View or print as a PDF

Christmas 1
31/12/2023

Ecclesiastes 3:1-13
Psalm 8
Revelation 21:1-6a

---

There is a time for every matter under heaven – a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant, to pluck up, to kill, to heal, to seek, to lose, a time to love, and a time to hate. These things – and many others – fill our time. The old philosopher who wrote Ecclesiastes got this right at least to the extent that he sought simply to describe the kinds of things which go on in the world.

But there is more at stake in our time than a simple inventory of what happens, as if that would give “permission” for all we do and experience. Our lives are not merely a matter of washes over us. We are agents in history – we decide and act. It is we who build and plant, kill and heal. But Ecclesiastes describes what we do, and gives us no direction as to precisely what time it now is. Is this the time for killing or for healing? Perhaps the answer seems obvious – to us here, at least. But a different answer is equally obvious to others in different times and places, whose sense for the time fills our news reports daily with accounts of actions taken according to different seasons and calendars.

While Ecclesiastes’ philosopher can tell us what we do, he cannot tell us what to do. For this, we appeal directly to God: God, show us the way. It’s not usually as explicit as this, nor even clearly religious. But every invasion and persecution, every bomb and expulsion, as much as every act of grace and mercy, appeals to the necessity, the timeliness, the divine (or ultimate) requirement that now we kill or heal, keep silent or speak, weep or laugh. We seek assurance or assure others that our actions are just and, so, that they are timely: now is the time for this to happen.

Our lives, then, are not merely subject to the many things happening around us. These events, and our responses to them, are claims and counterclaims to justice and rightness. Our enemies believe that they are right in their enmity, as we think we’re right in opposing them. If there were a God, God would see things their (and our) way.

How then do we tell what time it is? What can reconcile our conflicting discernments of the times? How do we know what to do?

A hint of an answer is given in today’s reading from Revelation. The city of Jerusalem – a work of human hands – descends now from heaven as a new city. It is crucial, however, that it is recognisable as the old city with its deep history of conflicting time-tellings, its persecutions and injustices and misjudgements. It is indeed healed, but the recognisability is crucial because it means all that history of Jerusalem’s errors of judgement about the time do not finally determine how things end.

It’s almost as if God does not bother to tell the time, but rather simply presumes that now is his own time: the time in which all things are claimed for God’s purposes and not for any of our conflicting intentions and cross-purposed calendars. We mark just this each week when we gather around the table and declare that our failure to receive the kingdom of God has become God’s means of calling us again to become that kingdom, as the body of Jesus broken by us is said to be broken for us. Jesus was broken because he seemed to us untimely, out of season, but the Eucharist is God’s own telling of the time: your times, your healing and killings, mournings and laughter, made my own.

What does this mean for us, on the cusp of another new year, according to our calendar time? It means that we are free to read the times as best we can, to argue about them, to persuade, to invite, to act, to warn and to correct as best we can. It means that we are free to risk telling the time and to act according to what the season seems to require, to test what it means here and now to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly. It means that where, in the old year, we might have gotten the times wrong, the new year begins with grace and forgiveness.

We look forward to the year to come not with confidence that we know now what to do, what time it is, but in the hope that we will find it again to be God’s own time, in which our time is continually made new

Lift up your hearts then, and give your thanks and praise to the God who comes to be the time of our lives.

View or print as a PDF

Christmas Day
25/12/2023

Titus 3:4-7
Luke 2:1-7

---

Distracted
What we pay attention to matters so much in economic terms today that commentators speak of our now inhabiting an “attention economy”. We experience this in all its social, commercial and political dimensions through the notifications on our phones, the clamouring of influencers, and increasingly in-your-face advertising.

With this competition for our attention comes the corresponding experience of distraction. When something vibrates or “tings” nearby, we are distracted from whatever we are doing. If the distraction is well-designed, the interruption grips our attention. This is how we might be sucked into a vortex of binge-watching something into the wee hours, or have a study session cut into confetti-sized bits by group chatter, or find ourselves with a hefty fine because1 we’ve tried to answer a text while driving. So pervasive is this experience that some have suggested that indistractability is the most impressive superpower of the present age.

But what does it say about us that we are so distractable? Distraction works as a commercial and political method because there are “buttons” in us which can be pushed by noises or flashing lights which will cause us to look up from whatever we are doing. These buttons are being pushed, of course, because our responses translate into dollars or votes for the button pushers.

Incomplete
But my immediate interest is that we respond, because our response tells us something about the tension between the real, tangible value of what we might already be doing and our sense of the possible value of what the distraction promises. What’s common to these kinds of distractions is the positive possibility of an “addition” to ourselves, and the corresponding negative experience of incompleteness.

This is perhaps most obvious when counting the number of online friends, followers, views, votes, shares, or re-tweets: more is more, and more matters because it is “less incomplete”. But it’s much the same with other distractions: the distraction of the latest version of our now superseded thing or of the novel “experience” we might have the money to buy. The possibility of the new thing distracts us because we imagine we are not yet complete. Where I am now, what I am doing now, what I am – these don’t seem to be enough. I am not yet enough; there must be more, and it’s not here but perhaps it’s there – in the next notification, in a different life partner, a new job, or when I finally retire

Christmas and completeness
So, what has all this got to do with Christmas? Christmas is about completeness in the midst of, and in the very form of, incompleteness.

“…And [Mary] gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger…”

Luke’s Christmas narrative is filled with signs of incompleteness. It speaks of the displacement of the holy family by the will of empire, of their marginalisation despite Mary’s condition, and of the humiliation of being laid in a manger. There is not a lot of fullness in the circumstances of the birth of Jesus.

But born, wrapped securely, and laid down safely, the child is complete. Of course – as with most children – there are many things he will do and say, many things he will enjoy and suffer. But none of that will exceed the completeness he is in himself: he is already all he needs to be. The Christmas story is about a completeness in the midst of poverty and powerlessness – a wholeness despite want and need, the utter absence of the need for distraction.

We don’t believe this, of course, which is why Christmas is often the opposite for us: a season of not enough, a season of incompleteness. And so we can be driven to distraction by the Christmas imperative to provide for the accumulation of more: more stuff for people who don’t really need it, more money to pay for the stuff, more work to earn the money to pay for the stuff, and so on. This kind of incompleteness is not merely a condition but a process, a way of life.

By contrast, there is a completeness in the Christ child to which nothing needs to be added. Yet this is not sentimental gooeyness at the image of a newborn. And neither is it a nostalgic harking back to a lost era when things were simpler. These are both themselves distractions. Sentimentality distracts us from the whole truth by telling only what might be appealing, and so sees only the cradle and not the cross. Nostalgia distracts by denying a fundamental truth of history – that though our circumstances may change significantly, we ourselves do not. And so, nostalgia imagines that the story from the cradle to the cross is not really our story.

But that first Christmas was the beginning of a story of wholeness in full awareness of our deprivation, a vision of completeness despite absence. We could moralise this by saying that Jesus remained true despite his lowly beginning, the opposition to his ministry and the final injustice of his crucifixion. This is worth saying, but it also reduces Jesus to a mere hero. The problem is that we don’t need heroes to do it for us; we need to be able ourselves to live complete lives in the midst of incompleteness. We need to be able to live lives which are not constantly haunted by the suspicion that there’s a better life, a better option, just behind the next glittering, ringing, distracting thing. Because there really isn’t.

Being enough
If Jesus does remain true from the cradle to the crucifixion, it is not by mere moral courage. It is by the conviction that he is complete wherever he is, whatever he is doing, whatever is happening to him. That is, Jesus knows his life to be a point at which God reigns in the world. It is this presence of God in what he does and experiences which is Jesus’ completeness. And this is despite appearances. God reigns in the child in the manger, in the sweaty teacher on the dusty streets, in the argumentative troublemaker and in the despised figure on the cross.

To get Christmas right is not to reduce it to a small part of our incomplete lives but to see it as being about everything in one thing: the whole of God and ourselves in just one small child and what he was to become, and perhaps also in us.

The reign of God – the gift of God’s self to the world, to our very selves – is not a distraction from what we are doing. It is the revaluation of what we are. You are not the sum of everything you have done, if this means there would be more of you if you did more, experienced more, viewed more, or sampled more. With the God of the cradle and the cross, you are enough before you begin doing or experiencing anything.

We lose this somewhere along the way, strangely becoming less as we do and own and experience more. The child in the manger will one day propose that unless we become again as children, we cannot be whole, cannot know God’s kingdom, cannot know that time and space in which whatever belongs to us, we belong to God (Matthew 18.2-5).

Indistractability is about this gift of completeness – trusting that even though there are many things we can do and we can add to ourselves, it is enough that we have been born, and swaddled, and laid in the manger of the world.

Because with this God, You. Are. Enough, however incomplete you think you are, however tempting it is to want to be more.

Rest, then, under the loving gaze of God, as did Jesus once under Mary’s eyes of love, and know yourselves to be complete.

View or print as a PDF

Advent 3
17/12/2023

John 1:6-8, 23, 26b-28
Psalm 126
Luke 1:39-55

---

In the season of Advent, our Scripture readings do strange things with time. We are called to remember something which is yet to occur while, at the same time, called to prepare for the arrival of one who, common sense would say, has been and gone. The same kind of time-twisting is heard today in Mary’s song of praise:

⁵¹ [God] has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud…⁵² He has brought down the powerful …
[he has] lifted up the lowly;
⁵³ he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.

Whatever we might think about where we are in the midst of these powerful and lowly, hungry and rich, the claim is unambiguous: God has worked with power to change the order of things in the world. Yet, this doesn’t ring true. From time to time, we might see the lowly lifted up and the haughty brought down but, for the most part, things don’t seem to be going the way Mary’s song would imply on a plain reading; the assertion that God “has” done such things is not convincing.

But the issue is not only that we don’t see this kind of change in the time between Mary’s song and now. The thing about her song is that nothing could have happened yet – at the very time she sings – if she is singing the gospel – singing what God has done in Jesus. Jesus is not yet born, but she still sings,

[God] has shown strength …; he has scattered … He has brought down… [he has] lifted up… he has filled… and sent away…

It is odd that Mary should speak in this way.

The key to understanding this strange speech is to see that there is no “history” here, in the ordinary sense. So far as Christian confession is concerned, there is little interest in the order or timing of revelation but only in what is revealed. And what is revealed about God’s work for the poor and the hungry? The only sense in which faith can say unequivocally that God has shown strength to lift up and fill the weak and poor is in relation to the resurrection of the crucified Jesus. He is the powerless and lowly one filled and lifted by God.

But consider what this now means! Mary does not sing the praises of the God who has lifted her up, as some readings of this text run. Or, at least, this is a secondary sense of her song. Rather, Mary praises the God who raised her son, the crucified Jesus of Nazareth. And here we see the Bible’s strange sense of God in time: Mary praises God for having done something that has not yet happened at this moment in the story.

This is bad history by most standards, but is in fact good biblical theology. Not unreasonably, we typically read history from start to finish, as if it were simply the unfolding of events from beginning to end. The very way in which we read a book – including the Bible! – reinforces this. Yet the Scriptures read, or tell, from end to beginning. The “end” is some experience of God, a salvation of some sort: an exodus, a healing, a restoration or a resurrection. This new thing is of such proportion that the beginning cannot be merely the first thing which happened on the way toward the present experience. The beginning is what must have been the case for us to have experienced the salvation we have.

And so, when it comes to what Mary sings, the important thing is not that she did say this – for it would make very little sense if she did. Instead, for Luke himself, bursting to speak of the work of God in Jesus, there would have been nothing else Mary could have said: the prelude must anticipate the climactic finale. If, in view of the resurrection, we imagine that Mary might have sung a song of praise to God at the news of her pregnancy, it would have to have been a prophetic song, because of what was going to come of her child. The song would point to the end which is Luke’s real purpose in telling the story: God’s work in Jesus. Why does Mary sing? Because of what God has done. And what has God done? God has raised the crucified Jesus from death. All of this then, and most strangely, makes the singing Mary the New Testament’s first believer in the resurrection.

Once again, we acknowledge that this makes no sense: it hasn’t happened yet, when Mary sings. But all belief in the power of God is like this: all confidence in the power of God is the bringing into the present some promised but unrealised future as if it had already happened. All belief is a living out of what God has done before it has been done, a living towards what we expect God to do.

Faith is a lived-out vision of the future. Faith says, That is how things will be in the end, so this is how I will be now: live with others now, speak of God now. The real question in faith, then, is simply the vision: how will all of this end? What will we say God has done in our story when it comes to being able to tell it in as finally completed?

To see what is at stake in this way is to see also that faith is not merely a “religious” question. Any life – whether it knows God, is still seeking God or is altogether indifferent to God – is the backward projection of some expected future, some time of completion, some sense of what it is all about. Every conscious action (and most of our unconscious ones) speaks of our sense of where we are headed, of what will finally be declared about the proper order of things. When Mary sings that God has done this, she declares her place in the world and the world’s place in God, despite every contradictory appearance. My soul magnifies the Lord, Mary sings, because God “has” magnified Jesus and will magnify me.

And, to the extent that she not only says this but lives it, she begins to appear, a glimmer of God’s intention for her. And God begins also to become clearer, a glimmer of Mary’s own future.

This is Advent faith: no mere wish that things were different, but a life lived differently because we have caught a fleeting glimpse of the possibility of a new order in which is set right all we know is wrong within us.

Let us live, then, as if what will finally matter has already happened and we are its reflection: an image of the God who is justice, mercy and peace.

Advent 2B
10/12/2023

Isaiah 40.1-11

---

AUDIO ONLY: HERE