Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

 January takes its name from Janus, that god of the ancient world who looked both ways.

Sometimes we are encouraged not to look back too much and maybe the words of St Paul ring in our minds when he talks of forgetting what is behind.  And yet, wasn’t it Jesus who encouraged us to do this in remembrance of me?  So, scripture is a bit like Janus, depending which bits you read it encourages us to look both ways.

Surely life is always a balance of the two.  Too much looking behind and we get stuck in the past.  Yet plunge headlong into tomorrow, with no thought of the journey thus far, and we are liable to make the mistakes of yesterday once more.

It’s easy for the future to scare us with all its uncertainties, and maybe even our new diaries unsettle us with empty pages as we wonder what will come up and fill the days of 2023.

However, I’m not sure those pages are totally empty.  I’d rather think of them as the spaces we have yet to occupy but in which God is already present, waiting for us.  God beckons us into the future with the promise to walk every step beside us, so that every day is full of his love, light, peace and hope.  God greets us as we step into tomorrow with the word welcome.  The future is possible, and we don’t have to face it alone.

Travel well into 2023 as you take the hand of God and walk into a New Year.

Christmas: Us?

 

Where does God’s light beckon us?

The light that beckoned Mary has given us The Magnificat, a hymn of praise that leads on to song of radical social justice.

The light that beckoned the Magi led them on a journey to something new.

The light that beckoned the Shepherds offered them encounter and affirmation, the like of which they had probably never experienced.

The light that beckons us….fill in gaps and complete the sentence.

The unifying factor in all the biblical stories is that this beckoning light led to Jesus, the Light of the World.  It shone not so much on an idea but on a person, a life and a story.

This is the light that takes me to Jesus and his life affirming presence with us.  The Incarnation.

I love the story of Washington Roebling, the architect New York’s Brooklyn Bridge.  Its design was considered a triumph in 1870 and it made Roebling one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the city.  The bridge’s expanse was so long that the pylons holding it up had to go much deeper than usual.  So the men were submerged below the river in something called caissons, a watertight chamber filled with compressed air.  There they dug, and even exploded rocks.  In these caissons men got sick with Caisson Fever, or even died from flooding or fire.  Washington Roebling spent the first two years of the construction of the bridge down in the caissons with his men.  Not behind a desk but in the caissons.  He never asked them to do what he himself wasn’t prepared to do.  In the end his health failed too – he gave his all.

God’s Incarnation in the Lord Jesus Christ and expressed today through the gracious presence of The Holy Spirit with us daily, makes life possible and makes life a joy.  God comes among us, that’s the promise of Advent, the centre of Christmas and our experience each new day.

In his Advent hymn, There’s a light upon the mountains, Henry Burton has these beautiful lines at the end of verse 3:
but his angels here are human,
not the shining hosts above,
and the drum beats of his army
are the drum beats of our love.

God’s light is shining now and calls for our response – for the drum beats of our love.

Advent 4: The Shepherds

 

Ah, the Shepherds.  Perhaps my favourite characters.  The light beckoned them to hurry down to Bethlehem, even with the song of the angels ringing in their ears as they made their way.  Grown men, maybe rough men who found themselves kneeling before a new-born, and doing so with new understanding.

But why make shepherds the first visitors in the narrative?  Well, maybe there is something radically subversive in this pastoral scene?

In Jeremiah God says the nation’s kings should rule like good shepherds.  A shepherd king is devoted to the flock, the nation.  A shepherd king cares for every sheep and in looking out for the one that is lost shows devotion to the minority as well as the majority.  Jeremiah is under no delusion; kings are rarely as good and faithful as shepherds. 

Perhaps we should recommend a reading from Jeremiah at next year’s Coronation?  And in that letter, that I will never send to the organising committee, perhaps I should suggest that instead of a mighty, diamond encrusted sceptre, our new Sovereign might do well to be invested with a simple shepherd’s crook.

I don’t think the authorities in Jesus’ day much cared for Jeremiah and his notion of a Shepherd King.  Like countless power conscious leaders since, they clung to the trappings and privilege of their office and by their actions and decisions showed they no longer went out looking for the lost sheep or personally lay across the entrance of the pen at night as the sheep’s faithful protector.

So, this part of the Nativity might be far more subversive than it first appears.  The shepherds are back!  And in his life Jesus will model what it means to be a Good Shepherd, and that will challenge a lot of people in palaces and in power.

And then, secondly, in looking at these shepherds I rejoice in their thoughtful and deliberate inclusion.  Because they were often side-lined.  Their work was hands on and those hands became dirty.  It meant that on occasions they were even excluded from temple worship.  Yet here they are given ringside seats at the Incarnation.  How ironic.  How wonderful!

Once again we shout: The shepherds are back!

The late Queen said she found Nelson Mandela the most inspiring leader she’d ever met because of his complete lack of rancour.  He knew what it was to live as the outsider, so after his release from prison he spent the rest of his life making people, all people, sense they belonged to a Rainbow Nation.

Yet, amazingly, that sense, that principled ethic of inclusivity, was part of his life even under arrest.

Mandela loved the Sunday Morning Communion Service in the prison chapel.  Whenever he attended and heard the prayers, he said he felt the warmth of millions of people as if they were smiling at him.

One Sunday, he noticed the guard Christo Brand had taken off his cap during the first part of the service.  Mandela asked if he was a Christian, he said he was.  And then Mandela did something wonderful, he insisted that Brand joined him at the altar and together they received bread and wine.  Father Alan Hughes who took that service at Pollsmoor said it had never crossed his mind to ask the guards to join in.  Yet it took this prisoner, Nelson Mandela, to offer out a hand of reconciliation to his guard and say we are both welcome at the Table of the Lord.  And what light must have shone into the chapel as he did so.

The shepherds are back – reminding us of faithful service and hospitable inclusivity.

Advent 3: The Wise Men

 

T.S.Eliot’s poem Journey of The Magi begins:
‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter’

It more than hints that at times this journey was tough and maybe these camel riders began to wonder if following the light which was beckoning them was really worth it.

Exploring faith can be demanding. 

Some of us may have just ‘slipped’ into Christianity, the product of Sunday School or home tradition.  Others might have had all sorts of ups and downs in their journey to baptism, confirmation or simply being part of a congregation – or not being part of one.  And most of us still feel ‘The Lord has yet more light to shine upon his word’.  Faith ebbs and flows, takes multiple turnings and constantly seems unfinished, always, always ‘A work in progress’.

The Magi are the outsiders in the Christmas narrative.  In a story so bound up with a specific culture, they blow away all the expectations; they broaden its meaning and deepen its relevance.

Faith, and those who seek it, often surprises us.  It’s expressed by unexpected people and found in unexpected places.

On the Sunday after the Queen’s passing, seven ‘extra’ people attended our Morning Service saying they just felt they needed to be in church that weekend.  During the Pandemic I heard from an ex-pat doctor living in Austria that she had tuned into our church’s podcast service every week – having found us by accident, feeling she needed God in those bleak days, she stayed with us every week until the podcast ended.

This beckoning light takes us on a journey, over moor and mountain ‘following yonder star’.

The Magi, who followed the star, are ultimately a bit of a Christmas mystery.  They are exotic, unexpected and simply ‘outside the box’. 

Some suggest they might have been Zoroastrian Priests, with a reputation for star study and fortune telling.

Zoroaster, Persia’s primary prophet, said he himself was the result of a virgin birth and, like Jesus, he began his ministry aged 30.  He predicted that others would be born, just like him, and instructed his followers to seek them out.

I think I probably grew up in a church that really felt it was the custodian of truth.  My church frowned upon ecumenical engagement because, I suspect, they didn’t really believe the church down the road was actually Christian – at least their version of Christian.

Well, I’m fifty years older now!  And I prefer to think of myself not as a Keeper of the Truth, as if I could ever put God in a box because he needs protecting, but as a Seeker after Truth.  God has that disturbing, yet exciting habit of jumping out of the box.

The light can and does beckon us on – to further journeying, further exploration, further questions and further encounters.  It can be messy, deeply disturbing, gloriously liberating, often confusing with a growing sense that we are on a task that never finishes.  God’s light, beckoning us forward on an ongoing journey of discovery.

One Epiphany, whilst living at Malvern, a group of us met up for supper and a play reading evening, based on Dorothy Sayer’s A Man Born to be King.   I was given the part of Balthazar and had the privilege of reading his wonderful response to meeting the infant Christ:

Do not ask me; I spoke like a man in a dream.  For I looked at the Child.  And all about him lay the shadow of death, and all within him was the light of ,Ife; and I knew that I stood in the presence of the Mortal-Immortal, which is the secret of the universe.

Perhaps that is it!  That the ultimate response to all the asking of questions isn’t watertight, scientific and dogmatic answers,; the ultimate response toa  journey of faith, one beckoned by light, is worship.

Advent 2: Mary

 

The light that beckoned Mary, at The Annunciation, was not bathed in a mellow, reassuring glow.  Rather, it was a light, (one, we are told she willingly responded to), that led her into a life of challenge.  She, undoubtedly, lived it with deep love and faithfulness, yet her heart was pierced as with a sword.

In her day, so young and unwed, she became something of a scandal in out of the way Nazareth.  In ours, I suspect, the Safeguarding Officer would be contacted.  I find it increasingly difficult to romanticise this part of the Christmas Story away.  She is so young, at times so alone and often the challenges before her seem truly overwhelming.

Which makes her life of faithfulness even more inspiring.

Many of us have made vows and promises at the start of some great endeavour.  I suspect, whether they were vows made at our wedding, baptism, confirmation or ordination we made them with great sincerity.

Upon hearing her call, as the light beckoned her into a new and truly amazing future, Mary said: I will’, and became the handmaid of The Lord.  We are so thrilled the story doesn’t stop there.  As the years unfold, she cares for her son: at the Wedding feast in Canaan, she told the steward to do all Jesus told him.  And on Good Friday, in the absence of so many disciples, she keeps watch at the foot of the cross.  Loving, faithful and true to the end.  Mary kept her vows and fulfilled them completely.  She does not just begin well, she ends well.

The light that beckoned Mary was not soft, warm and gentle.  It was one that led her into a life of great challenge and personal sacrifice.

Mary lived in that conundrum of the Kingdom of God being both ‘now’ and ‘not yet’.  As a Jew she would have rejoiced in the stories with which she grew up of a homeless people, once slaves, wandering in the Wilderness, then finding a God given home.  Yet, her generation knew the reality of occupation by the Romans.  And Mary, as a young girl whose pregnancy was misunderstood, knew what it was to be personally and hurtfully marginalised.  The words of The Magnificat were never mere theory from her lips.  She knew the reality of every syllable.  She was part of the oppressed and downtrodden, she lived in that space between the Kingdom’s ‘now’ and ‘not yet’, a space we can only occupy with faith.

Yet, she believed.  Yet, she trusted.  Yet, she sang.  Yet, she loved.  Yet, she kept on turning up!