GOD'S PRAISE AND MONEY

21st March 2010 : Lent 5 : Year C
9:30am Camillo
Isaiah 43:16-21 : Philippians 3:3-14 : John 12:1-8

One of the contentious issues that has clung to the Church over the centuries is its use of financial resources. For instance, when I was training for the priesthood a bequest of one million dollars was made to the cathedral for restoration work on the organ. When that figure became public knowledge a great controversy arose: how could the Church spend such a sum on an organ when so much need existed, even in a relatively prosperous city like Perth?

To say that the bequest aroused considerable scandal would be an understatement. Here was the Church yet again squandering money on material possessions while people went homeless and hungry or lived in circumstances of considerable deprivation and hardship. Self-righteous moralists, outside and within the Church, condemned this situation even though, because of the nature of the bequest, the cathedral was legally bound to use the money for no other purpose than the restoration of the organ.

We can ask any number of questions about this or any other issue where obscene amounts of money are spent on the broadly material fabric of either Church or society. How many people can a cool mill feed or house or train? How many hospital wards could that money open or keep operational?

It’s not an obscure picture. We all get it. And even if our sympathies stray towards the organisation that benefits from that kind of lucre, we still have an eye on the underprivileged and the echo in our ears of all those ethical questions and issues that have sprung up, well, at least since this Mary in John’s gospel cracked open a jar of nard and poured the aromatic fragrance over a mere man’s feet instead of selling it and giving the money to the poor.

Ultimately, these are pointless questions. The causes of poverty and human and environmental degradation are complex and not solvable simply by, as they say, hurling cash at them. We’ve seen how effectively such a strategy has brought justice and dignity to our aboriginal populations. It hasn’t.

Holy scripture on the other hand makes it clear that a primary responsibility of people of faith is to worship and praise God. This is one of the justifications that the Church advances for seemingly materialistic spending: we produce art, architecture and music of excellence as a sign to the world of how significant God is in our lives. We do not take short-cuts or offer God what is second-best but seek out the best, the most excellent, the most worthy – in honour of this Being whose standards we can barely comprehend.

In Isaiah God speaks of

the people whom I formed for myself
so that they might declare my
praise.

In his letter to the faithful in Philippi Paul repudiates material, social and religious status on the grounds that they cannot compare to the wonders of God:

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.
More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of
knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all
things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ

What Paul is saying is that when we assess the value and worth of Jesus everything else becomes meaningless and worthless.

And here begins the clue to what this is all about. First, what the faithful offer God is never a match for what God offers the faithful. By comparison to God’s grace and favour all material, social and religious trappings are without value. But second, what we can offer God is the best that we have.

Thus, Mary makes an offering of hugely-expensive aromatic oil. It is not valid to compare the offering to God with the gift made to, say, the poor, because they are not the same in quality. It’s like trying to compare an apple and a grain of sand. How do we do that? What value can we find in such a comparison?

When we shell out a million bucks on a musical instrument in a cathedral we are making an offering of the best we can be and do and in effect giving back to God what God has given us in the first place, so that we might declare God’s praise, a la Isaiah.

We are not actually lavishing money on God and therefore depriving the poor of the undoubted benefits of such a sum. What we are doing is praising God by acknowledging God’s worth and value in our lives. We are demonstrating our faith in God as the ultimate arbiter of justice and trusting this same God to continue working to eradicate the many horrors that beset any community or society in which humans live.

We are also acknowledging God’s sovereignty – God’s power to effect change. At one level, yes, we do this at the expense of the poor, whom we will always have with us.

However, at a more profound level, we are paradoxically doing more to benefit the most needy in our world when we surrender our own notions what is best for them and instead place our primary focus on God. In this sense, Mary is hastening the ability of Jesus to complete his work by anointing him as prefiguring of his own final conflict with the powers and sources of violence and injustice.

We surely know that anything we do, we do in God’s name. Anything we do, we do in the power of the Holy Spirit. Anything we do, we do with and to and for Jesus.

…Because our faith is relational. In other words, it’s about going out and being with people in that Spirit of love and generosity that comes from the Living God. As I’ve already suggested, simply doling out money is not an effective solution to the complex problems that create and sustain poverty and degradation. Far better to seek the Living God and venture forth trusting in the divine power and meeting other human beings as fellow humans, relating and building relationships rather than dealing in paper, plastic and metal.

It’s much easier to do that, of course. But we have to ask ourselves: do we want this rather lazy option? or do we trust the Living God enough to guide and strengthen us as we seek the lost and wounded of Camillo?

PRODIGAL FORGIVENESS!

14^th March 2010 : Lent 4 : Year C

9:30am Camillo

Joshua 5:2-12 : 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 : Luke 15:11-32

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now. Or maybe two things. The gospel reading we have just heard is NOT about the prodigal son. This may come as a surprise because we have become accustomed blithely to letting the phrase Prodigal Son enter our minds without invitation and equally the same phrase has intruded into our consciousness without asking permission to do so.

When we look at chapter 15 in Luke’s gospel we see that he has organised it on the basis of three parables – first, the lost sheep; second, the lost coin; and third? the lost son, the parable that concludes with the words, “he was lost and has been found”.

Certainly Luke creates tension and suspense by building up to the crucial story, the real story by throwing in two smaller, bite-sized vignettes. He wants us to see the importance of story 3 – but that doesn’t undercut the plain fact that story 3 is the climactic episode in a three-part mini-series about being lost – and then being found again.

Our traditional, historical focus on the prodigality of the son is largely, let me suggest, a function of our own avoidance of culpability. In other words, we point the finger at the wayward son so that no one will notice that we are not exactly squeaky clean.

It’s reminiscent of the scene in the movie Stalag 17, in which the William Holden character, whom most of the prisoners despise, recalls being beaten up because the POW’s think he’s spying for the Germans. Holden comments that the real spy, the real traitor would have been the one punching and kicking the hardest.

Well, folks, the lost son is William Holden and we are the POW’s of Stalag Camillo. It’s called scapegoating. Which is to say no more than that this is human behaviour, not at its ugliest, but not in its most worthy and honourable manifestation. And we legitimise the behaviour when we pour our own hurts and anxieties and woundedness onto another – even a fictitious character – instead of facing up to our need to seek healing.

If we really need to fling the prodigal word into the story – a word that comes from the reviewer’s quill, not the author’s – then we would serve ourselves and posterity better by looking at the father rather than the son.

If the father is meant to represent God then Luke’s Jesus wants to draw our attention to another nuance of the word prodigal: extravagant; generous beyond belief. This is how the father behaves. This story in Luke is one of the sources of our theology of God’s abundantly generous nature.

But it’s a hard generosity to accept – especially if we are playing the guilt-ridden scapegoat-herds who secretly “know” we deserve punishment and even more secretly wish that God were rather more punitive than forgiving and loving.

And of course, if we accept the prodigal father then where does that leave our vicarious self-righteousness with regard to the lost-and-forgiven son? Let me suggest that we don’t want the son to be forgiven.

We want him to remain forever prodigal because we unconsciously recognise something deeply disturbing about the divine economy in this story.

What we notice is this: the father lavishes his forgiveness freely, generously and extravagantly; and most scandalously of all, he lavishes this free, generous and extravagant forgiveness NOT on the basis of the son’s confession of moral turpitude and general depravity but because the son exercises true repentance – the metanoia of changing his mind and returning to the father.

Of course repentance in this scriptural sense implies renunciation of clearly immoral behaviour – but what activates forgiveness is actually coming back to God. …Because what is at issue is not the busy and overworked minutiae of moral impropriety but the separation that of necessity occurs when we indulge behaviour that is, for want of a better word, “ungodly”. What actually makes such behaviour ungodly is not any preciosity about the actual deed or thought but the fact that it treats other human beings and created things with disrespect and dishonour, as objects we use rather than those with whom we share a unique and genuine connection.

Immorality, when we can actually isolate it from within its spectacular arrays of grey, disrupts and sometimes shatters that connection. Is it mere coincidence that we sever our connection with God as well?

But that’s not the only thing we notice about the transaction of return-and-forgiveness in this story. Something is missing. After all this talk of creating a scapegoat of the son – where is the go-between who intervenes on the son’s behalf and pleads his case, thus satisfying the father’s thirst for “just” retribution?

Hark! Did someone say, “But the father doesn’t seem all that interested in retribution and vengeance?” And did I hear someone else say, “The father seems right chuffed just because the snotty-nosed brat came home!” Oh; and was that someone else saying, “Um, I can’t find anyone in the story pleading on behalf of the son.”?

All true. Where’s the sacrifice? None exists. Who’s the scapegoat? No one. What form does the father’s just and righteous vengeance take? Er, what “just and righteous vengeance”? Dad just seems, well, awesomely pleased – for no other reason than the return of his son.

The reality is that we are the ones who want vengeance. We want retribution. We want a neat, dualistic system in which everything adds up and all the negatives balance against the positives and vice-versa. We want it clear, cut and laid out on racks in the baking sun to dry.

Unfortunately, the divine economy does not operate like that. God’s forgiveness is for those who return to God. Almost certainly, we will still be trailing behind us our sacks of garbage, our lifetime’s worth of damage and woundedness that continue to require the grace of God to address.

And God is more likely to do that through the services of a psychiatrist, psychologist or psychotherapist, and/or by chemical means, than through the use of natural-rule-defying pyrotechnics. And God will use communities of faithful, loving people. And sometimes that will include the church.

A

nd what of the son’s brother, the scowling, aggrieved son who demands retributive justice? He’s the guy calling his bro prodigal, who cannot bear the prodigality of his father. Many of us secretly admire this dude because we’re thinking the same.

We’re thinking the same because we, like sour-puss, operate through the heresy of dualism, where everything is black or white, right or wrong, good or bad. Where the books have to balance; where the columns and rows, where up, down, across and every-which-way must arrive at a neatness and exactitude that would shame a Sudoku square.

Ironically, we call that “reconciliation”, but on God’s planet reconciliation actually means something different. It means “my sons and daughters were lost but now they have come home again. Whoo-hoo! Let’s par-tay!”

LONG-TERM/SHORT-TERM - GOD'S GRACE AND HUMAN ENTITLEMENT

7th March 2010 : Lent 3 : Year C
9:30am Camillo
Isaiah 55:1-9 : 1 Corinthians 10:1-13 : Luke 13:31-35

All week I have wrestled with the gospel reading. It’s my usual practice but what was difficult this week was my inability to remember what the reading was about!

The other readings were straightforward enough. Isaiah presents a scene in which Yahweh offers the people of Israel an abundance of nourishment. It is a moment of God’s grace. It is an offering of the things that are essential for life – water and food, with a few delights thrown in, like milk and honey.

It’s not an extravagant gift – it is simply the things that humankind needs. But the whole is given a spiritual cast. This is special stuff. It’s no mere meal, not even a banquet. It is, quite simply, enough. But because it is the gift of God’s grace, even “enough” is more than any human can imagine in their wildest dreams.

And needless to say, only the Living God can provide this sufficiency. And it is only available to those who seek out God and accept the invitation. It’s not a huge demand. It’s not a demand at all.

It’s worth remembering that God does not and will not make demands on any of us. God always invites – and it is always a gracious invitation.

And if it were that easy then perhaps we wouldn’t be here this morning. Perhaps the world would be in a state of peace and harmony, sharing resources of every kind, from food and water to skills and technology.

No. It takes a considerable act of will to abandon the old and familiar – especially when they are damaging and destructive, paradoxical as that may sound. …Because in some ways we become more familiar with our enemies than with our friends. We seem to invest more in hating them, more in gaining knowledge of their ways, of nursing and nourishing old wounds and grievances.

This is clearly an unproductive practice, however comforting it may seem. Ultimately, it is the way of dusty death. The Living God, on the other hand, offers life in all its fullness and it is an abundant offering, made by the ultimate philanthropist – a delightful word whose meaning is lover of humanity.

In contrast to the Living God’s exuberant prodigality – God’s limitless generosity – is the unruly, myopic attitude of human beings.

When Paul writes to the community of faith in Corinth he gives the example of the demanding, puerile attention-seeking misbehaviour of the nation of Israel. They have, says Pauly, spiritual food and drink – the same spiritual nourishment that the Corinth folk possess – but they are not satisfied.

Not because the food and drink on offer are unappetising or lacking in anything we humans need. But because earthly pleasures are too easy, immediate, gratifying. It’s all short-term, of course, which is why people need more and more, seemingly without an end, creating ever-more sophisticated but ultimately hollow and lifeless means by which to access those pleasures.

For Paul, the crux of the matter seems to inhabit the world of entitlement, with its burgeoning suburban sprawl, arrogance. Paul is saying that none of us should take for granted God’s offerings, even though they are graciously made. Nor should we assume that because we are the recipients of such magnanimous favour, we are somehow superior to anyone else. We are not. We have simply fallen flat on our faces and God has rolled us over, and the first thing we see is Jesus, smiling yet profoundly concerned, with a tray of food and drink.

And this, then, is what so wounds Jesus as he gazes upon Jerusalem, the city that is so important in Luke’s gospel – so important that Luke does a straightforward enough editorial on the post-resurrection tradition and has the apostles and disciples hole up in the holy city rather than scatter to their home towns.

He ends with an allusion to Psalm 118 – we bless you from the house of Yahweh – and a full-blooded quote: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of Yahweh!”

When does that happen? It’s a foreshadowing of his entry into Jerusalem on the day we call Palm Sunday. Jesus is aiming for Passover, timing his arrival so that he will be among the crowds of pilgrims. Luke makes his Jesus determined to meet destiny in “the city that kills the prophets”.

But what he also meets is the perverse nature of those who wilfully reject grace. Grace has been and continues to be offered but Jerusalem – a potent symbol of the people of Israel – gives God the finger and goes its merry way.

We in Camillo need to heed Paul’s warning. We pursue our own plans and desires at the expense both of the Living God and of ourselves. Grace is always available. So much so that one of my unfulfilled schemes is to produce a bumper sticker saying, Grace Happens, because that is exactly how it is. Grace Happens!

But we have to make ourselves available to receive it. And understand that it is given, not because we are better, more worthy, purer, more special, more deserving, better bible bashers or superior scripture students, but because God loves us and “doing grace” is where God is at (man). Whoa.

As last week’s study of Mary Magdalene put it – “I am good because God loves me…not loved because I am good.” Or to paraphrase the title of a book I came across recently, we are (potentially) grace-filled “for no good reason”. In other words, we don’t and can’t earn God’s grace. Grace just flows out of God like a fountain in a lake.

Question is: are we secure enough in our faith to accept this wonderful spiritual freebie? Or do we still need to learn that the grace of God is here-now if only we would reach towards God and accept it?

STANDING FIRM

28th February 2010 : Lent 2 : Year C
9:30am Camillo
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18 : Philippians 3:17 – 4:1 : Luke 13:1-9

In the words of the prophet: what do we got here? Today, like. Let’s look at this. First, some really weird stuff going down in the Hebrew scriptures. The seminal episode in which Yahweh promises Abraham – who is at the time still called Abram – that he will have heirs and offspring and descendants. Satisfies the typical male desire to have his name carry on, addressing the male mortality-fear of being the last of his line.

But more than that – we also get the uber-weird bizzo involving animal carcasses hewn in half and a flaming torch and smoking fire pot. This stuff is kind of freaky. Smoking pot indeed! But, for the trivia hounds and houndettes among us, it does explain the Hebrew idiom for “making a covenant”, which literally translates as “to CUT a covenant”, which is what Abe does to the carcasses – cuts ’em in two for the Mysterious Yahweh to move between.

Then we have Paul encouraging the troops in Philippi. Maybe not quite as stirring as Mel Gibson bare-backing a lively pony, wearing Pictish woad, natty hair flying, exhorting the motley crew of Scots clans to fight the invading Sassenachs… But who knows? Best wait for the film before passing final judgement on that one.

And then the godspell. The Guid News. What have we here?

What we have is a bit of an idea that will surface later in the twentieth century as “The Shadow”. Said Shadow is the recognition that each one of us has a built-in dark side. A side that surfaces to one extent or another whenever we think or say or do things that are more or less destructive, and diminish the fundamental goodness both of our own nature and of others. The Shadow operates when we indulge in intentional acts that damage any part of creation.

It’s not something we should fear. Rather, we need to accept it as part of what it means to be human. Late in the eighteenth century the English poet and artist and sometime mystic, William Blake, wrote his well-known poem, “The Tiger” – you know, the one that begins

Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night…

It concludes with a question that is difficult to face:

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Is the Living God, the Creator, responsible for this fearsome creature, the Tiger? In the terminology of Carl Gustav Jung, who proposed the concept of the Shadow, maybe the answer is, Yes… We humans are both Lamb and Tiger.

So Jesus in Luke poses the questions:

Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse
sinners than all other Galileans?

and

those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them-- do you
think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in
Jerusalem?

The answer he gives to both questions is: No, I tell you.

He sez: No, I tell you; but unless you repent you will all perish [just] as they did.

First, it’s a recognition that no one can claim to possess a greater level of moral rectitude than anyone else. We are all flawed creatures. AND we are all capable of behaving in destructive – and self-destructive – ways. Don’t let anyone dare doubt that.

I remember still experiencing the craziness of sleep-deprivation when our first child refused to sleep through the night. It lasted two years. I reached a stage where I was terrified of going to bed at night in case no.1 son woke up and cried as soon as my head hit the pillow – and he did it so often that my pessimism had more than ample empirical, measurable evidence upon which to form a powerful fear.

In the throes of sleep-deprived madness I came at times far closer than I would ever want to, to descending into physical abuse of my son. No one is more pleased than me that it never happened – but it left me with a profound understanding of what might drive an otherwise loving parent into that particular darkness of their soul.

That possibility existed within me. I knew it. I could not deny it in any way conceivable. I hated it. But equally I was grateful and relieved that I had never acted on it. What “it” was, was my Shadow self, the part of me that makes me fundamentally no better and no worse than any other human being, and certainly no better and no worse than any parent who actually does cross the awful boundary between dark thought and black action.

But Jesus warns us that we cannot rest with that recognition, however plausible an explanation it may give as to why apparently “nice” people do abhorrently horrifying things – like the man involved in the apparent murder-suicide in Kardinya a few days ago.

But what are we to make of all this? We know from Genesis that God makes extravagant promises. Abram will have descendants more in number than the stars. Yeah, right. At least, a rational person may well scoff. But it is hyperbole – exaggeration for effect. God sez to Abe: Chillax, man. You want your name to continue? It will. Trust me.

On the basis of that promise, Paul tells the folks at Philippi to “stand firm in the Lord.” It’s another “trust God” statement. Don’t let circumstances – or even the perverse parts of our own natures – deflect us from trusting God. And that means, at the very least, God’s presence in any and every circumstance. My sleep deprivation episode, for instance, left me with a secure understanding of God’s grace. I come across stories of people – usually men – who reached a point of uncontrollability and injured or killed their babies and infants, and I understand that that could easily have been me – but for the grace of God, the only thing that stood between me and my son at times. God was with me – and my son - in those difficult times.

But we can become so overwhelmed that we drift away from God as surely as a boat that has slipped its moorings. It’s those times we need to examine the rest of Jesus’ responses: repent. Change our mind, change our heart.

As I have often said, repent is far less about saying sorry than about a fundamental abandonment of thinking and acting that causes us to fly further and further away from God. The further away from God we get, the more distant and tissue-thin seem the promises that Yahweh gave Abram. ...And the harder and harder it gets to “stand firm in the Lord” because of course the Lord is miniscule and the ground is quicksand.

Repentance means first consciously turning back to God. And when we do that, having wandered far off, half-way round our little planet maybe – when we decide to turn back to God, what do we find? We find that God, who seemed so far away and unreachable, is standing right behind us. We turn and our first step causes us to run right into the Living God.

God has stood firm during those times when we were unable to. God has done for us what we were unable to do for ourselves. It is not a new thing either. It is something that is just about definitive. God alone has no Shadow – God alone never fails.

TAKING RISKS

7th February 2010 : Epiphany 5 : Year C
9:30am Camillo
Isaiah 6:1-8 : 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 : Luke 5:1-11

In 2006 BBC One produced an intriguing documentary series that SBS aired last year. It was called The Trawlermen and followed the harrowing lifestyle of Scottish fishermen operating out of the town of Peterhead in Aberdeenshire.

These men take their boats out into the vicious waters of the North Sea, infamous for its violent temperament and ice-cold temperatures. Trawling the North Sea is NOT the maritime equivalent of a gentle stroll in the park on a lazy Sunday afternoon-a…!

The Sea of Galilee, the backdrop to today’s gospel, also had a reputation for being treacherous and unpredictable, a place where winds could sweep in suddenly and whip the water into a frenzy of frothing waves and plunging troughs.

And when we meet Simon Peter he’s experiencing every professional sea-going fishermen’s nightmare – long, expensive hours for absolutely no gain. As he tells Jesus, they’ve trawled all night and caught nothing, nada, zilch, zero, rien.

It’s against this background that we find Luke’s version of the call and commissioning of Peter, James and John. Luke’s story has none of the straightforward brevity of Matthew and Mark. He’s a first-century cinematographer and he wants to give us some vision, some visuals that will not only enliven a mundane call story but also provide a vignette of a life lived in faith.

So, what are the elements of this short short film that Luke produces and directs? The first is obvious enough – the actual call. Jesus, after teaching the crowd, invites Simon to go into deep water and drop his nets.

The second element is trust. Despite logical, rational objections, Simon Peter takes Jesus’ word for it and does as “the Master” asks. His trust finds its reward in the so-called miraculous catch – more fish than either the nets or two fishing boats can safely hold.

Is this meant to be a blatant example of Jesus showing off? Highly unlikely. It’s hard to imagine Jesus doing anything so gratuitous and self-serving. A better fit is that it illustrates God’s power when human beings put their trust in the divine and allow God to act within the world through human agency.

A third element in the call narrative is unworthiness. Simon Peter, recognising the presence of God, suddenly becomes acutely aware of his failings. In one sense it’s a natural and unexceptional response: God’s presence ought to overpower us with such a sense of awe and wonder that we become paralysed, time stands still, all pretence drops from our being and we stand naked before the Living God clothed only in that uncomfortable part of us that we cannot seem to release by our own power – our sins, our failings, our neurotic clinging to faults real and imagined.

In another sense, though, this talk and feeling of unworthiness are sheer silliness. Does God need advice on who will fit the bill? Does God not know already that no one called into divine service is perfect? That we all have weaknesses and failings? Of course God knows these things. But hey – feeling unworthy is great for anyone seriously into self-manufactured humility. It’s one of the best free, legal mind-altering substances around…

Which brings to element number four: God’s grace. This is what operates when God calls people to serve the divine purpose and seek the divine will in our world.

Much happens behind the scenes as it were to enable us to engage and sometimes even complete the task God sets us. Grace deals with the objection of unworthiness – unworthy? Who, sir? You, Sir? What unworthiness?

Grace enables us to do things we otherwise would successfully talk ourselves out of doing. We see this in Isaiah and Paul’s continuing correspondence with the Corinthian mob. In the latter, God’s grace is also formative, fashioning us into the people God needs for the tasks at hand: “I am what I am,” says Paul famously. How? “By the grace of God.”

In other words, even though Paul was a persecutor and only received his vision of Jesus last, nevertheless, he now does what he does as a result God’s freely-given power to enable us all for God’s work.

We see these elements in the call of Isaiah – the call, the trust, the sense of unworthiness, God’s grace. In a more condensed form, call, trust, unworthiness and grace are all present in the piece we hear from Corinthians.

Where does this place us in the Parish of the Holy Spirit, in the Anglican Parish of Camillo?

It leaves us confronting the most unpleasant reality of vocation in God’s service. It’s not that we might fail; it’s not that we might be hurt, emotionally, psychologically and sometimes physically. Crikey, people might laugh at us or call us names. Perhaps having to deal with our own sense of inadequacy and worse, our prevarication, procrastination and stagnancy – perhaps they’re a little part of it.

But the greatest stumbling block involves taking risks. Remember, faint heart never fashioned deathless prose for a Valentine’s Day Love Book entry – and vocation without risk is like coffee without a cup to contain it – it’s wasted.

Remember also the gospel. What does Jesus ask Simon to do? He asks him to go into deep water. Not the relatively safe, secure shallows. And in that deep water place, what happens? Simon’s equipment is nearly trashed and not one but two boats nearly sink because Simon and his colleagues are so successful.

So if we want to remain safe and warm ourselves by the inviting embers of failure and sin, it’s best to ignore God’s call. But do get used to being nagged, because God won’t give up.

If we do set out into deep water, then we can count on God’s grace to assist us and, in the process, transform us into the people God created us to be.

As ever, we have choices. Which will ours – individually and as a Parish – seek safety? or take the risks God invites us to engage, with the greater security of knowing that we sail – however deep the water – with the power of the grace of the Living God.

WHAT'S OUR PLACE?

31st January 2010 : Epiphany 4 : Year C
9:30am Camillo
Jeremiah 1:4-10 : 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 : Luke 4:21-30

Few of us enjoy being insulted. Sometimes it’s plain rude; at other times an insult wounds our pride because it may contain more grains of truth than we feel comfortable admitting to. On occasion, an insult may fly wide over our heads.

But when it comes to people insulting others – anyone but us – insults, in the mouths of the adept and witty, can elicit anything from a titter to an uproarious guffaw. Consider these, for instance:

• Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go. -- Oscar Wilde.
• Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don't let that fool you, he really is an idiot. – Groucho Marx.
• Abraham Lincoln was invited to look over a painting recently hung in a Washington gallery. The President spent some time looking at the work from various angles and finally passed judgement on it.
“The painter is a very good painter, and observes the Lord's Commandments,” he said.
“Whatever do you mean?” asked one of his friends.
“Well, as I see it,” Lincoln replied, “he hasn't made unto himself the likeness of anything in heaven above or in the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth.”
• President Coolidge was known for his terse speech and reticence. A woman bet her friend that she could get Coolidge to speak to her, which was something he was reluctant to do. She went up to him and said: "Hello, Mr. President, I bet my friend that I could get you to say three words to me." "You lose," Coolidge replied dryly, and walked away.

It’s possible to find thousands of these on the internet. And many of them are at least amusing, moments in which we quickly, sometimes instantly recognise the revelation of some flaw or other.

But no one is laughing in the synagogue at Nazareth when Jesus issues a couple of very cutting insults at the expense of a congregation who clearly practise self-congratulation and exercise the assumption that God is on their side because they do the “right thing”.

We can deduce from their reaction to the two illustrations Jesus gives as he dismisses their accolades that the Nazareth congregation reckon that the Living God is interested only in the salvation and redemption of the Jewish people. God, they seem to believe, focuses only on them, to the exclusion of all others. They are the elite, the chosen.

Jesus pointedly observes that salvation history contains its fair share of redemptive moments when the Living God apparently ignored Israel in favour of Gentiles. Those are his examples: a widow from Sidon and a leper from Syria – both non-Jews.

What is insulting to the congregation in the synagogue is the revelation that they cannot claim a unique relationship with God and the implication that, although they think they are doing the right thing, they are actually way off target.

Few of us, convinced of our rightness or superiority, like to be told that we have it wrong. Few of us would fail to feel our hackles rise, increase our blood pressure and boil into anger if we were told calmly, convincingly and inarguably that despite our very best efforts we had it all wrong – especially if our efforts were sincere.

And make no mistake. Jesus is talking to US as well as the Jewish congregation at Nazareth – to 21st century Camillo Anglicans as well as 1st century Nazareth Jews.

And we might want to ponder how we might react if Jesus popped up and told us that God sent prophets to the Coffin Cheaters and the pot-smoking, aerosol-sniffing unemployed of Camillo instead of needy Christians…

It’s an instructive thing to consider. To ask ourselves: What is our attitude towards God, Church, Faith? Do we have a sense of entitlement, of superiority, of elitism because we’re “in here” and “they” are “out there”?

I had an experience early one Easter Sunday morning in a parish that always celebrated a dawn service. Noticing the lights and the bustle as we prepared for the celebrations, a couple of very rough-looking, leather-clad gentlemen walked in off the street. I immediately tensed up, expecting trouble in the form of baseball bats or flick-knives.

Instead, the said gentlemen began asking questions. They wanted to know what we were doing, what was going on. They were interested in finding out and learning. And they were suitably impressed, in awe.

I wish I could say that they converted on the spot, received baptism and became faithful and loyal followers of Jesus. I don’t think they even stayed for the Service. They just walked back out into the dark street.

But they had experienced something that is perhaps lost to those who turn up every Sunday. The newness. The presence. Something. Who knows? Something that they connected with; that connected with them.

It’s a similar dynamic that informs the passage from Paul’s letter to the folk in Corinth. We all know it. Anyone who’s ever attended a wedding service that I haven’t conducted will most likely have heard it. I’ve heard it at secular weddings and even, believe it or not, at a civil funeral.

But underneath it all, what is Paul really saying? His point is that form and format don’t matter. They’re not wrong. They have their place and they’re valuable – assets and gifts. But don’t confuse the outward appearance for the Spirit-driven core.

And that Spirit-driven core is this crazy little thing Paul calls love. Like the congregation in Nazareth, we can do all the right things, conduct Services by the book, look and sound like Anglicans, say the right things, stand, sit, kneel and scratch our heads in time to the King’s College, Cambridge, Boys’ Choir.

But it’s all meaningless unless it proceeds from and with love – the process of deciding to consider the needs of someone else first. That’s the usual context of marital love – but it applies to love in every kind of relationship, from the most casual to the most intimate.

And when the Living God sends us out from here today, it’s both a unique act that has never occurred before and one that has a timelessness that comes from God’s eternal loving of all creation, including humankind. And what we are called to do, like Jeremiah, like Paul and the Corinthian folk, like the disciples and the apostles, is to practise this love that considers the needs of others first.

And yes, we are supposed to practise and learn it in our own relationships as well as our ecclesiastical ones… Means here in this congregation as well as at home with our partners and children and relatives.

So unless and until we become adept at loving in this selfless way that Jesus showed is possible for human beings to do, we need not worry – even for one micro-moment – about whether the next person – or ourselves, for that matter – is standing, sitting, kneeling, reading the right version of the bible, doing the right thing, or the wrong thing. As the preacher remarked last week or the week before – we have plenty enough to do getting things sorted in our own little patch of the vineyard to worry about the rightness or wrongness of the person sitting next to us or across the road or in the mosque or synagogue or temple down the road, round the corner, up the hill, over the border…!

GOOD NEWS MEANS GOOD NEWS

24th January 2010 : Epiphany 3 : Year C
9:30am Camillo
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 : 1 Corinthians 12:12-31 : Luke 4:14-21

At the risk of sounding like a very poor parody of a German or eastern European film, we have a saying in English: there is no point in re-inventing the wheel. And if we want an excellent example of someone not re-inventing a particular spiritual, faith-based wheel we need look no further than Luke’s Jesus in today’s gospel.

What Jesus is doing, as Luke plainly tells us, is quoting from scripture, namely the Hebrew scriptures. What Luke doesn’t plainly say is that the passage Jesus reads is from the book of the prophet Isaiah, chapter 61 and verses 1 and 2, which go like this:

The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,
because the LORD has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;

ISA 61:2 to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;

What is this? About a third of verse 2 has dropped off, the most embarrassing bit being that stuff about “our” God’s vengeance.

Or maybe Luke has Jesus omit that part of the verse to remind aficionados of the Hebrew scriptures – who would have been everyone in Jesus’ and Luke’s time – that what the Living God is about is peace and not violence. In other words, let me suggest, the omission is deliberate and considered.

In effect, Jesus is saying that he comes to bring healing and hope – and that it is here now, in the presence of the people, who initially are quite smitten with his charming words. As Jesus will later demonstrate, he’s not easily flattered. He may well have agreed with John Lennon’s incisive lyric that pounds through the beginning of Gimme some truth: “I'm sick and tired of hearing things from uptight-short-sighted-narrow minded hypocritics…” But that’s another sermon; maybe next week’s…

So, what is Jesus in Luke saying today? Let’s be good theologians and begin by saying what he isn’t doing. Jesus is not saying he’s come to shut down Judaism because God has appointed him Receiver over an errant, impoverished religion. Fulfillment language never indicates an end to one thing, followed by a John Cleese voice-over saying, “And now for something completely different…!”

Jesus comes to reform the existing faith system, not to abandon it and create a new one. He was not a Christian and his mission was not to “usher in” Christianity. He came, he sez, to speak for the Living God and re-create a system of respect, honouring and genuine care for human beings for no other reason than that we are human beings, created in the image and likeness of the Living God and one of the vital elements in creation.

In theological and semi-theological terms, God sez, “I love you cos I made you; I love you cos you are.”

And here’s Jesus actually saying this is it, folks; over the top! And then we get power chords and Doc Neeson belting out Take a long line… with the Angels…

Okay, we don’t get Doc Neeson. But we do have Jesus making an extraordinary statement and sounding a tad more like Karl Marx than Jimmy Swaggart or Billy Graham; more like Martin Luther King, if you prefer, than Ian Paisley or Pat Robertson. More – like it or not – like Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi than Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benny Sixteen) or John Knox or John Calvin.

And what about this good news he’s come to proclaim? We’ve had it shrink-wrapped, galvinised, Photoshopped, merchandised, snap-frozen, deep-fried, fog-horned, feather-dusted, cream-puffed, basted, roasted, poached – especially poached – blind-baked, nose-ringed, tattooed, branded, professionally developed, networked, super-sized, miniaturised, tee-shirted, hog-tied, politicised, iodised, capitalised, franchised and of course theologized –

But we seem to spend more energy avoiding putting it into practice and making it real than we can thinking up excuses for explaining it away. It is not rocket science. Good news means good news. You’ve got the job. Your cancer has gone. You can afford that house. Interest rates have dropped. Or risen, as the case may be. You’re cured. You’re loved. You’re on the right track. You’re free!

Now, we should be aware that “good news” is a translation of the Greek word euaggelion, from which we get words like evangelist and evangelical. We are all called to be evangelists in the sense that good news is supposed to be our stock skill.

What Paul sez in his first letter to the mob in Corinth about evangelists is a reference to a particular, specialised calling. It’s not a handy excuse for avoiding being the bearer of good news at all times.

And yet… how often has the Church passed off as good news material – words, prayers, actions – that to any person of reason and common sense is anything but good news. Jesus engaged the legalists and hectic fundamentalists of his day precisely in an effort to wrestle plain reason and common sense back into his faith.

He understood the multivariate shades of grey and the brilliant hues of life lived fully and intimately with the Living God, not one of which required a more exacting belief in anything but a God who reached out, understood and loved unconditionally and generously.

This is essentially what he is saying to people whose captivity, blindness, poverty and oppression take many forms, not only the literal. And his most astounding statement is that this good news, this world of what one theory of counseling calls “unconditional positive regard”, is available freely here and now.

It comes into life whenever and wherever people show in word and deed that good news means good news in a way that even the most uneducated person can understand. …In a way that holds the eye and the heart together in tenderness and respect.

…In a way that refuses judgement and upholds the value and power of kindness, love and compassion in the face of every attempt of a damaged world to shred the fabric of respect and wholeness.

None of this is easy to do. Our damaged souls constantly infect and rust those around us. It is as if the damage is a cancer that tries to multiply its cells at every opportunity.

But the good news is that it is not at all impossible to be kind and loving and compassionate, to see these values and qualities as vibrant, energised signs of the Living God’s presence, and to seek what is best in every person and situation.

And whenever any of us manages to reproduce even a little of God’s generous presence in Camillo or anywhere else, then good news is being fulfilled in those places. This is our calling as people of God. May all our thoughts, words and deeds speak always and only the good news of Jesus, the good news of the Living God.

BAPTISING JESUS, OR: ENTERING THE ARENA

10th January 2010 : Baptism of our Lord : Year C
9:30am Camillo
Isaiah 43:1-7 : Acts 8:14-17 : Luke 3:15-22

For a while now I’ve been working my way through a book called The artist’s way by American writer, journalist and film-maker, Julia Cameron. The basic premise of Ms Cameron’s book is that all people are creative but that most of us are “blocked” for reasons that seem to be as numerous as they are complex.

These blockages usually come from childhood and family experiences of discouragement – what we might call the voices of doom and gloom that spring to life to convince our vulnerable and susceptible minds and souls that we are not good enough, or over-reaching our abilities, or might or will suffer terrifying consequences if we dare to pursue our creative dreams.

I’m reminded of all this as we come to Luke’s version of the baptism of Jesus, an event that has caused the Church considerable angst because it appears to contradict the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity and therefore also his sinless nature. In other words, why would the sinless Jesus approach John the baptiser to receive a “baptism of repentance”?

On the surface this is a reasonable question – apart from the nagging suspicion that it’s the wrong question.

It’s a question that is so reasonable that it becomes, paradoxically, a way of blocking the truly creative outpouring of the Living God acting in and through Jesus. It’s the theological equivalent of saying to an aspiring sculptor, “What makes you think you can support yourself sculpting busts of The Chipmunks?”

I’m sure it’s unintentional but it still functions to draw us away from what may be the more important elements in the story of Jesus’ baptism.

Hold that thought and its implied question while I go on to mention an MP3 download with the title Reflections on The artist’s way, which is a two-part talk that the same Julia Cameron presents. During the course of this presentation she begins to talk about engaging one’s creativity no matter how absurd it may seem to do so. At one point she begins to say, “…Something happens when you enter the arena…” And it’s that phrase that I find sticking and refusing to shift – entering the arena.

Because that, I think, is precisely what Jesus – the notionally, theologically sinless Jesus – does when he comes forward to be baptised. He enters the arena – and it’s because of that entry that “something happens”.

It’s reminiscent of the old internet joke about the man who complains bitterly to God that the wealth God has promised has not materialised. God’s response is that everything necessary has been given to the man – but he still hasn’t gone out and bought the lottery ticket… In other words, he hasn’t actually entered the arena, therefore nothing has happened.

“Something – rather than no thing – happens when you enter the arena.”

According to all four gospels – not just Luke – that “something” appears to be the activation of the Holy Spirit, the One with whom, John the Baptiser tells us, Jesus will baptise, in contrast to John’s baptising with water.

And in case anyone is wondering, all the gospels confirm that Jesus did the “right” thing because God indicates pleasure at what Jesus does. The mysterious voice that supplies the confirmation also closes the Trinitarian circuit, giving us Jesus, Spirit and God all together in the one place.

But before anyone has time to miss the point in that instant, the Spirit is driving Jesus into the wilderness to undergo a time of testing.

Let me suggest that God is not especially interested in the question of why the sinless Jesus should undergo a baptism of repentance. It’s the wrong question. It’s a blocking question.

What it blocks is primarily our ability to move beyond the text and to begin to explore what lies beneath. It’s a question that effectively stops us entering the arena.

…Because one of the hidden, unstated implications of the question is that something fairly obvious and discernible ought to happen if/when we find an answer. Theologically again, it’s the equivalent of saying, “I’ll take up painting if I can get some guarantee that my art will sell, or people will recognise my talent and reward me sufficiently.”

But that isn’t the “something” that happens when we enter our arenas, whatever they may be. For followers of Jesus entering the arena – the important action of engagement with the world in a real, human, open, generous, loving and compassionate way – does not and will never offer any guarantees, whatever our desired guarantee may be.

We need to be absolutely certain of that. We don’t even know what the “something” will be, let alone that entering the arena will provide us with all the good things we secretly and not-so-secretly covet.

But the question remains begged – what is the arena God invites us to enter? One answer would be that the arena is everywhere we go; that the opportunities for being kind and compassionate people whose words, thoughts and deeds speak of God’s love are always before us. Another would be to point across Lake Road at Lakeview Caravan Park. And another – equally valid – would be that we can’t know until we find ourselves in a situation that invites our goodness.

Ultimately, the arena is less a geographical or quasi-geographical entity than an attitude of willingness. And it’s a willingness freed of the burdens of expectation. It is not a transaction in the sense of a trade-off between my action and some reward. It is not doing for the sake of doing.

It is about responding to the invitation when it comes. And it will come. It will come because we all have gifts that God invites us to use. God invites us to use those gifts creatively, willingly, openly, freely.

When Jesus wades into the Jordan he isn’t thinking, I know I don’t need to do this, being sinless and all. But, heh – it’ll look good on my CV… We don’t know what he’s thinking at all. But it appears that he did.

And what we learn from Jesus’ action is the significance of entering the arena without knowing what the outcome will be but trusting that something will happen.

The only question is only one we can answer individually – are we willing to enter our arena?

HAITI AND GOD'S TRANSFORMING POWER

17th January 2010 : Epiphany 2 : Year C
9:30am Camillo
Isaiah 62:1-5 : 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 : John 2:1-11

It doesn’t seem too long ago that a submarine earthquake launched the tsunami that devastated so many areas in countries around the Indian Ocean. Most of those places, especially in Indonesia, are still trying to rebuild in what is still the aftermath of that horrific episode. In our own nation we live perilously with dry bush neighbouring us, praying that we have no further bushfires.

No prizes for guessing that I’m going to mention Haiti next. Word is that the death toll could reach 200 000, with the number of people the earthquake affected rising to three million. That’s one-third of Haiti’s population.

I have to admit that I can’t imagine either of those figures. They’re too big, almost surreal in their magnitude.

We who have the unspeakable luxury of continuing our comparatively stress-free lives – for which we should not feel any guilt – need to confront one of the huge questions that any faith or religion ought to be asking at times like these. The question takes several forms, most commonly, Why did God allow this to happen? and, Where was God…?

These are the common questions of a shared desperation that arises simply from being human in a damaged world. But they become even more sharply-focussed when disasters, either natural or human-made, shatter our complacency.

At one level these sorts of questions help deflect our thoughts from the pain we are feeling by having a go at God. I suspect that as we view the images of twisted metal and crumpled buildings, the silent screams and cries of people whose lives, for this moment, are ruined seemingly beyond repair, what we see are so many metaphors for our own inner turmoil.

And maybe it takes something this big, this insufferable, to make us jerk awake and take notice.

But we can’t stand it very long and so, inevitably, we have to make our aggrieved and aggressive representations to God, demanding answers or nervously offering un-asked-for and increasingly-arrogant sham theodicies – justifications for God’s actions or inactions – in order to repress our own pain.

Even so, these are necessary questions and we should never be afraid to ask them. Where indeed was the Living God when the earth ripped itself apart and made mockery of human structures and already-tenuous livelihoods in the dirt-poor republic? Why didn’t God do something to stop it?

I’m not going to pretend I have any answers to questions – good questions – that humankind has asked for millennia before Jesus came along. But let’s get some garbage out of the way first.

Neither this nor any other natural disaster is the action of an enraged, vengeful deity punishing human transgression. It’s clear enough from the Isaiah passage, in which God says,

For Zion's sake I will not keep silent,
and for
Jerusalem's sake I will not rest,
until her vindication shines out
like the dawn,
and her salvation like a burning torch.

Although these and the subsequent stanzas speak of God’s determination to bring restoration to Jerusalem, we can see the same movement towards healing and wholeness in the life and work of Jesus. His actions – so easily misinterpreted and misunderstood – were always about restoration and never about power.

This is what the Living God does. God is a builder and an encourager, never a divine policeman or petty tyrant demanding satisfaction for every slight, real or imagined. No doubt televangelists will have a proverbial field day when they peruse the CIA Factbook entry for Haiti and discover that although 80% of the population claim to be Roman Catholic, roughly “half practise voodoo”.

The true face of the Living God is actually in the hands and feet and skills and willingness of fragile human beings offering time and money and the use of their gifts. This is God in action – people acting with the generosity of God to bring about healing and wholeness.

Equally, God’s actions inform the prayers of the nations. Those who pray align themselves with God and the divine intentions.

Paul’s first letter to the community of faith in Corinth makes a point so obvious that we could almost be forgiven for constantly ignoring it, namely that ordinary people like you and me are the primary resources and manifestations of God’s work.

This is why we see volunteers going to Haiti. This is why people are donating money and goods. This is why aid agencies are seriously mobilised already.

And this is why we pray – not to call upon Mr Fix-it – but, as above, to align ourselves with God’s will and purpose for restoration and wholeness. Our prayers, in a sense, are an energy geared towards this purpose and will, made real when we surrender ourselves into the mystery of God and acknowledge that we really don’t know anything, that we are just as confused today as we were yesterday – and maybe more so – and that we can only offer something like faith in the presence of an enormity we can never hope to understand.

All of this may sound like wet, weak-kneed sap but in reality it is the acknowledgement without which we continue to delude ourselves that we have answers and abilities of our own, not God’s making. It is only when we surrender to the mystery that God can then enable us, freed from our confusing certainties and delusions, to be part of the divine purpose.

And when that happens, God is able to take ordinary bodies, intricate, complex and wondrous, and enable them to do extraordinary things.

Rather like turning water into wine…

CHRISTMASS 2009 - LOVE AND HOPE IN DESPERATE TIMES

24th and 25th December 2009 : CHRISTMASS : Year C
Midnight Mass / 9:30am : Camillo
Isaiah 9:2-7 : Titus 2:11-14 : Luke 2:1-20
Isaiah 62:6-12 : Titus 3:4-8a : Luke 2:1-20

The central paradox of Christmass is that we all tend to come to this day thinking it’s about a baby and yet the true focus of the Christ Mass is not the baby but the whole gathering of people who find something or other drawing them to this day, this event, this child. More than that – if the baby means anything at all, then the focus is every single human being on this planet.

According to the website worldometers, which claims to provide real time statistics on the world’s population, among other things, at the time I began writing this sentence the world’s population was 6,814,292,943. Having finished writing that sentence and switched back to check the current world population, I now find that it is 6,814,293,112…13…14…15…85 people.

I’m not sure if worldometers is a gimmick but the figures are probably more or less in the proverbial ballpark. That’s a lot of people in just a few seconds. Every one of whom falls within the Living God’s area of care and concern; every one of whom lives and dies as a unique creation of the one creator.

Well, that’s the theory, anyway. I doubt if any of us can grasp how many people that number refers to. As Stalin didn’t say: One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.

So maybe that’s why we find it easier to turn our attention to this newborn baby, remembering his birth year by year and re-telling the story to each new generation.

Needless to say, however, we’ve also become accustomed to the industrial sentimentality that, some would say, has hijacked “our” religious observance. Of course it’s not “ours”. Let’s lay that one to rest quicker than an exhausted parent can put the newborn to bed after rocking him or her to a miraculous sleep…

If God comes into the world and assumes human flesh in the form of this baby, Jesus, then it is for all the world. Remember the paradox? And that means for people who call themselves Christians and those who salute the Jewish flag; for Hindus and Buddhists and atheists and agnostics.

Like it or not.

And yes, Christmas has become commercialised and trivialised and sentimentalised and paralysed in a syrup of sickly goo, no more powerfully symbolised than in the so-called elevator music that assaults our ears the moment we step inside shopping centres. I suspect I’d derive more pleasure from blowing up a brown paper bag and making a loud bang than from continuing to allow this muzak to damage my delicate sensibilities.

But wait! Let me not get carried away with self-righteous superiority as if I have once again forgotten that I and my religious heritage do not own Christmass.

For many of us this music is part of a genuine joy we feel at this time of year. By what authority do the self-appointed arbiters of propriety seek to substitute disapproval or disdain for that joy? Likewise, for many of us the sentiment surrounding the gooing and cooing at the baby Jesus may be our first religious experience. By what authority does anyone assume that it won’t be our last or only religious experience? Does anyone really believe that the Living God is helpless in the face of muzak and mush?

When the kid in the crib grew up he said something about not judging, I seem to recall. And I know I’ve said this before, and I promise I’ll say it again, just as I’m about to say it now: we all have far too much to do just trying to follow Jesus faithfully to worry about anyone else’s beliefs.

Our faith – and we have to agree with Richard Dawkins here – is not a rational system. It can’t be. It’s a willing surrender into the mystery of a Being we call God whom we believe has somehow communicated with us. The story of the birth in Bethlehem is part of that communication. The other characters – Mary, Joseph, the shepherds; in Matthew’s gospel, the Magi – are part of a communication that tells us that something extraordinarily special and different takes place here in this narrative.

In many ways it resembles birth stories from other cultures and other belief systems. A god is born into the world, in human form. But in this story so many genre elements are missing. This baby isn’t rich, powerful or privileged. He’s not born in an important geo-political region. And what’s most remarkable, perhaps, is the absence of violence attending his conception and birth.

In the myths and legends of other cultures violence is a central part of the birth narratives of godly offspring, often in the form euphemistically-described rape. In the Jesus story this does not happen.

It’s a telling reminder of last Sunday’s observation – the radical social conscience of Mary, passed on to her son, Jesus, takes a non-violent cue from the very beginning. Here we have the birth of another who will show how well and profoundly he understands the pronouncement of the Hebrew scriptures: I desire mercy, not sacrifice.

At this point we might want to ask why it is that showing mercy seems to be such a difficult thing. After all, isn’t it a lot cleaner, less blood-thirsty, less putrid and smelly, and considerably less violent than sacrifice?

Of course it is! But mercy – or any other form of lovingkindness and compassion – demand connection, interaction, engagement. That is always an extremely difficult task. It asks a great deal to reach out unconditionally to another human being. Far easier to keep it distant, symbolic, stylised and definitely familiar.

Ultimately, it’s the old difference between being and doing. Sacrifice in biblical terms is an action. Being merciful, on the other hand, involves relationship – and relationship expressed authentically is about being.

Always more difficult, more demanding – because authentic relationship requires profound self-knowledge, especially with regard to our motives, needs and desires.

It’s little wonder that we so easily become uber-sentimentalised at Christmass. Because the sentimental makes few, if any demands of our self, our being, our soul. Yet the heart of spirituality is the totally irrational surrender to mystery I mentioned earlier. Trusting something we can’t see and can’t demonstrate using the scientific method.

Of course the flaw in the rationalist argument is the assumption that this is the only way and kind of knowing that is legitimate. It clearly isn’t. Finding the loving, redeeming, compassionate, global-directed essence of the Living God in a vulnerable and helpless baby who will remain dependent on his parents, to one extent or another, for the next twelve years of his life shows us that it is possible to enter relationship, to take risks, to be vulnerable and self-giving.

Yes we do need to remember that Jesus grew up, that Bethlehem becomes Nazareth and Capernaum and eventually, horrifically, Jerusalem.

But we also need to remember that the grown Jesus still needs our own love, compassion, vulnerability and willingness to take risks as we seek him in the only places we will ever find him in flesh and blood – in other people, in their pain and suffering, in their lostness, in their hopelessness, their rejection, their oppression.

The birth of Jesus – however it happened, wherever it happened – is the invitation to seek relationship with him in other people. It will not be easy – it never is.

But if we are willing to make that move then we will make real God’s love and the offer of God’s hope in a world now even more desperately in need of them.

MARY AND JESUS - HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW

20th December 2009 : Advent 3 : Year C
9:30am Camillo
The Baptism of Kai Justin Reynolds
Micah 5:2-5a : Hebrews 10:5-10 : Luke 1:39-45

In his CD talk, Mary and non-violence, Richard Rohr makes the observation that we don’t know a lot about Mary of Nazareth, the mother of Jesus, from the Christian scriptures. But he goes on to say with great insight that the primary source of our knowledge about this remarkable woman is her son, Jesus.

Rohr points out that when we look through the eyes of Jesus we are also seeing with Mary’s eyes. It’s a phenomenon that any reasonably attentive parent will notice, as their children – from a breathtakingly early age – pick up and reproduce even the slightest mannerism or twitch or behaviour.

I noticed it first when I saw that my son, Iain, then aged about two or three, frowned the way his grandfather frowned. At the time I thought it somewhat strange because Iain didn’t spend a lot of time with his grandfather, my Dad. Now, sometimes I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed and on this occasion I was clearly still waiting for the whetstone… But I eventually figured out that Iain’s frown came, not from his grandfather, but from me; and I was the one who picked it up from my father and hence transmitted the frown with all its subtlety to my son.

Now, we’d have to admit that Jesus would have picked up a great deal from his father, Joseph. Joe is on the scene for at least the first twelve years of Jesus’ life. Luke tells us as much in the story about the very precocious kid Jesus staying behind in the Temple while Joseph and Mary set off without him, notice he’s missing and return to Jerusalem to find him lecturing his betters… But after this – no more Joseph. The best guess we can make is that Joe kicked the bucket somewhere between Jesus’ twelfth birthday and his public ministry at the age of thirty. But given that Jesus is known to the townsfolk as Mary’s son, it’s likely his Dad died before Jesus became an adult at the age of thirteen…

So Mary likely had a huge influence on Jesus’ growing years, the period of time we in the west call adolescence, which is a relatively recent invention. And what we hear of Mary in these early chapters of Luke’s gospel suggest that she had what we would call today a powerful social consciousness – that she was very concerned about social justice and understood very well the message of the Living God in the Hebrew scriptures – that God desires mercy, not sacrifice; that God cares about the widow and the orphan. In other words, about the poor and the oppressed and the marginalised.

So it is that we arrive at the powerful poem our tradition entitles The Magnificat. Its clear message of solidarity with the poor and denunciation of the rich and powerful prefigures Jesus’ own social concerns by some three decades. That Jesus speaks with unparalleled authority, assuredness and confidence does not diminish Mary’s influence. If anything, it reinforces her position as primary role model to the boy who grew into a man convinced of his vocation to convey good news to the poor.

Nor is it likely that Mary beat this into Jesus… Mary is the woman who in Luke’s gospel ponders deeply on some pretty powerful and amazing events. She doesn’t jump to conclusions, she doesn’t pretend to understand what was beyond her – or anyone else’s – capacity to understand.

Instead, she “keeps things in her heart”. In other words, she ruminates in a healthy way. She considers deeply the meaning of things. At times she seems to understand her eldest child. At other times she appear as bewildered and confused as anyone else among Jesus’ followers.

It all goes together as part of the difficult and enthralling journey of faith into which the rest of us enter when we are baptised. Our aim as followers of Jesus is to see with his eyes, which are arguably also the eyes of Mary.

This is a good thing because Mary gives us that capacity to step back and ponder. This is not – and must never become – an attempt to arrive at any kind of understanding of things that mostly defy understanding. Rather, this business of symbolically removing ourselves from the midst of difficult situations allows us to stand with God and gain greater clarity with regard to any given situation.

Ultimately, it allows us to surrender ourselves to the Living God so that God can begin the work of transformation that is the essence of our spiritual journey. We will shortly be witnessing the formal beginning of such a journey when Kai comes to be baptised. The actual journey began long before this moment, probably before Kai was even conceived.

That is essentially a statement of and from faith. We don’t know – and it doesn’t matter that we don’t know. What matters is whether we are prepared to spend time with God learning about God’s ways and learning to see with Jesus’ and Mary’s eyes.

So when Kai is baptised he will publicly and outwardly begin his own journey of faith. None of us can know where that journey will take him but our prayer is that he will know that the Living God accompanies him every step of the way.

LIVING IN A REAL WORLD

13th December 2009 : Advent 3 : Year C
9:30am Camillo
Zephaniah 3:14-20 : Philippians 4:4-7 : Luke 3:7-18

Friday night I watched the movie The island. If anyone hasn’t seen it, it’s about a futuristic community of clones whose apparently warped genius creator has bred them in order to supply parts for rich clients in the event that something catastrophic should happen to them. Each client has a cloned copy of themselves, referred to disarmingly as their “insurance policy”.

The Island is a fiction that the scientist-controllers invent to give the clones – whom they refer to as “products” – a sense of hope, understood as “something to look forward to”. Whenever a client needs, say, an organ or body part, their clone wins a false lottery that purports to be their passport to The Island, sold as a paradise of tranquillity and joy.

The clones live on a mind-washing diet of constant lies and half-truths. Until of course one of them starts to show signs of increased neurological growth: his brain begins to allow him to think and question. He notices discrepancies. He begins to ponder what these things that don’t add up might mean.

And begins the unravelling and eventual destruction of this world of lies and duplicity.

It’s quite a contrast with the world we encounter this morning in Luke’s gospel. John the forerunner continues where he left off last week, clearly proclaiming a message of hope and good news that does not sugar-coat the unpleasant realities that are part of the world of the people who gather at the Jordan to hear his message and receive his baptism.

This is a world of fear and uncertainty, sometimes a place of sheer terror; in which few people – and not even the most powerful – can know what tomorrow and sometimes the next hour will bring. John the forerunner, on the banks of and waist-deep within the Jordan River, yells a message about someone who is coming to change this situation of uncertainty.

And he’s going to do so, not with lies and deception, not by promising an easy life free from pain and suffering, not by creating insurance policies that exploit and ultimately degrade other living creatures, but by showing us what it means to be human and connected with the Living God.

This "one who is to come" will teach us to live with God in this world – our world, our Camillo – not in some fictitious place that some manipulative megalomaniac spoon-feeds to us in order to control us for their own purposes. This one is the man we call Jesus – and what he does is radical in so many ways.

He tells us that we can connect with God, here and now. He tells us we don’t institutions or human mediators to do so. He shows us that it is possible – and natural – to find the Spirit in ordinary, everyday things and other human beings. He allows us to claim the power each one of us possesses and to use that power to make the world a better place, to help those most in need, to love the most unlovable, to go to and touch the hidden, the marginalised, the outcast and the untouchable.

This is what the message of Jesus, whom John the forerunner prefigured, is always about. At the risk of descending into understatement, Jesus’ message and manner show us how to live well in this world or whatever world we happen to be born into.

This is why neither Jesus nor John before him create a false world. They don’t have to. Nor do they have to jettison this world and make knowingly-duplicitous statements about places of harmony and joy.

Because we don’t eliminate suffering by avoiding it or passing it on to someone else. We do it by living with it and through it, by understanding it. This is what Jesus teaches us.

In Luke, John the forerunner offers advice to those who seek it. His words – wise words – speak of the here and now. They counsel frugality and sharing; they speak of a radical honesty and forebearance. What it adds up to is living well in the here and now.

What amounts to joy is joy in the face of pain because of our knowledge of God’s presence. Certainly we might feel a great rush of rejoicing if we are healed of a terrible illness or because we are offered the job we applied for. But these are not lasting experiences. If our joy is dependent on a particular event or thing, we cannot do anything with it but watch it fade away.

If, however, our joy comes from realising our connection with the Living God then we have a greater likelihood of that joy continuing, a greater likelihood of retaining that joy if things get worse rather than better.

Neither John nor Jesus ask us to live in a fantasy or a fantasy world. They both understand that we experience life here and now, and this life is the one we must negotiate and find meaning in. Nothing less and nowhere else will do.

If we look closer at the other readings we find similar insights: that although, in Zephaniah, rejoicing is couched in terms of victory in war and freedom from fear of further war, what is it – or rather WHO is it whose presence actually accomplishes these things? Paul to the community in Philippi makes it clearer – “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.”

Paul is not calling us to rejoice because of some event or pleasing thing that has happened, often enough in spite of anything we think we’re doing. Rather, he sez: rejoice in the Lord. The one who does not abandon us no matter how many times we do the abandoning.

Our task, then, is to allow the Living God into our consciousness. We’re all good at assenting to the proposition that God is and that we claim sort of belief in this Being.

But we’re not talking about assenting to an intellectual proposition. As the scriptures say, even the satan believes in God. Our task is somewhat harder and we can only accomplish it by embarking upon a journey that willingly invites the Living God to share it with us. When we do that, we discover soon enough that God is already present.

When Columcille, better known as Columba, waddled off in his coracle not really knowing where he was headed, he eventually found the island of Iona. He at first thought it was a deserted piece of rock and soil but he learned that it was already holy ground. The Living God had already been there and was still present.

This is how we will experience God as well. God called and not called. The sign above the gate leading to Carl Jung’s home: Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit! Called and not called, God will be there.

What makes our task so demanding is not so much the business of paying attention to God in order to discover God’s ways, though that is hard enough. What makes it hard is deliberately, intentionally making and taking the time to do so. It cannot be done in any other way.

So as we remember that the word advent comes from the Romans and translates as comes towards (us, understood), let’s take and make the time we need to allow the Living God into our presence, so that we may then – and only then – discover that we are constantly in God’s presence already.

Our coracles run ashore on holy ground – the holy ground of our own soul, the rock and soil of our own being – where the Living God chooses to dwell, watching and waiting, even as we still consider and think and dilly-dally about whether we too will wait and watch for God. Let us not delay in taking every opportunity that is offered us to deepen our spirituality and grow closer to the Living God!