deep love and respect for humanity. The Word – Jesus – did not become a single-cell organism, an amoeba, and insinuate itself into our bodies via our nasal passages as we went for a dip in Lake Galilee. The Word did not become a dolphin or a chimpanzee even though they are among the most intelligent creatures on the planet.

No, the Word became FLESH. A human being, an act that shows us how valued and esteemed and worthy we are in God’s sight. Jesus then shows us what humans are capable of doing – and better, being. He shows us that we CAN be human AND have a valuable and authentic spiritual life, one that enjoys a close relationship with the Living God.

This why the Christian scriptures exhort us to become Christ-like. Not so that we can impress the gullible, win friends or influence our uncles, but in order to experience the fullness of relationship with the Living God. If only we realised that the only qualification for such an experience is one we already possess – being human!

And so the incarnation tells us this: that precisely because we are human, which in biblical terms means created in the image and likeness of the Living God – precisely because we are human, we are “special and worthy of attention”.

Again, we need no extraordinary qualifications for being, in God’s eyes, special and worthy of attention. We ALREADY have everything it could possibly take, simply by being human.

The third thing is the unobtrusive manner in which incarnation unfolds. Maybe with twenty-twenty hindsight, we might think or ordinarily expect that momentous events should attract a great deal of publicity and attention.

But it doesn’t happen that way. At least, the publicity machine is a bunch of shepherds, in those days considered ratbags and unreliable. Hardly the sort of respected dignitaries to convey news of an event so momentous.

Instead God and scripture treat us to the open and gentle presence of a baby born in a stable. The paradox is that God’s power resides in such a vulnerable being – a baby who is defenceless, unable to repel an aggressor, totally dependent on the love and good will of others, primarily his mother.

It’s as if God wants us to know that from the very beginning this is what it’s about – openness and gentleness, presence, quietly “being there”. No self-serving, self-seeking fuss. Just being, attentive to what’s around us.

The good news is that this open and gentle presence doesn’t have to leave us when, as or just because we happen to grow up! For what I suspect is the majority of us, though, by the time we’re physically and emotionally adults, we’ve receive so many blows, experienced such trauma, become so wounded and scarred that we have a huge task ahead of us to return to life as an open and gentle presence.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t recover or heal. It’s difficult work. Fortunately, “difficult” isn’t “impossible”. And as we heal and recover, we find ourselves drawing closer once again to the open and gentle presence of the baby born in Bethlehem so many centuries ago.

So here we are again, making time to spend with God, expressing the desire to allow God to shape, re-shape and transform us into open and gentle people whose presence speaks again of God’s love and respect.

This is where the submerged meaning of the incarnation speaks with the Spirit within us. This perhaps is the inner work Mary was doing when Luke tells us she twice “pondered” the meaning of the great events of which she had allowed herself to be a part.

Her head had all sorts of logical or seemingly-logical answers thrust into it. But her heart needed more. And wisely she permitted the process to claim her attention. We see the fruit of that work when she stands at the foot of her son’s cross, open and gentle, a presence of love bearing witness to the worst of human actions at the same time as she exemplifies the Christ-like qualities that emerge in the incarnation, available to all of us, simply because we are human beings.

LIFE FINDS A WAY

9th December 2007 : Advent 2 : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 11:1-10 : Romans 15:4-13 : Matthew 3:1-12

In the film Jurassic Park the chaos theoretician, Dr Ian Malcolm, delivers some of the most pointed and insightful lines. Horrified at the thought of theme park scientists reproducing dinosaurs, Malcolm is also sceptical about the long-term effectiveness of the apparent safeguard of genetically engineering the beasts’ DNA so that every dinosaur born at Jurassic Park is female, thus ensuring that they cannot breed.

At one point an exchange between the chief scientist and Malcolm goes like this:

Henry Wu: You're implying that a group composed entirely of
female animals will... breed?
Dr. Ian Malcolm: No, I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way.

Life … finds a way.

That’s eventually what happens in Jurassic Park: some of the dinosaurs begin to breed.

But long before Jurassic Park our scriptures were running this theme in various ways. We can think of Sarah in Genesis, Elizabeth in Luke, and the all-surpassing example of Mary the Mother of Jesus, who apparently conceives without human intervention.

Life finds a way.

Except of course that life here means the Living God and we might prefer to say that God finds a way – a way to ensure humankind’s movement from circularity and despair to forward movement and ultimate hope.

The story of John the Baptiser – the one known as the Forerunner in Eastern Orthodox tradition – is another example of God finding a way to bring life and hope to a humanity digging itself into a deeper and deeper hole as it wanders aimlessly in circles substituting rules, methodology and religious formulae for a living relationship with the Living God.

John stations himself on the outskirts and in doing so he forces the people of “Jerusalem and all Judaea” to leave the familiarity of their current life-nullifying homes and workplaces and religious institutions to journey to the borders of the wilderness.

In that sense these people come to meet John where things are pared back. They’re returning to some kind of starting point in order to discover a new beginning – a place where God can encourage them to receive the gift of new life, a place where life, paradoxically in the environment of wilderness, bare natural elements and essentials, finds a way.

And this is exactly what Matthew tells us –

"The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
'Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.' "

At least, that’s what Isaiah sez in the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures. In the actual Hebrew version the quote is

The voice of one crying out:
In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord …

I used to think the misplaced comma didn’t appreciably alter the meaning of the text. But now I’m not so sure.

I think it IS especially significant that God has John preparing the way of the Lord in the wilderness. I think it IS especially significant that God causes life to find a way in a place where life is hard, dangerous, unpredictable – and even unlikely.

And as we know a little later on the dude from Nazareth rocks up, gets done in the Jordan and then, instead of heading straight to the Big Smoke to enact his reforms, the Holy Spirit drives him right into the wilderness. And it’s from the wilderness that Jesus emerges. And he emerges from the wilderness preaching exactly the same message as his cousin, John the Forerunner.

Now this may surprise us. Shouldn’t Jesus have a new message? Isn’t he the New Thing? Doesn’t he have a New Take on the Old Story?

Yes and no. Because the Story doesn’t change. The Story is about getting back to God.

As Joni Mitchell archetypally wrote and sang in early 70’s

We got to get ourselves back to the garden …

The garden – the place where humankind first meets and forms a relationship with the Living God. A garden that becomes blasted and withered and barren – a wilderness where God continues, in a sense, to reside.

Human searching for the garden is humanity searching for God – the God who causes life to find a way.

And so we have the same message from both John and Jesus:

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!

That one word - repent – encapsulates everything that Jesus was about.

And it’s NOT, as we so commonly suppose, a moral demand. It’s bigger – far more outrageously humungous than that. Repentance is not about moral sins but about spiritual redirection and return to the Living God in a way that gives life.

Again, it’s about life finding a way through the distractions and distortions of rules and religious red tape. It’s so easy to reduce Jesus’ message to a set of moral imperatives. The rational mind copes best with these neat niceties: good, evil; right, wrong; black, white.

But the call to life and the call of life – life finding a way under the loving prompting of the Living God – is a call to the spirit within us. As Paul reminds us, the good news is for all people, for Gentiles as well as Jews.

This is the merging, in one sense. It is the end of the dualism that the human mind enjoys so much. It is the unifying and reconciling of opposites. This is the ultimate goal of life finding a way.

Repentance, then, is not at all about sorrowing about moral transgressions. How much simpler and easier it would be if that was what it was all about and nothing else!

Repentance, however, is about this return to God. In its English form it means re-make. God calls us into the new life, the life that finds a way in Jesus, by allowing us to accept a total spiritual makeover. This is not easy and it’s not painless.

How much more straightforward it is simply to take the moral and dualistic path! I do wrong. I say, Sorry. I do right. Here’s the thing. I can do all that, all the time, my entire life, without ever changing, without ever coming even one tenth of a millimeter closer to God. Even hardened criminals know the difference between right and wrong.

So don’t imagine for second that hardened Christians are truly closer to God just because they know a few moral imperatives.

Remember, the message is repent. Change. Come back. Return. One-on-one. If we’re thinking Greek it comes out as “change your mind”, or as we might say today, “change your mindset”, change your way of thinking about God. See God, not as a terrifying school principal with an unbreakable cane, ready to give you six of the best every time you break one of the rules – but as the welcoming, inviting, loving Creator who yearns for reunion.

In other words, change your thinking about the moral tyrant so that you understand the loving giver of life, the One who causes life to find a way into our hearts and converse softly and gently with our own spirit.

It’s by no means an easy task. But, as ever, we don’t have to do it alone. So are we prepared to take that risk? Will we – can we move from the safety of the known world of dualisms and set out for the border country, the outskirts of both civilised religion and the wilderness where the Living God dwells? Can we set out to meet the Forerunner – and ultimately find Jesus, in whom life finds a way?

ADVENT SUNDAY A 2007

2nd December 2007 : Advent Sunday : Year A
9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 2:1-5 : Romans 13:9-21 : Matthew 24:36-44

Many of us have seen the movie Home alone, possibly even the two sequels. For those who haven’t, Home alone is the highly-unlikely story of a precocious young boy, something of a misfit in his large, unruly family, who is accidentally left behind when sed family goes on vacation. This sets the scene for a series of slapstick antics as the kid proceeds to outwit a couple of would-be robbers, ingeniously using only the materials he has at hand.

The first movie worked well. We didn’t know the outcome. The kid was very cute despite his precociousness. We had tension, we had sympathy. Durn-it-all, we were rootin for the kid from the get-go and his triumph over evil and disaster was OUR triumph over evil and disaster.

Home alone was a masterful piece of cinema manipulation that drew us into acute identification with the poor abandoned brat, ultimately playing on our own deep fears – maybe fears of abandonment also; fear of attack; fear of threats of one kind or another; fear of an assault on whatever it is we delude ourselves into believing fundamentally holds us together as human beings.

Before I continue let me say that I am indebted for much of what follows to the website Girardian reflections on the lectionary[1] The site’s name comes from the anthropologist René Girard, whose study of society and religion led him to conclude that what drives us is desire, which may lead either to cooperation or conflict. It’s far more complex than that so that will have to do for the moment – or until we find someone who understands it well enough to explain it clearly!

Meanwhile, back at the sermon …

The Church has long, though I suspect not “always” played on people’s fears of rejection and abandonment in order to gain adherents and keep captive the fearful faithful. We all want to belong, to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to feel in some way accepted. Such is our desire for belonging and acceptance that we willingly abandon our most fundamental principles and sense of personal integrity – at least in the short-term – in order to achieve it.

As one particular kind of example, this is how extremist groups of every colour, religion and political persuasion gain and retain followers. From the outside these groups may seem obviously dodgy – but offer someone who feels rejected a sense of home, a sense of belonging, a sense of likemindedness – and they willingly become yours. Once that happens it’s relatively easy to manipulate them and keep them for long periods of time.

It’s exactly this dynamic that operates in the conservative dogma of the so-called Rapture, a non-biblical term that has many different shades of interpretation based on selective and sometimes twisted interpretations of a handful of biblical texts. The basis of Rapture theology is that at some point before, during or after the last days – a time of terror known as the Tribulation – Jesus will descend from heaven and lift up the “saved” from earth and meet them in the sky, ushering them into eternity. Those who remain on earth still have a shot at salvation but they will have to suffer some or all of the horrors of Tribulation.

Well … who wouldn’t want to belong to the select group of the “saved”? And who, believing they were “in”, wouldn’t want to do everything they could to ensure they stayed “in”?

As far as that basic scenario goes anyone and any group can play the game – and who hasn’t? The Church is a past master at it. The Church has for centuries set up and demanded adherence on the basis of what Richard Rohr calls “questions of belonging, membership questions; who’s in – and who’s out”.

Part of the problem is that this was never Jesus’ message. He didn’t offer “membership” based on strict and coded principles. One of the reasons the established religion feared him was because he threw out their rule book. He not so much re-wrote their cosy constitution as tore the whole thing to pieces.

How? By allowing anyone and everyone to be members of his organisation! He threw wide the doors. He sed even the blind, the lame, the deaf, the mute – even SINNERS for goodness’ sake!! – could come in and receive God’s welcome and forgiveness. For those of us who like churchy words, it’s called GRACE.

Grace flows freely from a loving God and it sez to anyone who can hear the offer, Come on down!

It’s a totally different – and liberating – attitude from the one that sez These are the rules; you can stay as long as you obey them. If you don’t obey, we kick you out and abandon you to your fate.

Who among us really wants to be “abandoned to our fate”? I know I don’t!

No wonder people likewise are terrified at the prospect of being among those who are “left behind”. It’s what ancient and not-so-ancient peoples did to the elderly and infirm: left them behind under a bush or on an ice-floe or in a C-class hospital (read “nursing home”). No thank you!

One of the problems is that we don’t have to translate the text the way we actually find it. For instance, the word for “taken” could validly be translated as “swept away” or “kidnapped” or “taken by force”. The Latin translation gives us the English word rape and the French version – ravissement – sounds enough like its English equivalent to need no translation.

Is this REALLY what God is going to do to those who belong to the right club, the Salvation Club?

On the other hand, the word that translates as “left behind” occurs commonly in the Christian scriptures, has several different meanings also, and could be rendered forgive. It’s actually the same word sitting ingenuously behind Father, forgive them for they know not what they do; and Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

And when we consider that Noah was “left behind” while the rest of the world was “swept away” in evil and violence we start to get a different picture. And do we really need to guess how topsy-turvy the view is when we look at the most well-known of all people ever to be “left behind” – a certain Jesus of Nazareth, abandoned on the cross, soaked in the violence of humanity, refusing to abandon his faith, innocent victim of the world’s evil – and raised from the dead on the third day by the Living God!

The point is we do not need to fear being left behind. Being left behind may actually be the true sign that we are people of faith, people who maybe do not “belong” according to the rulebook, but people who have accepted God’s grace – the only thing we need to do.

It is exactly the same grace operating as Mary of Nazareth enters the final month of her third trimester. Humankind does nothing – can do nothing – to deserve or warrant the coming of Jesus into the world. God sends Jesus in an act of faith as an act of grace.

We who are left behind to meet him need only ask one question – will we truly receive God’s offered grace this Advent Season and understand it at the Christ Mass?

[1] http://girardianlectionary.net/index.html and http://girardianlectionary.net/year_a/advent1a.htm