Advent IV – The Stranger – 17 December 2021

 

The Sunday morning hymn session on TV1, a few weeks back, featured the much-loved old gospel song, Blessed Assurance, Jesus is Mine, sung with fervour.  And I was left wondering about the awkward possessive pronoun, “Mine”…?  Jesus arrives as does any new-born, as a stranger, even to his parents.  They have to find out who he is… and good luck to all parents in that task… hopefully they are not assuming their child is to be some faithful replica of them.  But at a deeper level, in this “Jesus is mine” statement, there is the strong note of possessing, and from the outset, with Jesus, it seems inappropriate.  Jesus is mine…?  “Mine” places ME firmly at the centre.. my faith, my happiness, my spiritual life…  That is not the way the gospel story tells us about all this.  There is a persistent note of strangeness in it from the outset.  About the only accounts of his life until, in Luke’s words, Jesus was about thirty years old…[1] are the stories of devout Simeon, and the prophetess Anna… and the very odd story of how the family went to Jerusalem for the Passover, and returning home they were a day or so on the road before they realised he wasn’t with them – he was back in the temple debating with the teachers there.  Understanding any of that may indeed be over to contemplatives like Anna or Simeon… and his mother, we are told, who treasured these things in her heart.[2]  And onward through his life Jesus is, in the Latin expression, sui generis, defying classification.  He appears, he disappears, his closest followers constantly misread him…  He defies labelling, and you certainly can’t possess him or domesticate him to your own personal happiness or your panacea in life.

In contemplative life and prayer we encounter true mystery as an open door, or perhaps even better if you think about it, an open window… at any rate not some impediment, or problem to be solved or explained, or a question to be got to the bottom of.  The baby lying there, an utterly dependent newborn, open to disease or injury, subject to fallible parents… is to the eye of faith God’s word of love.  We don’t explain this word – we receive this word, in faith and love, in awe and gratitude.  This is, as the Apostle John puts it, the word made flesh, pitching his tent among us… full of grace and truth.[3]  In good Benedictine fashion, you pause at the threshold of the stable, and you’re silent…  Paul says this stranger brings a new world:  If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation; the old has passed away; see, everything has become new![4]  Our priorities have shifted.  We are not thinking and reacting the same any more.  The things Jesus taught seem now to make a vital sense.  We are not so frightened… of life, of death, of tomorrow, or of others…  we can go on about all this, and plenty of preachers will, but the best gift now is to know how to be still and silent… as the carol puts it, O hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing.

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[1] Luke 3:23

[2] Luke 2:51

[3] John 1:14.  “…lived among us…” The verb is literally “pitched his tent”, from the Greek verb skēnoō (σκηνόω) meaning to pitch one’s tent. (Epidemiologists may be interested that the second-to-last letter of σκηνόω is Omicron... but perhaps not.)

[4] II Corinthians 5:17

Advent III – The Messenger – 10 December 2021

 

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God.  As it is written in the Prophet Isaiah, “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight…’” (Mark 1:1-3)

So… right at the outset, in Mark the earliest of the gospels, we find that the good news, God’s Good News, in Mark’s Greek the euaggelion, requires a messenger, in Greek an aggelos.[1]  Each word comes from the same Greek root.  Jesus is himself the euaggelion, the Good News… John the Baptist appears, bearing this news in the world… he is the aggelos, the messenger.  And the good news is that is God is not our enemy or adversary or examiner or competitor, that God creates and recreates in love and mercy… the good news is that what we see in Jesus is what we may see in God… Jesus is, in St Paul’s later words, the icon of the invisible God.[2]

But the point this morning is the messenger, the aggelos.  The messenger now, moving along to 2021, is not John the Baptist.  The messenger, the aggelos, is you or me… whoever, like John, recognises in Jesus God’s love, God’s word, God’s good news.  For better, and sometimes undoubtedly for worse, we bear the euaggelion.  And therefore, like John, the more authentic we are, the truer we are, the more we may seem strange, even inconvenient, in the world at times… and the more, like John, we see ourselves receding so that Christ may proceed.[3]  And like John, our ministry is as it were in the deserts of human life, in the world, where we find our task, in any of a multitude of ways, being one of making the desert blossom, making paths straight, living Jesus’s way in response to him. 

It is never a question of being good enough, or any of the humble hesitations by which we excuse ourselves… being an aggelos, a disciple or follower, is a matter of living in a bond with him, and with his people.  This bond is variously described in our scriptures as being in Christ, or mutually abiding, simply following…[4]  Walter Brueggemann, one of the truly great Christian theologians of the Hebrew scriptures of our day, wrote: The prophetic tasks of the church (that is to say, what we are here to do) are to tell the truth in a society that lives in illusion, to grieve in a society that practises denial, and to express hope in a society that lives in despair.  It has become a costly ministry in many places in recent times… as it turned out indeed for John. 

But there, each year, right in the middle of Advent, comes the Messenger, John the Baptist, the aggelos.  We assume the mantel of the aggelos, not because we are good at it, or because we’re saintly or wise, but because of the bond that changes us, an inner abiding of love and obedience.  It is the way we live.  Or as Jesus puts it, it is where our treasure is and therefore where our hearts are also.[5]

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[1] “Good News” is euaggelion (εὐαγγέλιον).  “Messenger” is aggelos (ἄγγελος) which also translates as angel.

[2] Colossians 1:15

[3] John 3:30

[4] eg. II Corinthians 5:17; John 15:4; Matthew 4:19

[5] Matthew 6:21

Advent II – Watching – 3 December 2021

 

I suggested that the first theme of Advent is Waiting.  The second theme might be Watching.  Advent can be tricky these days because it’s far too hard to hold Christmas at bay… children arrive singing carols… In the process we can miss a lot, unless we take notice of some of the great Advent hymns… There’s a light upon the mountains… or, Awake, awake! for night is flying… that one pictures the watchmen on the city ramparts, bound to stay awake; they are peering, watching for the first dawn light from the east… Zion hears the watchmen singing, and all her heart with joy is springing; she wakes, she rises from her gloom… Advent, said Rowan Williams, is when we all become Jews again, needing to be spoken to in our confusions, needing a word from God.  It is the time of watching and hope.

Waiting and watching… a basic rhythm of our lives.  We have done it often – with a sick child, awaiting the birth of a child, awaiting exam results, awaiting whatever has to happen before we can get married, waiting at the airport when perhaps all is not well, watching a business decline with pandemic restrictions, watching happen what you hoped wouldn’t happen.

While waiting has to do with time going by, however, watching is about paying attention, while time goes by.[1]  In the gentle disciplines of contemplative life and prayer we may find ourselves more and more distancing, gratefully it may be, from the chatter that constitutes so much of what we call communication these days… responses ranging from reflex to witty… reacting off the top of our heads, mainly, to what someone just said… with whatever it was that happened to me… swapping stories, swapping opinions, “you’ll never guess what she told me”… one way or another therefore, bringing me in, my ego.  This is not attention.  Fr Richard Rohr comes at it in this rather startling way: The presence of God is infinite, everywhere, always, and forever.  You cannot not be in the presence of God.  There’s no other place to be.  (Any) change is always on our side (ego, you see, intrudes) -- God is present, but we’re not present to Presence…  We’re almost always somewhere else.  We are reprocessing the past or worrying about the future…  We just keep thinking in the same problematic ways that our minds love to operate.  But we can say that all spiritual teaching… is teaching us how to be present to the moment… present to the Presence.[2] 

That is the essence of it, and that is the difference between the minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour passage of time, which is chronos[3] …busy involved people are always acutely aware of chronos, life by timetable… and kairos[4], which is God’s time, the moment that arrests our attention, our presence, the moment in which we know ourselves seen and addressed… or even dimly suspect that we were.  Jesus sometimes calls it being awake.  We can call it contemplative life.  Advent then is attending to God, cultivating the gifts of being able to attend simply to God, and especially at this time being acutely aware of all we will otherwise miss in our busyness. 

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[1] There may be exceptions… in the waiting room of North Shore Hospital emergency medicine I recommend going into a gentle stupor. 

[2] From Richard Rohr, First Sunday of Advent: To Be Awake Is to Be Now– Here, November 30, 2014.

[3] Greek χρόνος, as in Matthew 2:7, etc.

[4] Greek καιρός, as in Matthew 8:29, etc.