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!

JOHN THE BAPTISER - LIKE OR NO LIKE?

6th December 2009 : Advent 2 : Year C
9:30am Camillo
Malachi 3:1-14 : Philippians 1:1-11 : Luke 3:1-6

Last night I wrote in an email to a friend that I quite like John the Baptiser even though he’s such a joyless b… And I do. It’s true.

What is it, I ask myself, that I like about this guy whom scripture portrays as pretty frightening, uncompromising, straight-down-the-line? who pulls no punches, tells it how he sees it, is not afraid of authority figures and is prepared to mix it with the roughest, toughest, ugliest, meanest brutes in the business?

Well, I suppose that’s my answer. A man who apparently is able to do things that I kind of wish I could. John possesses some truly admirable qualities.

But it’s not these qualities that recommend him to Jesus or us or anyone else. In modern day pathological language we might suspect that John had a touch of Asperger’s Syndrome because he’s so focussed, unyielding and utterly humourless.

But again, that’s not the point. John appears on the pages of the gospel stories for one basic reason – to announce that Messiah is on his way.

John is the forerunner. The icebreaker. The forward blocker who crashes through the defence in order to let the fleet-footed dude with the ball make it to the finish line. He’s the warm-up act. He’s bad cop to Jesus’ good cop, softening up the sinful villains so that Jesus’ by contrast soppy message of love and peace can find its way into the hearts and being of the desperate and despairing.

Or not.

I know from my own stubbornness that it’s just not that easy. At the end of the day, no matter how much of a battering John the baptiser dishes out, I – and we – still have a choice. We can choose to seek God and be with God. Or not.

But beyond that, John has little influence. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether or how many people really understood the message he bellowed in the wilderness. Remember these are superstitious people in superstitious times. They willingly ascribe to John a power and a status that he apparently does not claim for himself. Those whom he baptises quite likely seek the dunking only because they’re afraid of being dumped on from a very great height.

This is not the kind of free-will approach that the Living God seeks. It is not the behaviour that God approves of.

We get this clearly enough in the piece from the prophet Malachi. Speaking through the prophet, the Living God tells us plainly that all the we need to do is turn back to God. Turning and returning. This is what the baptiser’s word repent means.

It has nothing much to do with saying sorry for doing naughty things. But it DOES have EVERYTHING to do with changing our minds about God, about changing our attitude. It’s a task that is a lot harder to accomplish.

Saying sorry is easy. Anyone can do that. But saying sorry doesn’t actually make any spiritual demands on a person. We can say sorry as many times as we like, and even be totally sincere, but we can – and usually do – stand outside and away from the real demands of repentance.

Repentance – changing our minds and attitudes – demands something of our BEING. Change – this kind of change – is a spiritual matter. It involves something at the core of our being. And it’s not something anyone can fake.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t ever say sorry when we have behaved badly. We certainly should take responsibility for our actions and accept the consequences.

But unless we put repentance in the picture, we may well find that we are dooming ourselves to repeating the same obnoxious behaviours over and over again. This is not good.

The great thing, the joyous and glorious thing about repentance is that by definition it brings us (back) into relationship with the Living God. Just as mere sorry-saying makes no relational demands and we can continue to stand well outside any connection with God, so too – but conversely – repentance, changing our minds about God, actually draws us back into relationship with God.

So when John wades into the Jordan and yells at the crowd he’s not asking anyone to say sorry for anything. He’s inviting in no uncertain terms a changing of attitude and mind, a returning to relationship, a moving away totally from self-imposed isolation and exile.

And inevitably the question: what are the signs of this changed mind? We find one answer in the letter to the community of faith in Philippi. It’s an attitude of love and self-giving.

These are not things that come without having some sort of relationship with the Living God. Of course it’s an absurdity to speak of “some sort of relationship”. It’s not a matter of degree or quality, as if one person’s relationship with God is worth six points and someone else’s is only worth two. It’s a matter of either we have it or we don’t.

But like any loving partnership, none of us can take it for granted. We need to be and remain attentive to both the relationship and to God. It’s not because God will go off in a huff if we don’t pay enough attention. God won’t and doesn’t behave in that manner.

But if we are not attentive we run the real risk of becoming caught up, enmeshed in the woes of the world and our own. Suddenly we find ourselves within the disaster instead of standing with God in that place where we can actually offer service and love when it is needed.

Because one of the tragic aspects of life’s pain is that it draws us in and crushes us before we’re even aware of what’s happening. We so easily become part of the tragedy and time after time reproduce it in our own and others’ lives.

Changing our minds and attitudes so that we seek and value and attend to our relationship with God allows us to step away from this tragedy and see it for what it is – a depth of need that love can address.

Yeah, okay, this is somewhat tawdry philosophical and theological stuff. Until we remember that love is about deciding and choosing. And when we love we make the decision to seek others’ well-being. And to act in that way is exactly the same as the way the Living God acts.

So let me conclude with this: if we want to act as God acts – what better and more powerful a way to do so than by paying attention to God and learning from God and doing God’s work using the lessons we have learned?

But we can only do that if we turn back to God and change our minds and attitudes. This is John’s message today. It is the message of the prophet Malachi. It is the outworking of that message in Philippi among loving and self-giving followers of Jesus.

Long may it be the same in the Parish of the Holy Spirit, Camillo!