Parish Of Opawa St Martins Blog

Isaiah 9:2-7; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.” Thus Isaiah celebrates the coming of the Messiah.

Not many of us enjoy the dark. The night can be a time of fear and uncertainty or even deep loneliness and suffering. Sometimes it is the time of death. Our body rhythms are at their slowest in the middle of the night when we are in deepest sleep.

When I took up my first appointment as an accountant in my early twenties, our busiest time of the year was in the depth of winter when the nights are long. I couldn’t believe it one day when the boss said that he would pick me up at 5:00am in the morning to drive to Timaru in time to start at 7:00am when the client’s office opened for work. Nobody gets up in the middle of the night to go to work, I thought in my naivety. Sadly, I was very mistaken and ended up driving down myself to meet rest of the team in the middle of the morning. To add salt into the wounded pride, my pay was docked accordingly. It did seem to me to be odd to be getting up ridiculously early when it was still night to go to work. Other people did that, but not me. The night, nay the world, is a scary place, and I was frightened. We lived in the inner city in those days, and there were people I would rather not encounter hanging around our place in the night. Homeless people or drug addicts sometimes walked around our house and through our garden in the dead of night. The police kiosk had just been built in the square, so there were all sorts of disturbed and unsavoury characters moving into our street from the square. Our insurance company were nervous and demanded that extra security measures be taken. When I was a child I loved the sound of the rain on the roof at night or even the sound of a thunder and lightening, because I felt warm and secure in bed with parents just down the hallway. But in the inner city, the night and I became suspicious of each other. We ceased to be close friends.

Yet, the night could be such fun. Think of romantic walks along the Sumner beach with lights reflecting off the water and waves gently lapping the shore; or partying with friends in a bar, or going to a big game in AMI stadium, a candlelit dinner at a favourite restaurant, or pondering life in quiet peace when everyone else is asleep. Some people love the night; that’s when they come alive.

Night time is a time of work for many people, like the shepherds in tonight’s gospel. The night can be a time of fear, but it can also be a time of peace. It can be a time of sleep, but for some it is a time of fun and even great creativity. Some of our best ideas come to us in the peace of the night.

We often talk about people having something of the night about them. We call it ‘having a dark side’. We think of people who have a shadow side that we might not see immediately. Sometimes this is part of a person that needs developing. Sometimes it is a negative aspect of their personality, a place of pain and hurt that is hidden away from view, but always present. We also think of communities having something of the night about them. We talk of communities with dark underbellies, parts of our community that we wish did not exist and even try to shut away. In our modern society those people are criminals or perhaps the mentally ill; people that we prefer to have living elsewhere, or people we avoid. This is how the people regarded the shepherds to whom the angels revealed the good news of Jesus’ birth. Shepherds were the night workers. They lived on the fringe of society and people avoided them. Their animals infringed so many religious laws that shepherds were permanently ritually unclean. They probably smelt of their animals and they were not welcome company. They were part of the dark underbelly of 1st century society. They were the ones associated with crime, drink, and violence. They were the convenient scapegoats when crimes had been committed. You kept your children away from the shepherds. They represent the dark side.

The astounding thing is that God chose to reveal the birth of his Son to these people first. The news was first broken to the uneducated, to the socially disadvantaged. The educated and the wealthy people, such as the Magi, came later. God is saying something here; here is the beginning of the pattern of the kingdom, the last will be first, the proud scattered, the mighty put down, the lowly will be exalted and the hungry will be filled with good things. This is not an easy message to hear. The gospel calls us not only to see Christ in those less fortunate than ourselves, we are called to serve Christ in them, and hear God speaking to us through them.

Lots of dark things happen in our city at night. We have issues with binge drinking and anti social behaviour on our streets. There is drug dealing, boy racers doing burnouts and street racing, there is death on our roads, violence against old people in mall carparks where they should be completely safe, fights, tagging on the odd fence here and there, smashing of the odd letter box, burglaries, even people being shot at from time to time. We also know that some of this happens in broad daylight. And this darkness is not confined to what happens on our streets. Just think of the shady dealing and corporate greed that has gone on in world financial institutions over the last few years. While some people become ridiculously wealthy, others face unemployment, damaged self esteem as prospects for work fade and promising careers disappear.

Well, most of God’s saving acts took place in the dark. God comes into the messiness of our world over and over again, culminating in Christ. Christ comes into our darkness to redeem and restore and re-create. Think of Israelites crossing the Red Sea in the night (Ex 14:20) into freedom. Jesus’ resurrection took place in the darkness of the night to bring about the dawn of a New Age. Jesus was birth was during the night watch of the shepherds. Into our darkness, Jesus comes. The Light of the World comes into our darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. God’s love is made visible in Jesus Christ. He comes into the darkness of our world. He comes to bring hope, life, and the restoration of the world.

Tonight we will light candles in the darkness of the night. We do this because Jesus is the true light that has come into the world. He is the light that overcomes our fear, that brings warmth and that guides the path of our life. Christ is the light that overcomes fear and means we need no longer be afraid. The darkness is no longer a place of fear or despair or destruction, but of creation and redemption. Jesus is the light that overcomes our darkness. He comes to make us bearers of his light, partners with God in overcoming the dark; partners with God in restoring a broken world.

May the Christ Child be a light in your life this night and throughout the coming year. May you and yours rejoice in a holy and blessed Christmas.

ADVENT 4 2009
Micah 5.2–5a; Hebrews 10.5–10; Luke 1.39–45

The Christian faith is a physical, bodily faith as much as it is a spiritual one. It is rooted in the lives of real people, real events in history, and in particular, it is rooted in human bodies. The Christian faith is being lived out here by real people in St Mark’s and St Anne’s in our particular time, just as much as it was lived in the days of King Herod of Judea 2000 years ago. Our faith is an incarnational faith. It is centred on the Word-made-flesh, born of a woman. As Archbishop Rowan Williams says, God has chosen to reveal himself in a complete human life; a birth, childhood, adult ministry and a death. God experiences everything we experience and understands the trials we live through. The Christian faith, therefore, is not just something “spiritual”. God chooses to come to us as a human being, to share our flesh and blood. Christianity is a physical religion.

The ministry of Jesus was to human bodies. He came to open eyes so that they could see; ears that they could hear, to loosen tongues so that they could speak. He came to be food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, release to the captives. The gospel text before us is the story of the visitation of Mary to Elizabeth. This, too, is a story about bodies. The two women are pregnant. There is a foetus that moves and kicks. There is an exchange of greetings and hugs, mouths speaking and songs being sung. Elizabeth hears and believes and proclaims. We notice the elaborate greeting, the loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” Our attention is drawn to Elizabeth’s hearing and her speaking. This is a hearing and a speaking of Good News, the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faith is established through this hearing and speaking, through the physicality of the encounter: through John the Baptist leaping in her womb, through their conversation, through the Spirit working through all these things. The Christian faith is a physical one. God communicates through our bodies and through real and physical events in real human lives.

This is the Good News that we will celebrate when Christmas finally comes; God becoming human, God speaking to us in our own language, through a real body and a real human life. The technical term for our celebration of Christmas is “incarnation and atonement”; incarnation means God becoming one with us in our humanity. The atonement could be called “at-one-ment” our humanity being united to God, being made one with God. So at Christmas we celebrate God becoming one with us in our humanity so that we can be united to the divine, so that we can be made one with God again. Today we mark the very beginning of Jesus’ fully human life, the moment of his conception in the womb of Mary.

The physicality of the Christian faith has had huge implications down through the ages. Later on in the gospel a woman will shout praise to Jesus, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and breasts that nursed you!” (Luke 11:27). When Jesus replies he echoes the words of Elizabeth, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and practise it!”

Jesus could have said, “Blessed are those who embody the word of God and who bear it into the world,” for that is what is what Mary does when she says “Yes” to becoming the mother of Jesus. This is what the gospel calls us to be and do. The “Word” is not a collection of cerebral beliefs, something to be received and believed in our heads. The Word of God is to be embodied in our humanity, in our lives, in our relationships, in our experiences, and in our commitments. God longs for the Word to be embodied in our human lives, a living presence in our lives, the word written on our hearts rather than on tablets of stone. The season of Advent is the time given us by the Church to prepare our hearts for this, so that our lives and hearts will be the stable where the Word of God it to be born; so that by God’s grace, we become another Mary, another human body in which the Word becomes flesh and is lived in a real human life.

One of the ways that the church has helped us understand this is to use our bodies in our prayer. Christian worship invites us to use our bodies. Some people choose to make a sign of the cross in worship. We have records as old as the 2nd century showing that Christians have made the sign of the cross, usually when receiving a blessing or when we want to acknowledge that we are in the presence of God. The sign of the cross is a physical way of saying that we belong to Christ. Some people also choose to make three signs of the cross when the gospel reading is announced: one on the forehead, one on the lips and one on the heart. The three crosses are a physical way of saying, “May Christ be in my thinking and in my speaking and in my heart.” Some people choose to bow as well; to bow before the altar to acknowledge that the table is central in our worship because that is where bread and wine become for us the body and blood of Christ. There may be bows to acknowledge the holiness of Christ, and in the creed some people choose to bow at the words “he came down from heaven and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary” to acknowledge the Word-made-flesh. Bishop Victoria has introduced the act of prostration at ordinations, where the candidate to be ordained lies prostrate on the ground to indicate their solidarity with Christ’s costly laying down of his life for the world on the cross. It is a reminder to us all that our wills need to be broken and shaped to the purposes of God. And then there is the sign of peace, which involves physical touch. And finally, the central act of Christian prayer is the Eucharist in which Christ nourishes our bodies through bread and wine. All these physical actions in prayer are given to us to help us express our faith in bodily form, because Christianity is a faith practiced in real bodies and in real human lives.

The writer to the Hebrews reminds us that Jesus came into the world in a real human body. He came to do the Father’s will, so that the Word would become flesh. Isaiah says that when the Word of God is spoken it does not return empty but fulfils the purpose for which it is sent. But it can only do that by becoming embodied in a real human life. That is why our faith is physical and why Mary is so central in our faith. Mary is an archetype for all of us. The Word was enfleshed in her body. It is because of her faithfulness that Jesus had a body. God sends us the angel Gabriel and asks us to receive the Word. He is calling us to allow our hearts to be the place where the Spirit of God may conceive the Word in our bodies so that we too might bear Jesus in live and present Christ to the world.

At the heart of the Christian faith is a woman who said, “Let it be with me according to your word.” Indeed, may that be our prayer to God. May our prayer be, “May your will be done in the body you have given me.”

Advent 3
A new beginning with God
Zephaniah 3.14–20; Philippians 4.4–7; Luke 3.7–18

The season of Advent is about endings and new beginnings. We know a lot about endings in New Zealand. The month of December is full of them: it’s the end of the school year, we all have end of year work parties and get ready for the big summer break. Some of our strongest collective memories will be of finally getting home from school on our last day, throwing the school bag into the back of the wardrobe, complete with the half eaten packed lunch inside, left where it will no longer be seen for at least six weeks. Then it’s on with the swimming togs and jandals and off to the beach to play with friends. We know all about the endings part of this season of Advent.

But Advent is also about new beginnings with God, and this is what John the Baptist is signalling in the text before us. The people who came to listen to him were a cross section of the community. They included religious leaders and the pious; those who expected their position gave them special credentials in the community of the redeemed. They also included people who were generally despised; tax collectors, and soldiers (presumably either Herod’s henchmen or Roman soldiers, or both). The crowd also included ordinary locals, who came out in great numbers to make their assessment of this strange character from the wilderness.

One of the reasons people give for sending their children to church schools is that parents expect a Christian school to give their children a moral compass. Morality, they think, is about education, teaching children the difference between right and wrong. Once children know what’s right, they will do it, is the way the thinking goes. The downside of this is that if our children do something wrong, it must be because the parent has done something wrong, or has failed to bring their children up properly.

The truth is far more complex. We all know from our own experience that we are aware of what the right thing is, but we don’t always do it. Remember those lines from the confession in our liturgy: “We have sinned in weakness: we have sinned through our own deliberate fault.” In other words, we know we are not always doing what is right. We have a kind of moral amnesia. We push to the back of our minds any inconvenient truth about what we are up to, and are quick to focus on any excuse that provides a satisfying reason for doing the wrong thing.

The people in today’s gospel came out in great numbers to see John the Baptist. They thought he must be the Messiah, but all he was doing was telling them things that they already knew. I am sure that the tax collectors knew that they shouldn’t be cheating their own people. The soldiers knew that they shouldn’t misuse their power for extortion and bullying. The religious leaders were probably aware that they shouldn’t presume the best seats in the kingdom and that they ought to practice humility before God and God’s people. John’s preaching was not actually calling them to a radical change of life. Soldiers were to carry on soldiering. Tax collectors were to carry on being tax collectors. Yet John’s message was challenging to hear. He was simply telling the people to do what they knew to be right and true, but had conveniently forgotten. The people were coming out to hear someone who could see their situation more clearly, and who was saying things they already knew to be true. They were responding to someone who is recalling them to themselves, and reminding them of what they already know. Perhaps this is why they regarded John the Baptist with a certain kind of awe.

John, however, knows that this will not be enough on its own. “I baptise you with water, but one who is more powerful than I is coming… He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” John’s message of repentance is very important. It is part of what we need. Self examination and repentance is an important aspect of a healthy, rounded Christian spirituality. The Anglican Church still has a form of private confession or “Reconciliation of a Penitent” which you can find on page 750 of the NZPB. John the Baptist was aware that his baptism of repentance was only part of what we need. When we are forgetful of what is true and right, when we know we have “stuffed up” and done something we know is not right, when we need saving from ourselves and the silly things we do to hurt those nearest and dearest to us, repentance is helpful. But we need more, and John the Baptist was very aware that we need more.

And so we wait with John the Baptist, in eager anticipation for the coming of Jesus Christ. God is offering us so much more in Christ. Jesus comes, not just to set us back on our feet, not just to be more faithful, not just to be better at doing what is right. He is offering more.

The tax collectors might well have gone away from John’s baptism determined to be better tax collectors. Soldiers might well have gone away telling themselves that they would indeed be satisfied with their wages. As we know from our own experience, the world is inevitably so full of injustice, temptation and the pressure of living, that it wouldn’t be long before they slid back into their old habits. It wouldn’t be long before they would need another call to repentance all over again.

The coming of Christ does much more than call us to repent and to get back to doing what is right. It does all that, but it also does so much more. Christ baptises with the Holy Spirit and with fire. That baptism is much more than a sign of repentance, much more than the forgiveness of sins, which in itself is so important. When Jesus comes, we are not just put back on our feet again. The love of God is poured into our hearts. God relates to us on our level and speaks to our hearts in language we understand. Jesus comes so that we can be in a relationship of intimacy with God. The coming of Christ reminds us that the Christian faith is much more than a package of beliefs or moral guidelines that tell us right from wrong. The Christian faith is primarily a relationship, a relationship of love and intimacy with God, made available to us by the coming of Jesus. That is why we hear words of the prophet every Advent: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.” Make straight a highway for God to enter directly into our hearts and into our world.

The coming of a child signals so much hope. It takes us back to the hope of our childhood, the hope we had as the school year ended and the long summer holidays began. In the bible the coming of a child signals a transformation as stark as the turning of a desert into an oasis. Jesus coming signals hope, new possibilities, the dawning of a new kingdom and a new start. Where we have squandered the hope of our births, where we have needed repentance and to find forgiveness, Christ comes. He comes not just to give us a second chance. It is the return to the hope of our childhood and more. It is a new and certain hope of life in God, of being a child of God, of being God’s in this life and forever more.

Advent 2
Malachi 3.1–4; Luke 1.68–79; Philippians 1.3–11;
Luke 3.1–6

The second week of Advent is now beginning; this time given to us by the church to be prayerful and alert for the coming of Christ in direct contrast with the consumerism and frantic business of the world around us. This is a time for making a fresh start with God. Each year in Advent we turn our attention to this curious character, John the Baptist. John was oddly dressed. Imagine someone coming out of the wilderness without ever having had a haircut or a shower or a shave and dressed in camel hair. He would have been an extraordinary sight indeed. John, we learn, lived in the desert. He was a Nazarite who like Sampson in the book of Judges, never cut his hair or shaved, and would have lived on a strict diet. He caught people off balance by his message, which was a proclamation of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

The reason he caught people off guard was precisely because he proclaimed a message of repentance. The people of Israel in the time of Christ considered themselves to be an oppressed people. They lived under the rule of the occupying Roman army and considered the Romans to be an intrusion in their national life. They were suspicious of the power of imperial state religion brought by the Romans. They were concerned that the Romans were interfering in the running of the temple and limiting some religious freedoms. The people on the ground knew their leaders had compromised with the gentile power brokers. Many of the faithful would have been more than happy to hear John tell the Roman soldiers to repent, or King Herod to repent, or even those turncoats running the temple to repent. Yet John comes along, not to any of them, but to the ordinary people of Israel and says, “Repent!” His message of repentance was in fact, proclaimed to the faithful people of God.

The upshot of that is that this message of repentance is a message that is addressed to us. For some of us, this might be something of a surprise. “Why not tell someone else to repent?” we might well ask. I am sure many of us could think of plenty of other candidates who should be repenting before pointing the finger at us. But “no”. God is calling us to examine our lives. John the Baptist reminds us that we can never say that we have arrived in our relationship with God. We are a pilgrim people, and we are on a journey with God. God is the potter, shaping us, moulding us, transforming us. All this requires humility and constant readiness to admit that we haven’t got it all together. We need to allow God to re-shape our attitudes and our values, and that this shaping is a life long process. This is the journey of a deepening faith. We may have made commitments to God long ago. Some of us made commitments to God as children, or as young adults. We may have engaged in serious study of the Christian faith at some point in our life and thought that we could tick that off as a task done to which we need not return. But nevertheless, those times when we made commitments to God were not the end of a journey, but perhaps a beginning or a point of growth in our faith. They are a “place along the way,” as it were. As we go through life we experience new things and discover new dimensions of ourselves and new insights into God. We all need to hear John’s call to repent as a call to humility and a call to continue our journey of faith.

Second point about repentance: Many people hear the words “repentance for the forgiveness of sins” and interpret them negatively, largely because some of us associate the call to repentance with the voice of a judgemental God constantly beating us up about our faults. In fact, John’s message of repentance is, in fact, nothing of the sort. It is primarily a message of hope. John’s voice echoes the prophecy of Isaiah. Long before, Isaiah had brought God’s promises hope to the suffering and grieving exiles in Babylon. John’s message has a similar tone to it. In effect he is saying to his generation, “Look people! God is coming again. Just as he came to the exiles in Babylon, God will come to you afresh. God wants to make a new start with you. God is searching for you and longs to liberate you from all that enslaves you. So make your hearts ready to receive your God.” So let’s re-imagine what repentance is.

What if repentance could be a new start with God? What if the primary message is that we are a forgiven people; that God is coming to wipe the slate clean and offer a future in which we are liberated from our past? Well, let’s face it the people of Israel needed a new start. For centuries now they had lived under the occupation of a succession of foreign armies, first the Greeks and then the Romans. Under the Greeks they had lived with terrible persecutions; under the Romans they had to pay crippling taxes to support the empire. Many of the people lived a subsistence lifestyle that was brutal and rough. For most people, life was a nightmare.

Most of us experience nightmares occasionally. If say, I happen to be having a nightmare in which I hear bloodcurdling screams and giant shadows lurking and ready to leap on me, and suddenly I wake to the reality of a beautiful morning with a gentle breeze with the shadows of branches playing on the wall by the light of the morning sun, this process of waking from nightmare to reality might be described as repentance. Repentance in its original meaning is a translation of the word metanoia which means a change of outlook, turning around to face in a new direction and see a new perspective not visible before. Repentance is a movement toward God in which more and more we see things the way God sees them. Repentance means letting God be God in us, the God of compassion, the God who loves all he created.

This is the kind of message of repentance John was bringing. He is saying, “God is working on a timetable none of us know about. Don’t focus on all the problems around you. Lift up your heads and be alert, for God is coming. God will do a new thing.’ John’s message is such a message of hope. “Prepare a way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” Those words are derived from a well known passage of Isaiah, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says the Lord.” The Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible says the Greek word for “comfort” has connotations of “standing at someone’s side.” It also means to strengthen someone, to offer encouragement and exhortation. When Isaiah proclaimed those words, he had in view the return from the Babylonian exile which he described in terms of a new exodus, of leading the people across another Sinai to a new and glorious land. So the words of comfort are that even in exile, God stands with the people to strengthen, to encourage, to help. Many people came out to hear John. Perhaps it was for the words of comfort that he offered, “The Lord your God will comfort you, strengthen you, and open a new way to salvation.” Isaiah’s words declare God’s solidarity with God’s people. John’s preaching is in that vein too; John heralds another Exodus, another time when God will pitch his tent among the people, another time when all will see the salvation of our God.

Today we celebrate the baptism of Isabel and Matthew. Their baptism is a new beginning in Christ. Through the waters of Red Sea, God will bring them to himself so that like a newborn children asleep in their mother’s arms, their souls may rest in the arms of God. They will pass through the cleansing waters of forgiveness and be given a future in Christ. As they are baptised, we pray that God will repeat the marvels of old in our day for Isabel and Matthew and for all of us. God has never failed to provide us with sources of strength and models of courage. Our task is to pray that our love may overflow more and more with knowledge and insight so that by God’s grace, we may support those in need, comfort those who sorrow, feed those who are hungry, and make straight the path for God to come into our lives and our hearts. So now, put on the mantle of joy. Give thanks that in Christ, God stands with us and with the world, and come to be nourished for your journey of faith by the One who is our joy. Come to the One who stands with you and for you. Come and be nourished by the One who is our joy, our hope, and our strength.