in the middle of the fire

 

REFLECTION AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU 
and St Martin’s, Duntroon
FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT

(December 18^th) 2022
 
 
 READINGS:
 
Differing readings in the two centres, so I am taking, loosely, as a text Daniel 3:25:

“But I see four men unbound, walking in the middle of the fire, and they are not hurt, and the fourth has the appearance of a god” 

(or T. S. Eliot, “The Wasteland,” line 360, “Who is the third who walks always beside you?”

 

I could spend a lifetime meditating on Advent and Christmas readings. So many to choose from. Were we strictly observing Advent 4 today we would be dwelling on the obedience, at great self-risk, of Joseph as he learns that his fiancée Mary is carrying a child that is not his.

Never mind that this child is the implantation of God in Mary’s womb, let us give Joseph his humanness: this child is not his, and Mary is his fiancée. By choosing to remain in relationship with her he is protecting her life; by choosing to obey God he is risking his dignity, his pride, his mana, his all.

It is risk itself that I find myself dwelling on at this time of the year. So many risks in the Incarnation of Christ. I don’t, to be honest, know what “Son” means in the context of God, but I do know that God’s very selfhood, God’s very essence is being placed into the terribly vulnerable state that is human existence. And yes, we have been trained to read the story of the conception, gestation and birth of Jesus as a safe and secure plan that was always going to work out, and after Christmas the reading of the slaughter of the innocents will strengthen that impression.

But what of the “yes, but” moments? Mary, aided by her fiancé, permits the entire plan of God to nestle in her womb, to nestle, to be born in what in another context Harry Chapin coyly calls “the usual way.” She lives, thouigh Joseph doesn’t, to eventually see him brutally executed. For we cannot divorce the birth and death of Jesus, and the roller coaster that is Mary’s life is one of terrifying ferocity. It is small wonder she ponders things in her heart along the journey. Of course we know the Easter story, and thank God we do. But she didn’t.

Still:  never can we neglect the resurrection. Stripped of that, then all that Mary faces, like so many women of hers and every age, is a story of a broken heart. So we will glance forward to the resurrection. But she could not, back in Bethlehem.

Later, when the first Christians turned to their scriptures, the Hebrew Scriptures, to make sense of all that had taken place in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, they turned amongst many scriptures to the story of Meshach, Shadrach and Abednego in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. They turned to a fourth figure walking in the flames with those who Nebuchadnezzar was trying to execute. They saw in that story a metaphor to unlock the meaning of Christmas. God entering the risk of human existence, God with us, Emmanuel in the flames of human existence, the womb of human existence. The fourth always with us watching not from a distance, not far off, but actually one of us.

The song by Joan Osborne, “One of Us,” so big a hit in the 1990s, is frustratingly ambivalent: does it capture or entirely miss the story that dwells at the heart of Christian faith? If you know the song, I’ll leave the question with you. If you don’t, ignore it. But in the womb God becomes one of us. Eternally.

T. S. Eliot famously captured the image another way – allegedly reflecting on the legends surrounding Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions. The party of explorers constantly had a sense of an extra presence with them as they faced the very extremities of human vulnerability. “Who is the third who walks always beside you” the poet asks an unseen, unnamed companion. The poet is there, the companion is there, but a shadowy figure, too is there, a presence bringing what may be divine hope into every human existence. An extra, almost seen presence. Who is the third in the poet’s conversation? Who is the fourth in the furnace? Whose are the footprints in the sand? The metaphors, of various merit, capture the Incarnation. Diana Spencer used the image of a third party in a marriage in a rightly dark and menacing way, but the figure of the Book of Daniel and of “The Wasteland,” while dark, is not menacing.

From the moment of conception in the uterus of Mary, God is one of us. God in Christ – not a distant God staring from afar – but God within the very vulnerabilities and risks and successes and failure of being human, is one of us. God, passing through the birth canal. God in a manger. God at the mercy of humans. God breathing resurrection into every death. God in the furnace of life and death. God dependent on Mary saying “Yes,” on Joseph saying “Yes,” and, strangely, on each of us saying “Yes,” as we ask God to be, as Wesley puts it, “born in us today.” Today and every today of our lives.

“There is always another one walking beside you,” says Eliot. Amen, say the scriptures.

 

 

 

divine size 14 boot

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU 
and St Alban’s, Kurow
THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT
(December 11^th) 2022
 
 
 READINGS:
 
Isaiah 35: 1-10
For psalm: Luke 1: 47-55
James 5: 7-10
Matthew 11: 2-11

 

As I interacted with my gospel conversation co-conversationalists the other day it occurred to me that one of the foremost and most neglected themes to emerge from this week’s gospel reading is the invitation established by John the Baptist to interrogate Jesus.

Often in my career I have tended to hang loose to the gospel readings, dipping more completely into the other readings and seeking application for our own times in those encounters with the God we serve. Occasionally I’ve been organised enough to weave through the readings, letting them cast light on each other – interrogate each other as I have just put it. That in fact is how the lectionary is designed, but whether we use what is called the “continuous readings,” something of a misnomer in any case, or the so-called “related readings,” the links are often tortured at best. Nevertheless our readings do in a sense interrogate each other. Isaiah’s ecstatic vision of joy asks our God – who as Christians we believe is definitively revealed in Jesus Christ as found in the gospels – asks our God where we might find joy in a tormented world, whether then in the first century – or today in our twenty-first.

“Here is your God … he will come” says Isaiah, foreshadowing that powerful word Immanuel, God with us. But where? Where is Isaiah’s God in the midst of the semi-apocalyptic doom and gloom of our era? Isaiah’s vision is of a God with a big stick who will bash up the Putins and Taliban and torturers and exploiters of his time. 

Is that our God? Such a God seems remarkably absent in our world, or at a more micro level, in the terrifying worlds of victims of war, famine or abuse. I will tend to explore answers, if such can be proposed to that question more in the context of Good Friday when we find God on a Cross crying out in resurrection solidarity with all who have cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is an eternal question. But let us for now acknowledge that the affirmation of either Isaiah or Jesus that there is hope, that God will come, that God will be with us, that God is with us, these can seem a pretty tenuous claim after 2000 years or more. Perhaps as philosophers like Nietzsche or Sartre and the fiercely evangelical New Atheists have claimed, God is simply dead or absconded.

Hopefully it is needless for me to add that this dark view is not mine. If it were I might well be mowing my lawns right now. But I’m not, long though they are after two weeks’ absence.

Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist – under threat of death – is understandably impatient too. It is sobering to note that he does not really see an answer to his question before he dies a brutal death. Interrogating Jesus, even believing in Jesus, is not necessarily innocuolation against dark times.

Where then is hope in the crazy Jesus-story? Jesus’ own answer is simply “go, see,” and we may well be human enough not to find that entirely convincing.

We have to be realistic. There is so much in our Christian story which is hardly Christ-convincement. We have seen exploitation, self-aggrandisement, grim stories of abuse perpetrated by those who claim the name of Christ, and suffering even to the extent of John the Baptist experienced by those who follow Christ. Where, then, is good news breaking through the white noise of calamity?

We might note  that Jesus warned that there would always be tares – thistles we might say – amongst the fine wheat of faith. That amongst those claiming the name of Jesus there would be wolves in sheep’s clothing, predators amongst the pure of heart. He also warns of times of great trial for his followers – John the Baptist at the very least foreshadows the trials that those who are obedient to God may face. I make no secret of my own belief that ours is a time of sifting, sorting the thistles from the wheat grass, or whatever metaphor we might choose. The brutal exposure of our institutional church by royal commissions, by collapsing kudos and resources, by marginalisation in society’s consciousness: these are amongst the trials predicted by Jesus, and they have always been a part of the Christian story. Jesus speaks of them when he prays that we may not be led into times of trial.

Yet we find ourselves at least to some degree in a time of trial. And there will be greater trials yet as our false gods are torn from us. Parishes collapse, church buildings crumble, close, or both, and numbers dwindle to nothingness. Those in what Jesus tellingly calls “soft robes” and ostentatious palaces are receiving the firm Size 14 boot of God’s winnowing Spirit. Our children and grandchildren, most of us, care little for our esoteric beliefs about an invisible friend.

Yet we can even without, no: especially without ostentatious palaces and soft robes – he says while admittedly wearing the beautiful robes of liturgy – be the sign for which John the Baptist was looking, for which John the Baptist asked Jesus. Are we able, in whatever small way, able to touch lives, to shine light, if only faintly, to penetrate a whole lot of grey dark?

It’s been kind of nice for me this past fortnight to return to old haunts across the ditch, and, returning, not to know but at least to wonder if God has maybe just once or twice or more, pray God, used this stumbling Christ-follower to touch a life or two, to murmur the rumour that love, hope, justice, joy, peace can still exist in some small but God-breathed way even in our century.

And, as John the Baptist interrogates Jesus, perhaps we can too, and can offer our lives as we do in the liturgy, to in some small way be a living sacrifice, be a vehicle through which God may touch and encourage those we walk amongst. Our task, in the words of the famous prayer of Richard of Chichester, is simply to know him more clearly, love him more dearly, and follow him more nearly, day by day, by continued exposure to the experiences of those around us, by immersion in the stories of scripture, and in the rhythms of liturgy. May God help us so to do.