21 December 2018

Recess

OurWarkworth group is now in recess until Friday 1 February 2019.

Advent Canticles 4 – 21 December 2018


He has shown strength with his arm;

he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away.

(Luke 1:51-53)

Part of the Magnificat…  Mary’s song of joy when the two mothers meet, Elizabeth and Mary.  I am very much on the outskirts of all this.  You know how people often say, “I know exactly how you’re feeling”… when of course they don’t, and they can’t.  What they know is what they are feeling, or felt. We don’t know what these two women are feeling.  We are distant onlookers, rightly hesitant about approaching, and we sense mystery.  But we may listen to Mary’s song.  It is very moving poetry… and it is profoundly subversive.  God, she sings, by the birth of this child has done three things. 

The first is: He has scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts.  It is in Greek.  “The proud” is a word meaning those who deem themselves naturally superior, the arrogant, the ones who believe they are born to rule.  But there is simply no place at the cradle of this child for proud self-satisfaction or egoism...  wherever it happens, in presidencies or the highest places in church or politics, or in our homes or the secrets of our hearts.  It doesn’t belong.  It is simply inappropriate here.  Mary sees such people “scattered”, she says, with all their pretensions.

Secondly, He has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.  This is about power.  “The mighty” means those not only wielding power but enjoying knowing others are powerless – the Greek word denotes powerful dynasties.  Mary sees such power defused, cancelled – as in the end, in history, it always is.  It is the meek, the humble, said Jesus, who inherit the earth.

And thirdly, he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away.  This is more than turning on Christmas dinner for the city’s needy… it is more than foodbanks… admirable and all as they are.  It is a vision of justice, equity in which no one is hungry, children are nourished… in which there is no culture of flaunted affluent greed or the diseases of over-indulgence. 

Mary’s vision… we scarcely see it happening in fact.  There is the poetry… and there is the reality.  Human arrogance, the misuse of power, greed and inequity, continue to thrive.  Eventually the followers of this child began to realise that the kingdom, as he indeed taught, is within.  The same Spirit who inspired Mary’s vision sets about changing hearts.  Mary knew what Jeremiah had prophesied[1]: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.  Or Ezekiel[2]:  I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh… I will put my Spirit within you…  These, in ancient terms, are the changes to which we consent in the stillness and silence of our prayer. 



[1] Jeremiah 31:33
[2] Ezekiel 36:26

14 December 2018

Thankfulness – Advent 3, 14 December 2018


You will say in that day: I will give thanks to you, O Lord, for though you were angry with me, your anger turned away, and you comforted me… With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.  And you will say in that day: Give thanks to the Lord, call on his name; make known his deeds among the nations; proclaim that his name is exalted.  Sing praises to the Lord, for he has done gloriously; let this be known in all the earth.  Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.  (Isaiah 12:1-6)

The Principal of Mahurangi College, on sabbatical, spent five weeks in South Sudan, a war-torn place, schools destroyed along with much more of the infrastructure, children now having lessons under trees or in the ruins, bringing their own chairs…  But David MacLeod found students “bright-eyed and eager to learn”.  He went on to Canada, with schools better equipped and financed than here in NZ.  There he found students “disinterested, poorly motivated and contributing to a youth mental health crisis… The Canadian kids just had a dullness in their eyes by comparison”, said David MacLeod.  Of course, those are generalisations, but still, I imagine, we are not entirely surprised. 

The passage from Isaiah is the Lectionary Canticle for worship on the 3rd Sunday in Advent.  It is about joy and thankfulness.  Isaiah is filled with gratitude… this is the 8th century BC, when the Assyrian was coming down like a wolf on the fold.[1]  Gratitude is a principal marker of grown-up faith – but the gratitude we mean is decidedly not on the level of counting your blessings, naming them one by one.  That is more on the level of Aunt Daisy than Jesus or Isaiah… if your blessings outnumber your disasters, so the story goes, then you’re ahead – but that’s not faith, it’s accountancy.  A related cliché says: There’s always someone worse off than you…  Believe me, there are situations, some of them quite common, in which there is no one worse off.  Nevertheless, gratitude was not unknown in Auschwitz.

Real gratitude flows from God.  It is a gift of faith, not something we generate ourselves, like remembering to say thank you to Aunty Agatha.  Gratitude and praise is a grace we receive.  It is a sharing of God’s joy in creation and in constant re-creation.  To say “Grace” at meals, for instance, though we may do it perfunctorily, if at all, is a “kairos”, a spiritual moment.  The food before us is a gift, part of the gift of life and love.  So we pause, properly, to think however fleetingly how all is gift – and of the atrocity of famine in the world God made and gave to feed us.  Neither is this gratitude giving thanks because we are safe and privileged – that is what the pharisee did.  We give thanks that food is there at all.  We give thanks for the hope that is in us, which is often “hope against hope”.  We give thanks for life and breath, for love and goodness, and kindness, for second chances and the lessons of adversity.  We give thanks for light on the horizon, the promise of Advent. 



[1] Byron: The Destruction of Sennacherib.

07 December 2018

Advent Canticles 2 – 7 December 2018


The Song of Zechariah, more commonly known as the Benedictus, normally gets said or sung in morning worship – but on Advent II it is given a special place.  Zechariah, a priest in the temple, so the story goes, sang this at the circumcision of his child John, whom we know as John the Baptist.  This was remarkable because Elizabeth his wife had long been labelled “barren”, which in practice meant useless.   They were elderly people – Luke stresses all this -- they may even have had their names down for Summerset Falls.  We are also told that Zechariah had been struck dumb, before John’s birth, for having expressed doubt to the Angel Gabriel that any of this was possible.  So Zechariah’s song was the first thing he had been able to speak for quite a while.  I do hope you are keeping up with me…

For some two-thirds of his song he lyrically celebrates his belief that God is about to intervene and deliver Israel from the hands of their oppressors, the Romans.  The Deliverer will be from the royal house of David.  Everything God promised to Abraham, and ever since, is about to be fulfilled.  Then suddenly he directly addresses this baby, his baby, the whole point of the observance in the temple today.  Luke renders this in Greek as an emphatic shift of focus… and you, little child…[1]  Have you ever noticed that abrupt change, as you recite the Benedictus?

It is difficult to resist, as a father, interpreting this in 21st century terms.  What is Zechariah expecting of his son?  A worthy replica of himself…? a young hero…? a dutiful prospect on which the father will spend a fortune for education and formation…? a sporting icon perhaps…? a credit to the family…? a loyal assimilator of his father’s goals and ideals and values…? Zechariah is not, he is letting go of his son.  Certainly he will do all that is expected of a father and a parent, in love, in nurture, in care and provision, in counsel…  But fatherhood does not mean ownership and control.  Fatherhood eventually means letting your child go.  Your child is another person, not under constraint to replicate anyone or anything.   Zechariah’s child will serve faith and hope and goodness in his own ways. 

The Benedictus ends in sublime poetry about God.  Zechariah sings of the tender compassion of our God – the Greek literally says “bowels of mercy”[2].  He pictures the dawn suddenly rising in the east, enlightening, shining on those sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death, guiding our feet into the way of peace.  It is a lovely prophecy that Zechariah weaves over this newborn child, utterly mysterious, profoundly hopeful and faith-filled.  Advent waits for the dawn, never more needed than in the 21st century… a dawn of mercy and truth, light in the darkness, hope for those who see nothing but the shadow of death, a discovery of ways to live in peace.



[1] Καὶ σὺ δέ, παιδίον… very focussed and emphatic.
[2] We have encountered ancient anatomy before.  τα σπλαγχνα (ta splagchna) means bowels, innards, heart and lungs.  It is seen as where our deepest feelings and reactions come from.  The word is used here, of God.