Parish Of Opawa St Martins Blog

Readings: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a; Luke 4:14-21

Noise! There is a great deal of it in our world today. We constantly surrounded by it, perhaps we even feel we need lots of it to feel at home, because there so much of it. For some of us the first thing we hear in the morning is the news on the radio. “Good morning. This is Radio New Zealand News and I am Stuart Keith,” or whoever it is who reads the news. This noise is especially startling on Monday mornings, as we are woken from peaceful bliss with the invigorating and rude noise of the world outside being played right into our sleeping ears. Then we hear the rumble of a train and the traffic; someone outside starts up a concrete cutter to fix the drains and the builders start banging away on the nearby building site. The phone goes. The TV is on covering the Aussie Open, there’s a computer game that is crying out to be played and the soduko in the newspaper to be solved. Where is there time and space to listen to the voice of God? We strain to hear the voice of God above the noise of the world; God’s eternal words laden with meaning that enrich our lives with meaning. So much of the noise around us is distraction. We tell ourselves that we are too busy dealing with all that has to be done to notice the needs of others. Sometimes we turn the noise up so that we can ignore the gnawing ache in our soul. The noise becomes an escape from ourselves; perhaps even an escape from God, a web of deceit into which we become enclosed; our own tower of Babel that makes us think we are in control and masters of our universe.

Our souls, in fact, are tuned to hear the voice of God, if only we would take notice. God has made us to long for himself, to find in him meaning and wisdom and life. More often than not, our desire for retail therapy, music on the radio, or the addiction to the computer game or to texting on the cell phone or our busyness is because our need for God is deep, and yet unrecognised, and so we try and fill that void with material things or lots more activity.

Our longing for God is also a longing for the shackles that bind us to be broken so that we can be truly free. The people Ezra spoke to in the first reading today were in that very position. They were a crowd of about 5000 who had returned to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon. God had been down in Babylon and had freed them and brought them home. They had made the journey from captivity into freedom. They knew what it was to be liberated, to be set free. So they longed to able to hear God’s word piercing the heart, making them weep for his law, washing away the false identities that held them back. Now home in Jerusalem they were able to hear God’s word proclaimed to them in the heart of the holy city. By then Hebrew had ceased to be a spoken language, so Ezra and his leaders translated the text into the Aramaic language of the Persian Empire so that they could understand. “With interpretation they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” They were utterly mesmerised. They wept for God’s law and they sensed as they listened that God was washing away the things that held them back. Here is a new freedom to be God’s people. Here we have found our true home.

How much more were the people, who heard Jesus preach in the synagogue, longing to be set free from bondage! Once again they were mesmerised. In fact, they were transfixed. They hung on every word, at least in the first instance. Jesus does a radical thing in this sermon. He gets up and quotes a well known passage from Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed to me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” You might well be wondering what is so radical about that. All he has done is read a familiar passage from the bible. The shock comes when Jesus says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” This was a huge surprise. Isaiah 61 recalls the Servant Songs earlier in Isaiah; the suffering servant who was marred and disfigured so that we recognised him not. In this moment, Jesus identifies himself as the Messiah, and then he links his self understanding of his Messiahship to the suffering servant of Isaiah. No one had ever done that before. Most people thought the Messiah would be an idealised King David; a military figure who would be powerful enough to restore Israel to even greater glory than ages past. How could the Messiah be a servant who would come in humility and in powerlessness to restore justice and bring God’s teaching? It did not compute and before long the adoring crowd will react and become the lynch mob.

Yet, here indeed is the Messiah, the suffering servant, who empties himself to become one with us in great humility. His whole being is a microcosm of the kingdom. In his presence the poor have good news proclaimed to them. It will be in his nature to stand with the disadvantaged, the oppressed, the imprisoned, and the disabled. All those regarded as outsiders, Jesus will be alongside. He is restoration to the community of the redeemed. Liberation from bondage will take many forms, but they will be concrete and real. In his presence, they will know God’s freedom and restoration. Release of the captives, recovery of sight for the blind, setting at liberty those who are oppressed will be the messianic agenda. These are programmatic words for God’s people too, for you and me. And they will only be meaningful when we as Christ’s representatives take them seriously. Our task is to co-operate with God in making them real in our world today. Faith must lead us to action, to being “little Christ’s” and living the Word, to eyes that see God at work in our world already and hands ready to assist. Then we too will find ourselves standing with Christ in the poor and the marginalised feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and setting people free.

This is the reality that St Paul is sensing in his letter to the Corinthians. But the biggest block disabling our ability to listen to God, the things that traps the most, is an ego thinking it’s in charge. Although Paul’s words seem mundane, they speak of a reality that draws us away from self-centred isolation and that draws into relation with one another. Christianity is a communal religion. We listen to the Word together. We reflect on it together. We become Christ’s body together. Our baptism makes us members of that body. The Body of Christ speaks of our solidarity together, our call to play an integral part of each other’s lives. We will never be able to listen to God while we think we are the masters of our destiny and that the ego is absolute. As long as we are locked into the isolation of self-absorption, attentiveness to God, freedom to be the people God has made us to be, will never come. No matter how many gadgets we have and no matter how socially networked we are, it’s all a lie if we fail to be the mystical body of Christ. Communion with Christ, being in relationship with the Body, this is what completes us, and sets us free. Incorporation into the Body of Christ makes us whole. It is by being in relation with the Body that we hear the voice of Christ breaking the chains that bind us.

Jesus, in his being, is the Word-made-flesh. He is Word who has power to heal us, to set us free, to restore our sight, to give us comfort. All we have to do is listen to his voice. Turn off the noise, be still, and you will hear Christ’s voice, clear as a bell. He longs to be with you, to love you, to give you life, to commune with you. He is here speaking to you now. He is present in the lives and hearts of those gathered around this holy table. His body is made real in our “Amen” to the body and blood of Christ in Holy Communion. He comes to be enfleshed in our lives and to dwell in our hearts; he comes to be what we receive, the body and blood of Christ. Do you hear him? Does he speak to your soul and does he call you into loving and caring? For therein lies the power of being the Body of Christ.

The New Wine of the Kingdom
Isaiah 62:1-5; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11; John 2:1-11

Weddings! For most people they take a lot of organising and planning. Generally, there is quite a lot of angst that goes in to making the ceremony perfect, dressing the church, choosing readings and music; and then there are beautiful hairdos, dresses and suits to be arranged. But preparation for the marriage liturgy often pales into insignificance when compared with the work that goes into the wedding breakfast to follow. Tradition demands that even more energy is put into this part of the day. There is venue to be dressed up, food to be prepared, speeches to be made (in the correct order), a cake to be cut, the first dance and so on.

Of course, the effort put in to this is because at a wedding, families are doing more than simply providing nourishment for their guests. The primary point of everything is so that the happy couple and their family and supporters can rejoice. It’s a wedding after all. Celebration and rejoicing is compulsory! The reason for the mandatory nature of this is to reflect the nature of the relationship between the newly wedded spouses. The newly weds rejoice in each other and we all rejoice with them. The very idea of getting married involves feasting, whether small or large. Not all of this is easy. Being nice to family members for a whole day can put one under pressure enough. So at times like this a good wine is essential to enable the rejoicing and the celebrating.

In the texts before us today the first thing we note is way the bible uses marriage as a metaphor to describes the relationship between God and Israel. The prophets often describe God and Israel as a bride and bridegroom. “As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you” (Isaiah 62:5). God’s relationship is not just like that between any old husband and wife. The relationship between God and people is like the newly married when everything is new and exciting and there has to be celebration. God never changes, yet God is always new.

“On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee” (John 2:1). There is rejoicing, and why not. These words have profound resonance in the bible. The third day is the day of the resurrection, Sunday, the day when the glory of God was revealed. It is also the third day in a great week, the week in which Jesus first revealed himself as the Son of God in the presence of John the Baptist. John introduces Jesus at the wedding as if this was the most natural thing in the world. The entire Gospel is an invitation to a wedding feast. “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a marriage feast for his son” (Matt 22:2). The church celebrates the incarnation, the Word-made-flesh, as a wedding banquet between God and humanity, between God and creation. The relationship between God and people has always been sung as a marriage. Jesus even speaks of the end of the world, heaven itself, as a nuptial banquet or even a nuptial meeting between bride and groom. Christ is the groom. Here at Cana he reveals himself as Son of God, with his people, at a wedding. This is the messianic banquet, a celebration of the incarnation as the union between God and humanity. In John’s gospel, this is the first sign that Jesus gives. It is given on the third day. The kingdom of God is made manifest in abundance and plenty and rejoicing. The bridegroom is with his bride and is rejoicing over her. This is another epiphany, and on this occasion it is the epiphany of our salvation, a picture of the kingdom of God, a foretaste of heaven.

The only problem is that the celebration has hit a snag. The wine has run out. Normally, this might not actually have been so important. The guests had probably had enough anyway and would have gone home satisfied. The hosts would have got over any embarrassment that may have arisen after a while. The shortage of wine is about the lack of well being, that certain something that gives a faith community a feeling of quality and depth, a sense of the numinous. When it comes to living the Christian life there are times when something is missing. Perhaps this is because of the temptation to turn the Christian faith into a formula to be followed. “Yes, I tick all the boxes,” I say to myself. I have spent time praying today. I have my quiet time with God and read the bible every day. I do someone a good turn every day. I have donated to the needy and I go to church every Sunday. Churches can do the same by picking out the list provided by the latest consultant: yes, we have updated the liturgy (or updated it too much); we have visited the sick, provided food for the local food bank. Our clergy pray the morning office. We have made our hearts open to newcomers and given them plenty of say along with better coffee delivered with our best smile. The point about the wedding at Cana is that in spite of all the boxes being ticked there is still something missing. There still needs to be that ‘something else’ and that ‘something’ is the very thing that counts most. There has to be new wine.

When Mary says, “Do whatever he tells you” her words also resonate through the bible. These are, in fact, the very words pronounced by Pharoah during the time of famine in Egypt when the people had nothing. “Go to Joseph; what he says to you, do” (Gen 41:55). Then Joseph opened all the storehouses. St John stresses the quality of the wine. “Everyone serves the good wine first, and the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” Jesus in his being is that good wine, the rich wine Isaiah so poetically describes. He wants us to experience that wine in our own lives and in our life together as a community of faith. He wants us to experience new wine as joy and love and hope and faith. He wants us to experience this in abundance. Just look at the size of the six stone jars. Each was full to the brim. Is our spiritual life marked by dryness and fatigue, or is there a deep down a gushing wine, the superabundance of the Spirit nourishing us day and night and never running out? What is your life tasting like? Is it a dry ticking of the boxes to make us feel spiritually on top, or is it abundantly rich with the best wine?

The good wine that Jesus describes is the joy of becoming comfortable with the truth of who God has made us to be. It is the joy of being in an intimate communion with Christ and knowing we are loved by him. It is the joy knowing our vocation and our calling and our gifts. It is delighting in sharing those gifts, living our vocation for God and growing into the fullness of Christ. It is our readiness to serve God and the community on concert with all the baptised. This is the wine that Jesus provides. He is one greater than Joseph. His blood will be the blood of the new covenant, poured out for many. His food will satisfy the hunger of the world. His feast foreshadows the consummation of the kingdom, while at the same time, pointing forward to his passion, death, and resurrection and to his saving work that he will accomplish on the cross. He lives and dies to give us a taste of the best wine.

In your prayer this week, ask the risen Christ to watch over our feasts, the feast that is our society, the feast that is our church in Opawa-St Martins and the feast that is the world wide Anglican communion. Ask Jesus to keep us attentive to what is lacking in these feasts, to avoid allowing our hearts to be consumed in worrying about trivialities and rivalries, or the wine of consumerism and materialism, so that with Christ we can see those who have no wine, no bread, and no joy. Ask God to show us how we can be stewards who distribute the new wine of the kingdom. Pray for the confidence to bring others to the banquet of Christ, and pray that Christ may make the good wine appear in our lives and in this church.

The baptism of Jesus

Today we are celebrating another Epiphany. The word Epiphany means “manifestation” or “appearance.” So in this part of the church year, following on as we are from the Christmas festival, we are celebrating the manifestation of God in Jesus, the human being in whom the eternal Word of God was made flesh. We recognise in Jesus the fullness of God, God’s compassionate love in human form, God choosing to be revealed in a complete human life. As Jesus comes to John to be baptised we are seeing in him a person shot through with God’s life and love; God breaking into the human world. There have been many holy people in human history who have provided inspirational spiritual leadership. But few have attracted the kind of language used to describe Jesus. Jesus was more than a someone showing up to give a course of lectures on God and personal self improvement. When we gaze upon Jesus the emphasis is not so much on his ideas. The key question is, “Who are we dealing with?” St Luke has been answering the “who question” in the early stages of his gospel. Ever the master story teller, Luke tells us that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and welcomed with choirs of angels, recognised by John the Baptist before he was even born, blessed by Simeon and Anna in the temple. As Jesus comes to the Jordan to be baptised, we are seeing none other than the Creator of the universe dwelling within a human being, Jesus. He is completely associated with God and is now being empowered by the Spirit to do what God does.

In recent novels and popular journalism, in characters like “the teacher” in The Da Vinci Code” there is a suggestion that Jesus was really just a great man who suffered a tragic death. It is said that Jesus’ divinity was a later invention by a power hungry church hierarchy who manipulated generations of people to suit their own ends. But the striking thing here is about how quickly this understanding of Jesus fell into place in the imagination and prayer of the early church. The earliest witnesses, the disciples and the first Christians, had a strong conviction from the start about who Jesus was, and this conviction drove them to communicate the gospel to lands far and near and to risk their lives in its telling. They knew that what they had to say about Jesus would be life giving anywhere and everywhere, that Jesus was for every person in every time and place and that he could transform any situation.

And so we come to contemplate a second Epiphany, a second episode in the life of Our Lord in which he is revealed as the Son of God, his baptism.

We might wonder why Jesus, who is of one substance with God the Father, might need to be baptised at all. Baptism, as John the Baptist practiced it, was a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. But the gospel writers are on to something here. Jesus is God, not just because he is all presence of the all powerful Creator of the universe and can do what God can do. He shows his divinity also in his humility and in his demonstration of dependence on God. The divine life in Jesus is generated by unconditional, compassionate love. In Jesus there is one who listens in humility to God and responds, who allows his will to be bent to God’s purposes, and that includes being united to the human condition in every way. So Jesus comes to be baptised, just as we do. God is more than power and initiative. God also receives love and reflects that love back with gratitude and thanksgiving.

This is what we are witnessing in the baptism scene today. Jesus is baptised by John in the River Jordan. We see the whole Trinity involved here. We hear the gentle, affirming words of the Father, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with whom I am well pleased”. We see the Holy Spirit descending upon him in bodily form like a dove. Jesus is embraced and affirmed as the “servant-Messiah” of God that Isaiah foreshadows. From the beginning, God’s energy is flowing through Jesus. This energy will shortly drive him into the desert and empower his ministry of teaching and healing. But this creative, living, communicating energy is not just directed to us and to the world. It is directed back to God. In the baptism we see all the members of the trinity communing together, giving and receiving love, affirmation and support. Jesus is lovingly and humbly receiving love from God and reflecting back that same love and the life to God, the source from which it comes. Jesus is both the outflow of God’s life and energy which is now directed toward us, and he is the world’s energy and love being redirected back to God in a movement of reconciliation, love and gratitude. Jesus stands at the heart therefore of a twofold movement. He comes to communicate God’s compassionate love to us, and he comes to unite us back to God and to redirect our love and energy and our thanks to God. In this short little episode of Jesus baptism, we see this action beginning to unfold. It will become more visible as Jesus’ ministry and his passion, death and resurrection unfold. We are seeing Jesus bound up in the life of the Holy Trinity, being held and affirmed by the Father and the Holy Spirit. He reveals God who is in the habit of sharing love, pouring love out, giving it back with gratitude, a circle of love being given and shared around.

Notice how observant St Luke is in telling his story. St Luke notes that after his baptism, Jesus was praying. All the gospel writers tell us that Jesus was someone who prayed, meaning that he continually put his will and his decisions at the service of God.

While we may nod our heads in wonder as Jesus unites himself with the human condition in submitting to John’s baptism. But the meaning of Jesus’ baptism does not end there. His going down into the water and rising up again Christ anticipates his death and resurrection, his dying and rising again. In doing so, he sanctifies the waters of baptism to be a means by which we are united with him. So Jesus’ baptism becomes a prototype of our own. We too are embraced by God to be included in the mission Jesus freely entered. We too, are caught up in the dynamic of dying and rising, being united to Christ’s death in a baptism like his, so that we might rise again into eternal life with him. We too will be participants in the Day of Pentecost. On that day the whole family of Christ’s people will be incorporated by the Spirit into the servant community, charged with bringing the light of God’s justice and peace into a broken world. It will be our task to allow God to enflesh the Word of God in our hearts and lives and to be channels of God’s love and affirmation, mutually receiving and giving love as we echo the life of the Holy Trinity.

All this means that you and I, in our own baptism, are immersed in the baptismal experience of Jesus. When Mary first said yes to the message of God given her by the angel Gabriel, she seemed to be a very ordinary woman, just like one of us. Yet all was not as it seemed, for the child she carried would turn out to be the Word-made-flesh. When Jesus was born, he was an ordinary baby, just like any other child born every day of the year. But again, all was not what it seemed, as the shepherds and the Magi attest. There is more to Jesus than meets the eye. Today Jesus is seen for what he is. Jesus is “The Beloved Son of God, the Word-made-Flesh.” The ordinariness of his earthly body and his earthly being is united to the divine holiness of God. He has come that we too might be united to one another and to God in a divine circle of love. In our baptism we are immersed into this mystery. God unites us to himself and God’s purposes become ours. We might look like an ordinary group of people, but just as it was with Jesus, all is not what it seems for we are the holy beloved people of God to be driven out into the world by the Spirit.

The Epiphany of Our Lord
Isaiah 60:1-6; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12