another day

 

REFLECTION at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS
(December 31^st) 2023

 

READINGS        

Isaiah 61: 10 – 62: 3
Psalm 148
Gal 4: 4-7
Luke 2: 22-40
 

When I was a theological student I encountered for the first time a phenomenon called “watch night services.” I have to admit until I paired up (I was going to say “hooked up” but that has all sorts of awkward connotations)  –  until I paired up with Anne I was never that big on New Year's Eve. In earlier days of course I was just given to any excuse for a wild party, but the ticking over of a clock at midnight on what is usually the 365^th  day of the year didn’t really strike me as a matter for faith observances. Whether I partied or whether I snored it was just another night before another day.

And then every – I dunno – seven I guess years New Year’s Eve falls on a Sunday. And you know what? I still see no liturgical reason to sit up and – should I call it “virtue signal”? – by sitting in a church praying in what is really no more than an accident of an old calendar.

On Easter morning at around pre dawn, and preferably pre light, I generally observe an ancient Christian tradition of lighting a new fire, lighting the paschal candle, blessing the year as it were in the name of Christ, and processing it (year and candle) into a church, a darkened church. Part of the blessing of that candle is words that remind us that Christ the Child of Christmas and the Resurrected One of Easter stands outside all time and blesses, or hallows all time, makes all time holy.

Amongst the readings set for this day is a passage from late in the writings of the Isaiahs, focusing on a majestic amalgamation of God's love of compassion and justice, and the possibilities of new beginning. These of course are not a January 1^st thing. These are an everyday thing, an every encounter with God thing. And I realise of course that I am using the same sort of arguments that non liturgical Christians will use to explain why they don’t like feast days, high days and holy days set throughout the calendar. I get that, except that I think such days give us a remarkable opportunity to focus and to learn. So does this day, I guess. 

The Isaiah passage speaks of an expectation charged with energy as endings are observed and new beginnings witnessed. The Galatians passage, set for this day if we were to read it, speaks of the remarkable new beginning that is the obedience of Mary, the resultant birth of Christ and the warm breath of new hope. The comparatively long gospel passage leads us into the beginnings of a new life, like every new life full of promise, uncertainty and hope. Although the passage does not reach that far for this reader it culminates in the remarkable observation that the mother of Jesus watched her son puzzled, bemused, fascinated, and as one translation put it “pondered all these things in her heart.”

There will be for me no watch night service tonight. Depending on my stamina I’ll be snoring peacefully or perhaps screwing up one last burst of energy to toast another day. But the message that we must cling to is at least two-fold: tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow is a day like every tomorrow, already warmed by the footsteps of God. Let’s stride on.

COLLECT

Saving God, whose son Jesus was presented in the temple and was acclaimed the glory of Israel and the light of the nations: grant that in him we may be presented to you and in the world may reflect his glory, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

 

hush of expectation

 

REFLECTION at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
SECOND SUNDAY IN ADVENT
(December 10^th) 2023

 

READINGS   

     

Isaiah 40: 1-11
Psalm 85: 1-2, 8-13
2 Peter 3: 8-15a 
Mark 1: 1-8

You may recall (though if you are at Saint Paul’s you won’t because it wasn’t the case) but two or three weeks ago we sang the stirring Methodist hymn “there’s a light upon the mountains.” The second verse runs

                        There’s hush of expectation, and a quiet in the air,

                        and the breath of God is moving in the fervent breath of prayer;

                        for the suffering, dying Jesus is the Christ upon the throne,

                        and the travail of our spirit is the travail of his own

I grew to love that hymn when I was introduced to it by a parishioner in one of my New South Wales parishes, young woman of Methodist extraction, though the granddaughter of a wonderful Anglican bishop. But it was for me, above all, this sense of a hush of expectation, especially at this Advent time of the year, that captured my imagination.

It seems to me that, while there may be some expectation particularly in children’s circles at this time of the year – and that expectation tends to be of the coming of a rotund gentleman in a red suit rather than an infant incongruously in a manger – nevertheless any sense of hush is 180 degrees removed from our experience in the weeks leading to Christmas. From around about late August onwards as hints of Christmas trade begin to appear in supermarkets, I begin to wish that I was living in a Buddhist or Islamic country in which I could maintain my belief in the birth of a vulnerable Christ child, but not be bombarded with songs about jingling bells – and I refuse to make reference to the odours of Batman – or across the Tasman, and perhaps to a lesser degree here, rusty Holden utes.

It seems to me precisely that divergence that preys most on my mind in the weeks before Christmas. I find myself seeking peace and quiet, taking long walks not just to reduce my own resemblance to Santa Claus but more importantly to find at least some hope of encountering the still point in a turning world. That phrase that T.S. Eliot, amongst others, most memorably called the encounter with Jesus, is a powerful understanding of Jesis. As Patti Smith mused, albiet is without specific reference to Jesus, the prhrase points to a solid anchor in the complexities of human existence.

For Eliot, in his “Burnt Norton,” “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.” The dance, as Sidney Carter emphasized in his controversial hymn “Lord of the Dance,” is everything: “Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” 

Or, when Eliot was being more of the church warden that he was, there is only the Christ.

The chaos of the weeks before Christmas contrast radically with the hush of expectation celebrated in the hymn that I’ve mentioned. We are called to be a contrast society of Jesus, a counterculture of hope. The hard part for us as Christ bearers is to shut out at least some of the noise of commerce around us, to pause enough to allow at least the possibility of the encounter that Eliot emphasises. We are called to encounter the God who is before creation and after creation, and who holds creation and all time within that realm, impossible to understand but that many of us are learning to call “Godself.”

If that seems a convoluted and incomprehensible sentence or two let me put it in more biblical terms: in advent we are challenged to pause long enough to reconnect with the God “who was and is and who is to come.” That God who in Christ came into human view vulnerable, defenceless, born on the edge of a crumbling empire, rejected by humans with the exception of his own family, soon to become according to the legends a refugee in Egypt.

We have a week or two left of this season of Advent. Let us hope and pray that we can find touches of the God of stillness and peace amidst the fanaticism of commerce and sometimes dangerously wild celebration of a southern hemisphere summer.

crawling cancers, hurtling meteors

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
FIRST SUNDAY IN ADVENT
(December 3rd) 2023

 

READINGS        

Isaiah 64: 1-9
Psalm 80: 1-7, 17-19
1 Corinthians 1: 3-9
Mark 13: 24-37

 

From time to time texts of apocalyptic raise their ugly head. I don’t mean in church, where at least in theory they can be broken down, “parsed” as it’s trendy and only partly correct to say, but in uncontrolled youth groups, on street corners, billboards, cheap books and advertisements. There they can do irreparable damage, convincing many who encounter them that no matter what price must be paid,  the God to whom they refer is a being that can be done without. To put it more dramatically, as Jean Paul Sartre and others have done, that God can be put to death as far as those who encounter – almost certainly “him” – are concerned.

In the hands of Jesus and other biblical speakers they were designed for what in broadcasting we called a “target audience”; an audience of believers who were experiencing persecution. They were to be a source of hope, reassurance, as we will see in our final hymn today, "A Safe Stronghold our God is Still" in which Martin Luther refuses to offer cheap hope.

Living in an extraordinarily apocalyptic age he offered what can seem to be no more than pie in the sky, the hope that even the most grievous suffering and loss can be transcended, is transcended in the encounter with Jesus. Five hundered years after Luther, I remain persuaded that he was right, though God knows I would not wish to be put to the test, and not one of us knows how we would respond in times of real persecution.

As I have said before, by “real persecution” I don't mean by the minor inconvenience of not being able to say the Lord’s Prayer at a council meeting or in school classroom, both contexts in which such use of a sacred prayer becomes a little more then a hollow recitation. No, as Martin Luther put it in his famous hymn,

And let the prince of ill

look grim as e’er he will,

he harms us not a whit;

for why? His doom is writ;

a word shall quickly slay him.

Luther’s hymn, although written from an undisguisedly male perspective, give us some idea of the extent to which Luther was prepared to trust in divine hope.

Divine hope, the writers and speakers of apocalyptic biblical scenes urge us to believe, can transcend all grief, as we sung in our first hymn, "Lo, He Comes"  “deeply grieving, deeply grieving, deeply grieving”; all suffering, all bereavements, and indeed all our own failures to believe are transcended.

The lurid scenes that we have heard recently, scenes of sheep and goats and gnashing teeth were designed as encouragement for us to trust in God, to hope in a God who will stand with us even when we fail to stand, and who will bring us and all people into the mysterious state that we give names such as “heaven,” “eternity,” “paradise,” and indeed “City of God.”

And though they take our life,

goods, honour, children, wife,

yet is their profit small;

these things shall vanish all,

the City of God remaineth.

(Though I’m more of a McKenzie Country or, for my Australian friends, Nullabor sort of believer, personally).

So over these next few weeks we will hear words that remind us of our fallibility, and for that matter our mortality, but words also that will speak of hope amidst despair, light amidst the darkness, and joy amidst tears. We will be reminded, as Isaiah put it, that “we all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities take us away,” And we will be reminded also, as Jesus puts it “that heaven and earth will pass away.”

But strange people that we are, we will also be reminded that none of these things are the end of the story. Whether the so-called second coming is our own personal mortality or the mortality of the planet we're destroying, or even the mortality of an expanding universe that must one day contract, we will be told that that is not the end of the Christ story or, weirdly, of our story or the stories of those we love and those we pray for.