CHRISTMASS - UNDOING THE KNOTS

24^th and 25^th December 2012 : CHRISTMASS : Year C

11:30pm and 9:00am Kalamunda

Isaiah 9:2-7 : Psalm 96 : Titus 11-14 : Luke 2:1-20

Isaiah 62:1-12 : Psalm 97 : Titus 3:4-8a : Luke 2:1-10

Only last week I came across a painting from the German Baroque period, the title of which is translated as either Mary, the Untier of Knots, or Mary, the Undoer of Knots. The painting portrays Mary, gently hovering in the heavens, where cherubim attend her. In her left hand she holds a length of well-knotted string. One of the cherubim is feeding the knotted length to Mary, who with infinite patience works away at undoing each knot she comes to, while another cherub, to her right, receives the now-unknotted string from Mary.

Mary seems to be blessed – and cursed – with many roles. Yet all of them are ultimately blessings for humankind. Mary, the Undoer of Knots seems to be an exacting, painstaking role, akin in the demands of sheer patience to that of Sisyphus rolling his stone to the top of the mountain. Unlike Sisyphus, whose peculiar agony is to see the stone roll down infinitely, Mary does unknot those knots, her string does flow free and straight: her patience is never unrewarded.

This is just as well, because the business of conceiving, bearing and giving birth to the Messiah is a knotty one from the moment an angel pops up and delivers God’s invitation to participate in salvation history in a unique and extraordinary way.

Not least among the knots is God’s decision to choose a young woman from a country town, who gives birth in an obscure town in the midst of the flurry of a national census. The Messiah may eventually trace his descent to king David but Mary is hardly a Princess Royal and her surrounding are anything but palatial.

And the knots just keep on coming: God’s sends a batch of singing angels to announce the good news. To shepherds. These are not the heartwarming fellows we meet in our Christmass carols. In those times shepherds were dodgy types with the same social standing as the average bikie enjoys today. They’re in the fields, not just because they have sheep to look after, but because when shepherds are around, the townsfolk lock up their daughters, hide the silverware and cancel the local police officers’ leave.

Imagine Her Majesty issuing an invitation to have a gander at the Duchess of Cambridge’s yet-to-be-born baby, to the local chapter of the Hell’s Angels. If that happened, Kate would almost certainly have something to think about! Little wonder that when the shepherds scamper down to check out the baby, Jesus, Mary “treasure[s] all [their] words and ponder[s] them in her heart.”

But what is going on here? Well, God is turning the world upside down. The scene is set from the very beginning for the grown Jesus to wander his nation healing people who, like the shepherds, exist on the fringes of society. He’ll touch lepers, and not only consort with hated foreigners but actually praise them for possessing the kind of faith he expects of his own people, who instead display something that is at best lukewarm [no pun intended!], and can hardly be considered faith. Equally as bad, Jesus will speak with women as if they are fellow human beings, and treat them with respect, and consider them intelligent people who have at least as much to contribute to the work of the kingdom as any man.

All these people are the ones Luke the evangelist regards as “the Poor”, people who are the victims of a society that is more interested in seeking, gaining and managing power than being God’s people. Such a society is built on a foundation of violence, and the violence tears through the weakest, most vulnerable members of every human community leaving a legacy of pain, and damaged individuals.

Ultimately, the One whose birth we celebrate this day, will refuse to participate in the violence of his society and reject the violent assumptions that create the disharmony and misery he sets about healing during his own lifetime, in which he invites us to participate in our own.

This too is the meaning of salvation. Jesus is indeed the Saviour of the world. But not because he dies “in our place” – a bizarre concept that has little scriptural validation.

Jesus saves us from becoming victims of the power-hungry and from becoming power-seeking people ourselves. He does this by refusing and rejecting the game of power. By not fighting back even though he could easily have done so. He saves us by exposing exactly the kind of basis upon which our world, our Church, our parishes and congregations exercise power.

So it is no accident that Jesus comes to us in obscurity and from the margins. This is where God acts. These are the places Jesus will inhabit, standing with those whom the world rejects and casts out. This is where Jesus sends us: not to buy the latest issue of the magazines and papers micro-reporting every little twitch and tremble of the privileged – whom the Living God loves just as well as any person living on the edge of society – but to be with the rejected, to show them that the Living God caused a child to be born so that the despised could find hope and feel God’s love.

And that child is closer than any of us usually imagines. When you return home, look in a mirror. You will see that child, born this Christ Mass day, staring back at you.

MARY, YES AND GOD

23^rd December 2012 : Advent 4 : Year C

8:00am and 9:30am Kalamunda

Micah 5:2-5a : Magnificat : Hebrews 5:5-10 : Luke 1:39-45

John L. Bell has long been one of the driving forces behind the contemporary Iona Community, whom Saint Columcille, better-known as Saint Columba, founded in 563AD[1]. Often in collaboration with Graham Maule, John Bell composes beautiful melodies or arranges folk songs, and writes some of the sharpest, most intelligent, incisive and insightful lyrics in contemporary Christian music. He’s also an ordained Minister in the Church of Scotland; and I’m an unashamed groupie!

Ever since I read the liner notes for the Iona Community’s early cassettes, songs for Advent and Christmass, John Bell’s comment on Mary the mother of our Lord has delighted and tickled me. He lamented the fact that Mary had become, as he put it, “an anaemic virgin” rather than the robust, feisty young woman holy scripture portrays her as being.

Mary of Nazareth, the almost-certainly-teenage young woman engaged to local bloke, Joseph, a carpenter, is the one whom many scholars believe Luke the evangelist regards and portrays as Jesus’ first disciple.

Her strength of character and fortitude certainly fit her for such a role. She is the one whom the Living God chooses to bear the Son, Jesus. But Mary is no simple-headed peasant girl who acquiesces out of thoughtless piety.

Like Abraham, mentioned in the canticle we read as the psalm, Mary has a faith that is strong enough to speak directly about the matter God invites her into: to bear the Saviour-Messiah. Yes, we may regard such forthright speech as boldness – but, like all the heroes of faith, both in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, it is primarily born of an unshakably trusting relationship with the Living God. Mary knows who this God is – not in the sense that she believes herself familiar and therefore vulnerable to contempt – but rather from time spent forming and moulding and listening and sensing and feeling. In other words, immersing herself in God and God’s ways.

So when the angel Gabriel announces God’s invitation Mary has a few comments and questions to make before she agrees, willingly and wholeheartedly. And when she goes to visit her cousin, Elizabeth, the soon-to-be-mother of John the baptiser, she speaks with authority and confidence in the full knowledge that something holy is happening between them and for them and within them.

We learn only later that Mary doesn’t know the whole story, which is hardly surprising; but when events like worshipping shepherds and elderly prophets come into her small life, she isn’t fazed, she doesn’t run, she doesn’t evade or hide or droop her proverbial bundle. Instead, Luke tells us, she will “ponder these things in her heart”.

So the great thing in Mary’s life – the moment that is so instructive for us who seek to follow Jesus – is that initial YES to God’s invitation to bear the Son, Jesus. Though born of faith, it’s a considered agreement, which that faith tells Mary is trustworthy and doable because the Living God does not ask humans to do what they cannot do.

What Mary shows for us is the willingness to trust God’s will – a willingness which this preacher at least has often enough disguised under a sand-flinging flurry of industry and busy-ness. You know how it goes: I’m so busy seeking God’s will that I don’t have time to listen to God when the divine will is actually communicated. And when God breaks through the busy-ness it becomes possible – dead easy – to concoct excuses and reasons and justifications and rationalisations.

This is a wholly different ballgame from Mary’s standing firm and seeking a few natural answers. In all that, she holds the invitation in her hands and takes it seriously enough to investigate further.

One thing, however, that Mary does understand, is that in allowing the conception and gestation of the Son, she is actually bringing to bear, as it were, glory and praise on the Living God. Just as praising a cake or a painting or a well-executed sporting achievement reflects on the baker, the artist and the sportsperson, so too Mary’s entire part in the story of Jesus and his conception and birth reflects on the Creator, the Living God.

When Mary sings, My soul magnifies the Lord! she’s saying exactly that – what happens here, what I am doing, glorious and groovy as it may be for me, to become a mother – itself in most cases a wonderful awe-inspiring happening – is actually going to make the Living God even more praiseworthy, even more awesome!

It’s something well-worth remembering next time God’s will breaks into our own lives. If we dare to take the risk of saying YES to God’s invitation, then we are not only doing God’s will, which is truly a Great Thing, but we will also ultimately be “magnifying” the Lord, like Mary.

The reverse, however, is also true. Our failure to accept the invitation to do God’s will means that something God has planned will be delayed unnecessarily, and the opportunity to reveal God in a world where so many need God and yet cannot see or hear or find God – that opportunity will also be delayed.

Delayed but not lost. In God, nothing and no one is lost – unless by choice.

May what we choose, therefore, be the same as Mary’s choice. May her YES echo and resound upon our lips as it did on hers. May our YES likewise magnify our awesome Living God, and may this world become a place of grace and peace because of what we, like Mary of Nazareth, choose to do in the name of the Living God!

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columba

POWER AND TRANSFORMATION

16^th December 2012 : Advent 3 : Year C

8:00am and 9:30am Kalamunda

Zephaniah 3:14-20 : Song of Isaiah : Philippians 4:4-7 : Luke 3:7-18

The third Sunday of Advent. It’s often seen as a bit of a “resting place” after the first couple of soul-searching Sundays, and in some parts of the tradition a rose (read “pink”) candle is lit as part of the Advent wreath liturgy. Some communities of faith even sport rose vestments.

The readings reflect this change of pace. Suddenly we’re all joy and celebration – and that’s not a problem, except for the desire to turn Advent into what some liturgists call a “mini Lent”. This Sunday, in that way of thinking, is the vague equivalent of Lent’s Laudate Sunday, when the faithful have a break from the spiritual self-flagellation of the previous weeks.

But Advent is not a mini Lent; and what we engage today is not so much a “breather” from the demands of the previous Sundays but a recognition that the Awaited and Anticipated are approaching quickly now. It’s a kind of rehearsal for the letting-go of Christmass, the wholehearted celebration of Jesus’ birth.

Even so, it’s wise to ask what we are celebrating here on this third Sunday because the cause of the joy is by no means as clear as a rather shallow and cursory glance might indicate. 

For instance, to say that we’re getting on the joy because we have a whiff of the so-called “reason for the season” is somewhat facile, though perhaps not entirely so. Such a view buys a controlling interest in the hoary conceit of cause-and-affect: celebrate Jesus’ birth, sing upbeat carols and hymns, exchange gifts and greetings.

Surely – and we should add if only because the Living God is involved in this – the presence of prophets is alone enough to indicate that we are living through something far more profound that cause-and-effect – something that actually involves transformation and not just the puppet-on-a-string mentality that cause-and-effect thinking implies.

In other words, what is happening is change. The cause-and-effect mindset requires nothing more than blind, mute subservience to whatever wind of doctrine, as it were, happens to blow us along said doctrine’s predefined pathway.

Transformation, on the other hand, demands the change implicit in turning back to the Living God. That’s what God, through the prophets and through Jesus, calls us to do. Transformation is what God does in loving, gracious response to our return.

The joy that our readings speak of, therefore, is the recognition of God’s “breaking in” to our damaged and damaging human world and making inroads into the terrorising perversion of power that humankind practises. It’s the joy born of knowing that our world of horror and injustice, oppression and marginalisation is being shown not simply a better way but the only good way of being.

Therefore the prophet Zephaniah records God’s forthright promises:

I will deal with all your oppressors at that time. And I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth.

This is where and how God acts: in presence with and concern for the weakest and most impoverished among us.

And make no mistake – this is not some namby-pamby, sentimentalist, socialist/communist/do-gooder rubbish. This is the Living God’s concern, articulated again and again in the Hebrew scriptures, and put poignantly and uncompromisingly into practice in the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth.

We ignore this at our peril.

When John the baptiser jeers at the mob on Jordon’s banks coming for baptism thinking, perhaps, that they will just be going through the motions, participating bodily in another ritual, but one that will formalise whatever their conception of salvation might be, he’s ironically describing the world situation that misuses and perverts power. “You brood of vipers!” says he. Such an evocative phrase! And so accurate an image of the repulsive lust for power that finds greater traction in game-playing, and prodding and poking the rival than in using the same energy to do God’s will.

How great would the Church or any parish or worshipping community be if its energies came to bear, in concert, on God’s will, on seeking the oppressed, and being kind, loving, compassionate and forgiving towards the people on the edge!

But the image at the conclusion of the passage is also worth exploring. I’ll reproduce my research at this point because it’s clear and to-the-point, and any paraphrase is likely to do the insight damage and disservice. It comes from Sarah Dylan Bauer’s blog, Sarah Laughed. She is referring to the passage that reads: his winnowing fork is in his hand…

A winnowing fork is used to separate the wheat from the chaff. A winnowing shovel is what you use after someone else has done their work with the fork and the wheat and chaff are already separated to do what John says the coming one will do: "gather the wheat into his granary," while "the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." Jesus is only fulfilling half of what John says the mighty one coming would do: he's baptising with the Holy Spirit and gathering people for healing, good news, and blessing, but the fire to destroy the wicked is nowhere to be seen.[1]

She goes on to say that later, when John is in prison and questioning whether Jesus is “the one who is to come”,

John is invited to rejoice at what God is doing in the world, and to let go of what God is not doing, to release his preconceptions and take in the reality of God's presence and work.[2]

We are in exactly the same place. We, like John, need to let go of preconceived notions and open our eyes and ears to the reality of what God IS ACTUALLY DOING in our community.

As to the fire that will destroy the wicked, which is “nowhere to be seen” – it is not Jesus who will wield this fire. That’s why the fire is never apparent. The shocking reality is that it is the twisters and perverters of power who use the fire to destroy one another. They practise destruction upon themselves by preferring their power games and needling and jockeying for position, often over trivial and petty issues, investing them with the kind of importance one might accord to worshipping the Living God or sitting down next to a homeless youth and finding out who they are and what they need.

This kind of behaviour fools very few people. It’s naked, secular power strutting and parading under the huffing and puffing guise of self-importance. It’s fire burning up chaff. But it does NOT come from God.

God’s will is for transformation in its broadest sense. It’s where our search for revelation intersects with God’s yearning for connection. Is that smoke I can smell? Or is it a barbecue for the hungry and homeless…?

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[1] http://www.sarahlaughed.net/lectionary/2006/12/third_sunday_of.html

[2] ibid.