Advent and two photos - Advent IV, 18 December 2015

I confess that I have little affinity with the prescribed readings for Advent IV.  Mary sings the Magnificat for us, Elizabeth sings the Benedictus, just as the church prescribes.  It’s lovely, it’s familiar, it’s poetic, it is often set to music, and all is well.  All we wait for now is the magic of Christmas Eve.

But as we know, all is not well.  Nothing, not the most sublime Magnificat, makes up for two photos I saw.  The first showed a very small North African child, maybe three years old.  The child is naked, starved and hopelessly dehydrated, kneeling collapsed with head on the ground, drained of all energy.  Behind this child is a vulture, waiting until breathing stops.  I presume the photographer – I hope the photographer – picked the child up and showed some care.  The child was clearly dying.

The other photo was of what they themselves called “An ordinary American family”.  It is their Christmas photo to go out to family and friends, and there they are, all smiling, all clad in Christmas red, with holly and tinsel around.  There are two grandparents, maybe three adult daughters, one son-in-law (it’s not clear who they all are), and four grandchildren.  Each adult is wearing, or carrying, visibly and proudly, a lethal firearm.  Even grandson Jake, aged abut 6, right in the front, is clutching a gun clearly too heavy for him.  That, it seems to me, is child abuse.  The story informs us, It’s up to Americans to protect America – we’re just your ordinary American family.  We are given also a list, an inventory, of the weapons they keep oiled and ready, in their happy hospitable home.  The names of the weapons mean nothing to me, but they certainly sound malign and deadly.   At any rate, it would not be a smart move to enter their home uninvited or unexpected.

I can’t cope with this, and I am seriously out of my depth.  All I can suggest is that we remember that the Christian Christmas festival is about peace and joy.  (And with the debate going on with secularism at present, it is worth remembering that Christmas is a Christian festival, and it is not compulsory…) The best option for Christian believers is not despair, but reality nevertheless.  The world is not as the Warkworth Santa Parade depicts it.  The world of the close of 2015 is a sad and desperate place for millions of people.  Among them are an almost incredible 30% of NZ children officially below the poverty line.  We now know that nothing whatever is resolved by violence – guns, bombing, or the violence of words and attitudes.  Nothing is resolved by closed minds and anger.  Nothing will be resolved by tanks and artillery and blowing people and their homes to smithereens.  Why would anyone ever think it would?

As always in history, it will be people of peaceable hearts, people free within themselves, people of wisdom and quietness, who may know accurately what to do next.  People, that is to say, not frightened all the time, people who have learned to live with difference and colour, mystery and uncertainty.  People not obsessed with their own privileges, comfort and safety.  Some of them will be Christians, some Buddhists, Moslems, Sikhs, Hindus, some of them will be atheists, agnostics, crystal gazers, even some Presbyterians. 

I can’t imagine this sad world will ever be heavily populated by such people, but there will be a few, here and there, and these are the ones we should look to for enlightenment.  Quite a lot of them will be followers of Jesus.  That would be even better.  Meanwhile it is important, where we are, to have a happy Christmas, to bear the pain of the world, and to hear the angels sing. 

Our Warkworth Christian Meditation group is now in recess over Christmas and January.  We will resume, and these postings will resume, on Friday 5 February 2016. 

Children of Abraham - Advent III, 11 December 2015

Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. [Luke 3:8]

Anyone who has been to Palestine knows that there are stones everywhere.  If you are looking for a strained or broken ankle, that is where to go.  It is a landscape of stones.  In the heart of the cities, in the countryside, among the trees, right beside modern buildings… stones and rubble and dryness prevail. 

Stones figure also everywhere in the literature.  The Judean wilderness is not sand dunes, it is stones.  Jesus was tempted to turn the stones into bread.  On another occasion he prophesied that the holy temple would soon be a heap of stones, which it was.  The people were about to throw stones at the woman caught in adultery – it was a convenient and costless mode of capital punishment.  The government of Israel has just increased the sentences for anyone convicted of throwing stones at the police or the military – but stones are the only ammunition they have, and they are plentiful.  Jacob made one stone his pillow, and dreamt of a ladder to heaven.  Jesus told about seed which fell on stony ground… everyone knew what that meant.  The name of one of his disciples, Peter, in both Aramaic and Greek, means a stone – so Jesus made a pun on it, which soon became a metaphor for an unshakeable and eternal church, built upon a rock.

Stones predominate, and here Jesus presumes to say, You assume you are notable and accepted because of who you are, your natural and spiritual lineage…  Hebrew, Jew, sons and daughters of Abraham, privileged, powerful, pre-eminent, educated, successful, famous, iconic, role-model, born into some ruling caste… with us in our day it could be white, Christian, civilised, decent, democratic, even sang in the choir.  But Jesus presumes to say, God can raise up 100 like you from these stones.  Jesus was not out to win friends and influence people.  It was never a question of who you are.  It was always a question of what you are.  Jewish literature has always known, and written, that God looks on the heart, on the person, on the motives and all the inner struggles, sees, understands and pardons the negatives and failures.

It can never be a matter of status or attainment, wealth or power.  What matters, says Jesus, is fruits worthy of repentance.  We touched on that word repentance last Friday – it does not mean feeling sorry, it means being changed.  It means doing life in the ways God intends -- to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly.  Jesus exemplifies this for us.  The new life of his death and resurrection, mediated to us by the Spirit he promised, makes all things new.  Our practised silence and stillness --  not only when we are actually doing it, but equally at all the other times, whatever we may be doing, our hearts remaining still and receptive -- are an important way in which we are open to God’s Spirit of change. 

If Jesus did indeed say that about Peter being a rock, upon which the church would be built – and plenty of scholars have serious doubts about that – then we might be tempted to think it was an unfortunate analogy.  The image of a rock, solid and unchanging, appeals to many, including parishioners I remember well.  John’s image of the wind is rather more helpful.  Stones…?  God could raise up any number of impeccable and unchangeable believers, cornerstones of the church, no doubt.  But what matters these days is openness to change, to justice, love and mercy… with all the risks pertaining thereto.

A word from God - Advent II, 4 December 2015

…the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. [Luke 3:1-2]

Every time I have set myself to get the history of this period straight in my mind I have wound up in confusion.  It is impenetrable.  Tiberius never wanted to be emperor, but he was – that should have been quite a good sign, but in fact he was what my mother would have called, “Not very nice at all”… to say the least of it.  And if you ever are tempted to think you belong to a dysfunctional family you should take heart.  These people all emerged from families marked by murder and plots and nepotism – Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, Herod Antipas, Philip, Lysanius, and the High Priests Annas and Caiaphas – represented a coterie of corruption and crime, as toxic a bunch of political unpleasantness as you would find in any age including our own. 

Then, into this climate of fear and oppression comes a word from God.  Most of our contemporary dysfunctional culture would not give two minutes of attention to any alleged word from God.  But in any case it is not as though God somehow intervenes with some news, some instruction, some wisdom, that hadn’t been heard before.  It is more that a prophet, a person disciplined to listen, announces that there is a word from God we need to know.  There are prophets in our day also, and they prophesy in a world environment in many ways strikingly similar – but like John the Baptist they are out on the margins and scarcely noticed, certainly not on the official Christmas card list.

What John the Baptist hears is a message about repentance.  The Greek word Luke chooses is µετανοια (metanoia), and plenty of scholars regard the English word repent or repentance as a serious mistranslation.  John the Baptist was not inviting people to feel sorry for their sins.  God’s word is a command to change, to move into a new life, more accurately to be changed – metanoia means change.  The best response to a world of corruption and violence, lies, injustice and the misuse of power, is to be different from that – as Jesus put it, It shall not be so among you -- within the world, of course, loving and hospitable, but different.  Baptism signifies this entry into the new obedience and response to God and life.

As we know, our culture quite often does not agree that it is OK to be different.  If you are in any way different, you may make some people feel insecure, even angry – but, like any contemplative, you simply and gently be it without needing to justify it.   Christians, all followers of Jesus, have at their best always been at odds with a world scorning to hear any word from God.  Sometimes we join that world, and sometimes we retreat from it.  But never could we feel that our home is in the world of violence and lies, even in our families and among those we love.  Jesus taught us another way.  It entails change at the level of the heart.  That is metanoia.  Benedictines have a vow called conversatio – it means openness to conversion and change by the Spirit of God in Christ, each day.  That is the point of our prayer, Christian Meditation, to be silent and still in what Jesus called the πνευµα, the wind of the Spirit – blowing, as a local prophet, James K Baxter, pointed out, both inside and outside the fences.