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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Hear the words again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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