Parish Of Opawa St Martins Blog

Today concludes the Church’s celebration of the incarnation (the Word-made-flesh), a central mystery of the Christian faith. The fact that God assumed a human form is another way that the Christian faith affirms creation and our bodies. The fact that God affirms created matter and speaks to us through it is why art and symbol, music and ritual are so important in the Christian tradition. Certain parts of the Body of Christ make much more of this than others. Using all our senses of sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste make for a tactile and rich liturgy of worship..

The Christmas Crib scene has been packed away now, leaving a lovely space in this church where the organ console used to be. My agenda is to make that a prayer space; a place where people can go and pray quietly, maybe after church on Sunday or during the week. Having something beautiful as a focus of prayer would be helpful, such as a flower arrangement, or a candle with an open bible or an icon would be good. It could be a place where prayer ministry could be offered after church on a Sunday. If you have any ideas, please let me know about them.

Icons have been very important to many in the Christian tradition. At present the Romanian Orthodox church is using the hall at St Mark’s. The use of icons in their worship is routine. It would be very interesting to invite their priest, Fr Emanuel, to come and tell us about them one day. (There is an idea for any parish groups looking for speakers!) In Christian icons, Christ is very often depicted as the “Light of the World”. We celebrate Jesus, the “Word made flesh”, and so in icons Christ is nearly always holding a scroll or book of the gospels indicating that in his person Jesus the Word of God in human form. God is not actually words in a book. God is revealed fully to us in a real human life. Sometimes the book of the gospels is opened to a passage such as, “I am the light of the world,” but more often the gospel book is open to a page with the text “Whoever follows me walks not in darkness but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).

All through the bible, light is the very first attribute of God. God is the light that pierced the darkness at the dawn of creation. In the birth narratives Jesus is born in the night and is proclaimed as a light piercing the darkness of this world. Jesus is the “Light of the world” about whom the prologue of John’s gospel speaks, and the One Luke calls a “Light to enlighten the nations” in the song of Simeon which has become known as the Nunc Dimittis; sung by generations of Christians at night prayer before retiring to bed.

We usually think of light emanating from the sun, but biblical thinkers usually thought of light as being uncreated; emanating from God himself. So when Moses came down from the mountain after communing with God and receiving the law, he had the appearance of being penetrated with God’s light to such an extent that he still glowed with it. Having approached light itself, Moses’ body is transfigured into light.

Anna and Simeon are probably the only two elderly characters I can think of in the story of Jesus. Their whole attitude suggests their welcoming of Jesus. The Christian who contemplates Christ, who is attentive to Christ’s coming into his/her life and who welcome the Christ become rather like the transfigured Moses. They become windows through whom the light of God shines for all to see. Moses spent all that time communing with God on the mountain and contemplating the Law of God. Our task is similar, to make Christ the centre of our being. Whenever we allow our hearts to be penetrated by the light of Christ, whenever we are able to repent and receive his forgiveness and know that we are loved unconditionally as we are, the light of God shines in our lives.

The gospel today is from Luke’s story of Jesus, but it is John’s gospel that makes the most of the theme of light and dark. All through John’s gospel you can tell whether someone is friend or foe depending on the time of day or night they see Jesus. The faithful are people who live in the light and speak with Jesus in the day. Enemies do their thing at night. Nicodemus appears only three times in John’s gospel. His first appearance is on the occasion when he comes to Jesus at night as a closet believer. His problem is that by day he is a man of the Pharisees and a ruler of the Jews. So he does not want to be seen consorting with Jesus during the day. That would get him into trouble. So he comes to Jesus by night. Unluckily for Nicodemus, Jesus is not flattered by the attention he receives. Jesus knows that to have desires by night which are in contradiction with the desires he has by day are signs of dishonesty and a distorted life. So he gives it to Nicodemus straight: there can be no such thing as a closet disciple. After delivering the most famous verse of the New Testament: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”, Jesus draws out the consequences. If you are a disciple of Jesus, then you are not frightened to come out into the light because of it.

Poor old Nicodemus! He had thought it was possible to give witness to belief by night behind closed doors when no one was looking. But instead, Jesus assures him of the absolute incompatibility between his daytime persona, and his night time confession. He is told that only if he is able to act on what he claims he believes in the broad daylight that he will show where he really stands. Living as people of light appeals to our piety, but it can be costly, even frightening at first. Living in the light, becoming fully human involves the task of working out where we stand in relation to the world we live. It is about living truthfully. This was the challenge facing Nicodemus after he had spoken with Jesus. He had to decide whether or not to go along with the pharisaic interpretation of good and evil and to act accordingly, or whether to involve himself in the undoing of that world whatever the consequences. He had to decide whether to allow his life to be beacon of God’s light, or whether he would allow something else to hold sway.

It is the same with us. The gospel enables us to receive Christ and to make him the intimate centre of our lives. But it also involves a transformation of our hearts; the kind of costly journey facing Nicodemus as he prepared to come out of the closet and into the day. Have there been times when you have stayed silent rather than speak up to offer a Christian perspective? How would it be to ask Jesus to give you the courage to speak and act in his name? Have there been times when another person has triggered a deep negative response in your gut. It may well be that that person is reflecting back to you an aspect of yourself that you dislike or that there is something so precious that you fear others will walk over and damage, and so you have tried to shut that bit away in the closet out of sight. Would it be so bad for Christ to bring that part of you out into the light? Facing and accepting and loving these parts of ourselves is what it means to live in the light and to grow into full maturity in the faith. This is what the gospel calls us to do. It may look difficult or scary, but the grace of God is able to do so much more than we can imagine or conceive. Living in day, in the full light, means being in intimate communion with God and being happy and comfortable with the person God is making us become. What better life could there be?

At the moment we have been hearing readings from St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Usually I find the territory of St Paul’s writing to be a bit like travelling in a foreign country where everyone speaks a strange language. I don’t relate to it as easily as the gospels. However there were some racy things said in last week’s reading from chapter 6 that caused quite a bit of comment over morning tea. So today we are going to tackle the reading from St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.

Today’s passage is mercifully short. It can be summed up in this portion of the text: “let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it.”

The first thing to remember when reading Paul’s letters is that these were written to people who had been Christians for a very short time, maybe five years. Also, while many of them were Jews, there were also many who were Gentiles (non Jews), so they did not always have an in depth understanding of the Hebrew bible and a Jewish background to inform their understanding of God. These were people in a vastly different time and context from those whom Jesus primarily related to. The church was working through what it meant to be Christian in a completely new world.

To understand this text before us today, we have to go back to the beginning of chapter 7. Funnily enough, Paul kicks this off by saying, “It is well for a man not to touch a woman.” What is it about the biblical writers telling the men to stay away from the women? (Let the reader know: we joked about this last week when looking at Exodus 19 and the background to the feast of Pentecost). Well men (and women), wait up. Up until recently, most people thought this idea of men staying away from women was Paul’s opinion. But now most interpreters think that Paul is quoting something that is being said in the Corinthian congregation by someone else; someone supposedly in authority. So the issue we are actually dealing with here is teaching about sex within marriage. What we can note straight away is that Paul is not taking a negative stand on this subject. Each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband (1 Cor 7:2). Husbands and wives should give each other their conjugal rights. In other words, there is nothing wrong with being married, says St Paul.

One point of great interest, is that given what we know about the status of women in the ancient world (and in many societies today), it is instructive to note that Paul regards men and women as absolutely equal. This is an outworking of the radical call of the gospel that the early church was working to live into. “For the wife does not have authority over her body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.” (1Cor 7:4). The call for the community to give equal status to men and women is a theme of this letter that comes up repeatedly in different contexts such as worship and spiritual leadership. Here, the theme of equality is in the context of marriage, and in terms of the times Paul is writing when many wives were treated as little more than slaves, this is highly counter cultural stuff. Mutual respect between men and women is to be the mark of a Christian community, and that extends into Christian relationships such as marriage.

But back to the issue before us that was foreshadowed last week. The real issue in Corinth was that the wives had, in a very high minded fashion, decided to practice celibacy. In other words, the problem initially in the Corinthian church was not promiscuity, but abstinence. The reason the women decided to practice celibacy, we think, was so that they could concentrate on prayer. Now this was not unusual in Corinth. There were other religions in Corinth that taught their adherents to do this, and it was regarded as a particularly pious thing to do if you were highly committed to your faith. There are hints in this letter, however, that this was cause of much frustration among the deprived husbands, who were then tempted to have their needs met elsewhere. Corinth was a sea port, so there was no shortage of brothels to visit and other sources of temptation. So Paul’s sensible advice is not to go for abstinence at all, unless both partners want to and agree by mutual consent, and even then only for a set length of time.

What about those who are single? Paul says it is good for the unmarried and the widows to remain single, wishing that “all were as I myself am (verse 7). But if they are not practicing self control, they should marry. “It is better to marry than to be aflame with passion” as the NRSV puts it.

One of the things we need to take from this is that St Paul is a Jew, and Jewish people had a very robust and matter of fact approach to sex. Paul understood the power of our sexual needs. There is a popular view that St Paul thought of marriage and sex as something the pious would avoid. But that is far from the case. Paul should really be regarded as a champion of good sex in marriage, and married couples should get on with it and enjoy it. Good on him!

In fact what Paul is doing as he goes through this letter, is that he builds up a sophisticated Christian theology of the body, which is something our church needs to do again today for our context. In Paul’s day, the popular Greco-Roman view was to say that the body was worthless and transient while a person’s soul or spirit was everything; that meant people thought that the point of spiritual life was to escape from the body and the physical world. On the contrary, Christians believe in the resurrection of the body; therefore we believe our bodies have been redeemed by Christ and for Christ. Our being joined to Christ in baptism is just as much a physical union as well as a spiritual one; our bodies will be raised in Christ and taken into the life of God. Therefore, we believe bodies are good and they are to be enjoyed. What we eat and drink and smoke or otherwise inject or ingest actually matters. Our sexual relationships matter. We have a bodily existence which is part of our God-given humanity, and our relationship with the body of Christ is also just as much physical as it is spiritual. Our bodies belong to God who made them and God will not let go of any part of them. Bodies are not our personal property that we can do with what we want; they are a temple of the Holy Spirit, they belong to God and even to the community of faith, the Body of Christ.

But in terms of today’s passage this is almost secondary. The real point is the nature of the call of God on our lives, which is what all our readings focus on today. Paul is saying that living into God’s call for us is what actually matters most. Our marital status, whether we are single or married or widowed (and you can extrapolate to our professional identities and who we are when we play), these things are very important, but even more important is our vocation. Do not try to change your circumstances to live the Christian life. To use St Paul’s examples: if you are old, do not pretend to be young again. If you are a Jew, do not pretend to be someone who is not a Jew. Live the life that God has called you into and be happy in it; be comfortable with who you are becoming. In all you do, in every situation, open your hearts and minds to Christ. Find your self worth in being loved by him. Seek to make him known without seeking self glory or self promotion. Trust that you will know yourself as a deeply loved brother and sister of Christ who died to raise you up and set you free. This is what really matters. Marital status, social status, gender itself; these are the things that will pass. But knowing ourselves as loved utterly by God and called by God to be in communion with him: this is eternal, and this is what really matters.

Imagine in your minds eye that we have placed before us an interesting package, something that is clearly gift wrapped. It is looks beautiful and inviting. The people are gathered around it wondering what is inside the package.

This is a good way in to seeing the way that John’s gospel is presenting Jesus. Just like Mark’s gospel, there are no infancy narratives at the beginning of John’s gospel. In this gospel as with the gospel of Mark, Jesus is revealed as one of the people in the crowd that have gone out to see John the Baptist. At this point in story, Jesus is like that gift that waiting to be unwrapped. Everyone can see that Jesus is someone special, but at the moment no one is quite sure exactly who he is. The gift has arrived. It is standing before us. Everyone is fascinated and speculating about what might be in it.

It’s as if the story of the people of Israel is being repeated all over again. Ages before in the story of the Exodus, Moses had gathered the people the foot of Mount Sinai. There, they spent three days preparing for God to give the people the Law. You can read all about that in Exodus 19. The people washed their clothes. The men stayed away from the women! And Moses consecrated them with special prayers. And then at the sound of the trumpet, and accompanied by fire and smoke, the people went up the mountain to meet God, and the 10 commandments and all the sacred laws were given to the people as a gift, and God made them into a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.

And so it is in John’s gospel. In chapter one, we have a series of days in which we are being prepared to receive the gift of Jesus, within whom the glory of God will be revealed. We can tell that because John’s gospel starts the beginning of each paragraph with the words, “The next day…” So we are following the pattern of the people preparing for the festival that celebrates the giving of the Law on Mt Sinai; the Jewish feast of Pentecost. Except now there is someone greater than Moses here and something greater than the Law. On the third day when the people celebrate the gift of the Law, Jesus will reveal his glory. Ultimately the third day will be the day of the resurrection, but in this part of John’s story of Jesus, the third day is the day of the marriage feast at Cana, the day when which Jesus turns water in wine. Whereas the Law was given through Moses, John’s gospel tells us that the gift we will receive in Jesus Christ is grace and truth (John 1:17). This is what is gift wrapped in the package, and what we are waiting to see.

So Jesus is standing in crowds. He is like a gift that is waiting to be unwrapped. We know that the gift be brings is grace and truth because we have the benefit of hindsight. But those who encountered Jesus for the first time will have to wait for the gift to be unwrapped, so that the full identity of Jesus can be made known.

John the Baptist baptises Jesus. The next day he hails Jesus as the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”, the “Son of God”, the one who baptises with the Spirit. Jesus begins to gather disciples around him. They refer to Jesus inadequately as “Rabbi” (which means teacher). They say they have found the Messiah. They refer to Jesus as the one “about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote,” and, “the King of Israel.” John’s gospel is hinting that none of these titles and affirmations are enough. We can say that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, the King of Israel and so on, but these were all bound up in the culture and history of the people of Jesus’ day. They are projecting their idea of who Jesus should be on to him. So these affirmations, while true in themselves, do not mean that the disciples have understood the gift that is before them. That understanding is still to come; the gift is still to be unwrapped, still to be revealed. That’s what Jesus means when he says that we will see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. For those who want to open the eyes of their hearts to see, God will surpass our expectations. Whereas Jacob encountered God in a particular place, and wrestled with God all night until his hip was out of joint, so Jesus himself becomes the place, the gate of heaven, where God can surely be found. Disciples of Jesus will need to learn to leave behind their own expectations of who God is what they think God should be like, and open their eyes to the God that is; the grace and truth revealed in Christ.

Today we note that Jesus is beginning to call disciples to follow him. The faith of the disciples at this point in the story is flawed. It is weak because the disciples are yet to understand who Jesus is, and when he begins to reveal the fullness of his glory, they will very nearly be blinded by the sight. Even so, Jesus has called them as they are. And they follow freely. They will be tested. They will witness rejection by those whose minds are hardened and closed.

In the course of these early conversations, the disciples ask Jesus about where he is staying and where he is from, as if to say, “If you’re from Nazareth, how can we take you seriously?” Jesus ask them, “What are you looking for?” and tells them about who they are, “Here is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.” His language is invitational, “Come and see.” What an invitation! We are all invited on a journey with Jesus. It is a journey of faith. We will see the Lamb of God enacting the drama of salvation. If we want to, we will be given a view into the heart of God, and see the love and forgiveness and compassion that fills the heart of God.

The Lord’s words to the disciples are addressed to us. You will see great things because of your faith in Jesus. Living our faith means staying close to Jesus, dwelling with him, and opening our hearts and minds to him. It involves freeing ourselves from our own agendas, and our own preconceptions. Living our faith means allowing Jesus to gently reveal himself to us, to trust the grace that is in the heart of God, and to learn how to live in truth. God calls us to greatness, but it is not a greatness of our own making. It is what God accomplishes in us that makes us great.

The first disciples were weak and inadequate in lots of ways. Surely Jesus could have called far more talented and competent people to spread the gospel? But he didn’t. He chose this group; ordinary people that he invite to come and see and to travel with him. He asked them to open their hearts and their minds to him. Over time he unwrapped the gift to reveal the fullness of his grace and glory to them. And that is what transformed them. They became humble preachers of the Good News. They avoided hankering after self glory and personal achievement. They looked to the heart of God. They desired to make God known.

The gift is here to be unwrapped. Seek always the heart of God with open hearts and wait patiently to see the gift God longs for you to receive.

Today the church continues to celebrate the Epiphany of Our Lord. Last Friday we contemplated the magi coming with their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, and we heard that the glory of God revealed in Christ would be made known to all peoples of the world. The light that has come into the world can be seen by everyone, and received by everyone.

To mark Epiphany and the New Year (at the suggestion of The Rev’d Bosco Peters who is with us today), we are reviving a time honoured Christian tradition (you can see more detail about this on Bosco’s website here). It’s called “chalking the door”. It’s very simple. We have packages of chalk for people to take home. We will bless the chalk, and when you get home you use it to ask God’s blessing on your home for the New Year. Just as the people of Israel were told to mark their doors in the Exodus story on Passover night, we mark our doors with the words, “The year of Our Lord 2012” while saying an appropriate prayer. In this way we invite Jesus to be a guest in our homes, a listener to each conversation, a guide for troubled times and a blessing in times of thanksgiving.

Today is a different aspect of the Feast of Epiphany, the glory of God made manifest in the Baptism of Jesus. In keeping with this day, we have blessed water and we have been sprinkled: we do this to recall the baptism of Jesus, to reflect once again on the baptism into which we have all been baptised, and to pray that we might grow more and more into the likeness of Christ.

We hear the story of Jesus’ baptism today from the gospel according to Mark, as we are now also returning to proclaiming the story of Jesus as our patron saint, S. Mark, presents it. Mark begins his story of Jesus in the wilderness. It will end in a wilderness state too, as the women encounter the empty tomb and flee in fear. Mark wants us to notice that the story begins wilderness. The wilderness is on the fringe of social order. It is neither town nor country. It is a place of testing, but also a place of new beginnings, where God meets his people and announces something new.

The crowds are all going out to hear John the Baptist, perhaps because he is offering God’s promise of a new start, a new encounter. So all Judea empties itself to go out into the wilderness to be baptised by John. In this mob of people who are hungry for healing and for forgiveness, is the person of Jesus, the Son of God.

In Mark’s gospel this is where we encounter Jesus for the first time. Unlike Luke and Matthew, he is not a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, or a refugee fleeing the hatred of Herod. He is a human being in a crowd. He is lining up in solidarity with all the other people on the banks of the River Jordan. He waits his turn to wade into the water and to stand before John.

This is how the ministry of Jesus begins. It is in a most unexpected place. It is in the desert where there is an unlikely crowd of people who are all out searching for God. This is where the holiness of God is to be found. It is among people; not in the holy of holies in the temple where there is darkness and silence and where only the high priest enters once a year. The holiness of God is out on the streets, among ordinary people.

It is at this moment, when Jesus is identifying himself with our humanity, that the heavens are torn open, and the Spirit descends like a dove. The Spirit is God’s future rushing toward us like an express train, bringing God’s vision of heaven to reality on earth. The Spirit will fill Jesus throughout his ministry. It is the Spirit who will be energising force in Jesus’ life and ministry, bringing healing to the sick, challenging injustice, and empowering Jesus to eat with the tax collectors and sinners and welcome the alien and the stranger into the kingdom.

Here is Jesus, within whom the glory of God is made manifest. He chooses to stand with our humanity; to experience all the human alienation and all the inhumanity we visit upon each other, what the bible calls human sinfulness. He comes to stand with our loneliness and with the suspicion we have of others, and he comes to set us free from all that, to show us how to be human, how to break down the barriers of human division, how to love and how to show compassion, how to be fully human. He will live and die for sinners through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Today we gather to baptise Toby. At the font, we believe and proclaim that everything God did for Jesus, he will do for Toby. God will give Toby the gift of the Spirit and we will hear that he is God’s beloved child and upon whom God has bestowed divine life. In Holy Baptism, Toby will be joined to Christ, so that he may be raised in Christ to eternal life in the kingdom.

Jesus is revealed to us today as one who is among us and who is identifying with us. He stands with us in our humanity. He comes to offer the gift of God’s love. He comes because he wants to be united with Toby and with all of us, to live and die for us through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit will be present again in the story of Jesus. Just as the heavens are torn apart as the Spirit descends on Jesus, so the curtain in the holy of holies will be torn apart on the day of Jesus’ death; signifying that the saving death of Christ releases the Spirit who will be known and experienced by all people everywhere. Later the same Spirit will empower the Apostles on the Day of Pentecost, to turn them out of the upper room and into the streets, turning the desert of human existence into the City of God.

Today we give thanks that Jesus identifies with us totally and completely. Being loved like this by God is hard to comprehend, and some people respond by withdrawing back into the desert with hearts closed off from God and from others. But today’s feast is our hope. Jesus stands among us and with us. He is not afraid to be a face in the crowd. He comes to be united with us in our humanity, so that we can be united to God. And for that we give thanks and praise.

Today is the 12th day of Christmas when we celebrate the manifestation of the Glory of God to the gentiles; we give thanks that God in Christ opened the kingdom to all people. The story that announces this remarkable gift of grace is the arrival of the magi bearing their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

There are two major points to take away from today’s readings. The first is to note what this story is saying about the identity of Jesus. The gifts are a pretty big clue. Gold is for a king. We know that Jesus will be a king and he will inaugurate a new kingdom, but it will be the opposite of the kingdom of Herod. Jesus is not born in a capital city. He is born in an obscure town and in poverty. His kingdom will not be about power, but servant hood and its leaders will be servants.

Frankincense is brought because Jesus will be for us a priest. He will be one who will go before us as the pioneer of our salvation to open up a new way to God. He will take his humanity into the being of God, and having experienced all the limitations of being human, he will intercede for us with sighs and tears and prayers too deep for words. He will become for us the great high priest. He will replace the Jerusalem temple and all its apparatus. He will be the dwelling place for the glory of God. He will make us into living stones in a temple made with people, and together in Christ we will be a dwelling place for God.

The third gift is myrrh. This is a special perfume often used for preparing a body for burial. This foreshadows that Christ will not only be our high priest. He will allow himself to taste death, so that he can absorb its power. All the forces that serve to alienate human beings from each other and from God will be robbed of their power. God will give Jesus back to us in the resurrection as forgiveness and make us into a new humanity.

The issues of identity of Jesus, foreshadowed in the gifts of the Magi are only part of the message of this day. There is one other important point to note: This foreshadowing of the kind of kingdom Jesus will inaugurate. The Magi are foreigners. You might recall that there were two ideologies running in Judaism at the time of Jesus. One was grounded in the story of Ezra and Nehemiah. It is the story which says that the Kingdom of God comprises a faithful and holy remnant. The programme of the returning exiles who espoused this position centuries earlier banned intermarriage with the people who had remained in Israel while the rest were in Babylon. They wanted a restored Jerusalem with a walled city and the law to codify the response of the faithful to God. By contrast there was another ideology put espoused in the prophecies of Isaiah and Jonah and the book of Ruth. This looked forward to a time when all humanity would gather together at the mountain of God. Jesus will stand quite firmly in this camp. The Magi are the beginning of a procession of people of all ages and of every race, coming to pay homage to the new born King.

This is where the rubber hits the road and it’s an aspect of the Good News that the disciples struggled with; perhaps even Jesus himself struggled on this front. Just look at the story of Jesus meeting the Syro-Phoenician woman. He called her a gentile dog and initially refused to assist her. Herod provides a much more straight forward picture of the human response to God’s agenda to bring all humanity together. Strangers and aliens can’t be trusted! His reaction involved conspiracy, spying, murder, abuse of power. These are all the forces of evil that Jesus will face, as will those who choose to take the message of Jesus seriously.

Matthew is calling us to get our road maps ready to go on a journey of faith with Jesus that will involve risk and adventure. Today signals another beginning in the launch of God’s agenda. It is for a kingdom that is open to the alien and the stranger, for a community of faith that has wide open doors and that will be a broad tent capable of including all the peoples of the world, as first envisioned by Isaiah the prophet all those years ago.

An important part of the journey is to learn to trust in the goodness of God’s agenda, even if we can’t see where the journey is taking us. The letter to the Ephesians, which we read today, teaches us that we need people of other cultures, those who are strange to us, because they will bring particular gifts that the whole body of Christ will need. The most important gift they will bring is the particular image of God that they bear; aspects of God that are only possible for them to see because of their cultural lens on life and the particular experiences they bring. If we close our hearts to them, we miss out on an enlarged vision of God.

The second important part of the map is to learn self awareness. When the stranger comes and we feel ourselves wanting to reject that person, or if that person raises a strong negative reaction in us, we need to take that to God in our prayer, and ask him to show us why we find that person so hard to love. Usually they are reflecting back to us something in ourselves that we find hard to accept or to love. In our prayer we need to ask God to bring healing and acceptance to that aspect of ourselves so that our hearts can be opened to stranger who comes to us.

As we make this journey with the Magi to Jesus, we will find in Christ the truth about ourselves: that we are utterly loved, that we bear a unique image of God that is ours only to bear, and that every single one of us is an important building block in the spiritual temple, the holy people of God. For this we give glory and praise to the child who comes to open the gates of salvation to you and me, and all the peoples of the world.

All through the bible a name is much more than a mere label, so that we know what I should call other people. They are an expression of a person’s essential nature. So as we go through the bible, it is worth noticing what people are called, and how people are addressed. In many ancient cultures nothing exists unless it has a name. In the second creation story in Genesis, creation is not complete until all the creatures have received a name. In the psalms and the prophets, God brings things into being and then calls them by name. In the bible naming someone is part of the process of bringing that person into being, completing the process of creation. That is why Adam names all the creatures in the second creation story in Genesis.

Looking at some of the well known characters of the bible, Esau complains that his brother Jacob is aptly named, because “he has supplanted me these two times.” The name Jacob has two meanings: the first is “to seize by the heel” reflecting the fact that when Jacob was born, his hand was already reaching out to seize his older brother’s heel. But the name Jacob can also mean “one who overreaches”, and his older brother Esau clearly believed that Jacob overreached himself all the time (many older brothers think that anyway). Later on Jacob has his named changed by God. His new name is “Israel”. Israel means “one who wrestles”. Isn’t that something to be known for? To be someone who wrestles with God, who takes God’s will seriously enough to really engage in the struggle to discern the mind of God? That is something worth aspiring to. Jacob got that name after he wrestled all night with God in a dream such that he woke up with his hip out of joint.

One of the fascinating rivalries in the Old Testament is between the prophet Elijah and Queen Jezebel, wife of King Ahab. Elijah is a prophet of God in the northern kingdom of Israel, and his name means “the Lord is my God”. The Queen was a strong character, the real power behind the throne. She used her position to convert Israel to the worship of the Phoenician fertility god Ba’al, a religion that was offensive to the people of Israel. Elijah was the champion of the resistance movement against her. We are not completely sure of the translation of Queen Jezebel’s name, but some people think it means “Ba’al is exalted”. The interesting point for us is that all through the story, neither Queen Jezebel nor Elijah ever address each other by name, or even utter the other’s name aloud. Of course, they can’t because to same the other’s name would be like uttering blasphemy.

In the bible, names are an expression of a person’s essential character. It is a worthy exercise to study names of biblical characters, and most of all, to study the many names and titles given to Jesus by the New Testament writers of which there are many.

Today we celebrate the naming of Jesus. It is eight days after his birth when all Jewish boys were circumcised, and this would also have included naming the child. The name “Jesus” is the Greek and Latin form of the Hebrew name “Joshua”, and it means “The Lord saves.” Therefore, the One who bears this name will be one who will save his people. But it will not be a political salvation like that gained through the first Joshua. Jesus will save people from their sins and he will restore our relationship with God. He will establish a holy people, a new house of Israel set free from sin. He will establish a new covenant, and it will be an everlasting covenant that will restore the relationship between God and creation.

We are in the season of Christmas, and at this time of the year many of us will have received Christmas cards of Mary holding the child Jesus: images of mother and child. In the great artistic images of Mother and Child, Mary is shown presenting Jesus to the world, and as she does so, she points to him. In Greek Christianity, she is called hodegitria which means “pointing the way”. Pointing the way to Jesus, inviting us to know him are regarded as essential to Mary’s being, and to ours. In John’s gospel Jesus will call himself “The Way” (I am The Way). So there is an interesting parallel here. Mary points the way to Jesus, who himself is “the way”; he is our way to the Father and also our way of life, our way of being.

As we imagine Mary and Joseph naming Jesus before God and people in the company of their family, we imagine a unity in the holy family. But this unity is more profound then first meets the eye. Jesus is also Mary and Joseph’s creator and their saviour. His humanity has been assumed in coming to us as a vulnerable child. He is the self-expression of God, the Source of all. He is God becoming united to our humanity, so that we can be united to God again. He is full of grace and truth, and we behold his glory. He comes to draw Mary and Joseph into the intimate unity that is at the heart of the life of the Trinity, to make them heirs of the kingdom and children of the New Covenant. Jesus has come to draw us into that intimate communion as well.

Today we gather to celebrate the baptism of Ruby Caldwell-O’Neill, and we give thanks for what the child in the manger is doing for her today. He comes to give her a new identity as we give her Christian names. He comes to give her the Spirit of Adoption that will make her a child of God and an heir of the kingdom. He comes to take her from being no one, to being one part of a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a people set apart. He will make her part of the new Israel, the holy people of God. We will sign her with the cross, the sign of Christ. And Jesus will come to be her way to God, and will unite her to himself. Today we give thanks and praise that God has done and is doing this for all of us so that with Mary, we can treasure these things in our hearts, and with the shepherds, give glory and praise to God for all we have seen and heard.

The year 2011 will be etched in our memories for a whole bunch of reasons. One of those reasons will be that this was the year that the ground shook for a very long time. Some people are still waiting to know if their land will turn green. Some have lost their jobs. Some have had to work ridiculously long hours keeping businesses going and responding to crises. Then last Friday’s aftershocks came out of the blue. They were an unwelcome reminder us of the stress of the constant shaking we have all endured. In many ways it has been a difficult year; we have lived through frustrating times. Now there are people in Nelson facing similar frustrations as they work through the aftermath of the floods up there. Someone told me that over the last year New Zealand has been responsible for 25% of the world’s insurance claims, even though we are barely 1% of the world market. What we are going through collectively is huge.

But the stories are not all negative. There are many positives, many stories of resilience and courage that demonstrate the spirit of Canterbury people. One of the important positives is the humanity we have shown to one another. We have seen that in the deepened sense of community we are experiencing, the care shown of our neighbours, the willingness to help people out. The student army and the farmy army have mobilised and people have shared their resources with one another. After the quakes of Friday afternoon, people were again checking on neighbours. They were back out helping to move the latest piles of silt that came up out of the ground. The care and compassion that has been shown, the humanity we have shared with one another: this is where God is to be found. At Christmas we celebrate God coming to us as a human being; God revealed in our humanity and compassion.

The message of Christmas is simple. Love comes to us from beyond the stars, and that love comes in the form of a vulnerable human being. God is not a creed or a package of beliefs. God is not words on a page, or a formula in a book, or a set of rules to follow. God coming to us is personal and human; he comes to us in the flesh, as a naked vulnerable child. He is the exact of God’s very being and the reflection of God’s glory. He meets as we are and where we are. There is no pompousness in that meeting. He comes to us on our level to speak to us in our own language, to overcome the barriers and boundaries of our souls and our relationships. God’s coming to us is human. It is the presence of Love coming to us in human form.

One of the dynamics that has especially marked our community since the earthquake struck in September 2009, is that when we are in crisis and people are hurting, old boundaries and divisions between people suddenly become irrelevant. To name one example, faith communities divided by centuries old divisions worked together in a new found spirit of co-operation. After February there were groups of people from Baptist, Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian and Pentecostal churches all working together in a way that would have been rare before the quakes. They were bringing their particular gifts and putting them in service for the community. This story is repeated in different contexts all over town. In times of disaster when people are hurting, barriers that have been created by our inhumanity to each other are removed. They simply become irrelevant in the face of the need to keep people alive and provide support and care. The humanity and compassion we have shown one another has been something of a miracle. It shows that when in trouble and when people are hurting, the humanity we show one another transcends politics; furthermore it puts the reasons for our divisions under the microscope and exposes our limitations.

This is the work of God. God comes to us as a human being to show us how to be human. Christianity could be described as a school for learning how to be human, and how to show humanity and compassion to others. We have learned a great deal about that over the last year, and the Gospel calls us to keep it going. Keep visiting neighbours; keep looking out for each other, keep helping one another. God comes to us in Jesus to remove the barriers that divide us, to restore our souls and heal our relationships and unite us to each other; to introduce us to our truest selves, and to unite us to God again. That is the message of Christmas. God coming to us as a vulnerable child to show us what being fully human looks like, because the more human we are, the more we are like God we become, and God draws us closer to himself so that in our humanity the joy of heaven can be touched and embraced and tasted.

That is why the Christmas is a day of joy and hope and why the angels sing. In the midst of all we face, God brings joy to the world. And so with the angels we give glory and praise to God.

The gospels are all clear that when John the Baptist proclaimed his message, he was standing in the tradition of Isaiah the prophet, who said, “Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight!” According to some scholars, Israel of old was dominated by two dominant ideologies. One is reflected in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. These books represent the idea that the Jews who returned from Babylon considered themselves a holy remnant, a people set apart. They were opposed to intermarriage with those who had remained in Israel as these people were thought to be unclean with pollutions of the peoples around them and their abominations (see Ezra 9:11). Their programme involved rebuilding the temple, building a wall around Jerusalem to keep strangers out, and codification of the law that helped maintain a separatist identity.

There was a second ideology, however, that was interested in bringing together all the neighbouring groups. The theology of this group is reflected in the book of the Prophet Isaiah, but also the books of Jonah, Ruth and Judith. The fact that the gospels stand within this universalist theology of Isaiah sets the tone for the Good News of God that is to come. John the Baptist heralds the joyful news of God’s coming. The one who is to come will be the servant in whom God delights, and will bring a fresh and new manifestation of divine rule. All people will see the salvation of our God, and all nations will come to join God’s people.

The Isaiah reading before us today looks forward to a special leader, a human vocation, who will be energised by God to instigate this new beginning and a fresh start for a suffering and broken humanity: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, to give them the oil of gladness instead of mourning, a mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.” The one who will bring this about is coming, and he will be called Jesus, the Son of God.

John’s gospel is very clear about the divine identity of Jesus. We hear a short section from the prologue of St John today which speaks of Jesus as the Word that was in the beginning with God and which is God. And then, all through the gospel, Jesus uses the phrase “I am” repeatedly, which echoes the voice of God talking with Moses at the burning bush. “I am the Light of the world”. “I am the bread of life.” “I am the resurrection and the life.” John’s gospel has no infancy narrative that tells us about the identity of Jesus. It begins instead with a dense hymn that tells us that Jesus is God and that in the beginning he pre-existed with God.

While John’s gospel is clear about Jesus’ identity, having Jesus say repeatedly “I am”, this gospel is much more cautious about the Baptist. This gospel has John the Baptist saying with equal emphasis, “I am not.” “He was not the light,” says the prologue. “I am not the Christ,” says John himself. He also goes on to say that he is not Elijah, and he is not the prophet. Where Christ ‘is’, John ‘is not’. These statements are a huge relief for us. Just like the Baptist, we don’t have to fall into the trap of being the Messiah. God is not asking us to be heroes who save the world. That is God’s task, and we should leave God to do it.

This brings us to the key spiritual issue before us today; our identity in relation to God. In the second creation story of Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve and the serpent who tempts Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and so on, the temptation in that story is to think that the power of human reason and endeavour needs no boundaries, and that if human reason does not need boundaries, we don’t need God. Adam and Eve stop asking, “How can we relate to God” and instead begin asking, “If we have all this knowledge and technology at our finger tips, do we need God at all?” What happens next though, is a loss of identity. They found themselves divorced from God, lost outside the garden, and in losing God they lost themselves, their sense of who they are. Without God, their lives no longer made sense. In John’s gospel, our lives only make sense in relation to the one who “is”, and when we understand what it means to say “I am not”. The beginning of the story of our redemption is the recognition that we need God, that we cannot do without God, that all we do and say, we do for God and for God’s glory and not to build up our own ego.

So after John the Baptist says many times, “I am not”, he finally comes out with some “I am” statements of his own. “I am sent by God.” “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.” And as we have mentioned earlier, that voice is not a random one. It is a brave voice, a courageous voice, a voice rooted strikingly in the inclusive tradition of Isaiah. It is a voice that will challenge those who think they are above God and who abuse their power, such as the King Herods of his day, and those who claim to be the religious leaders of the people.

Christian vocation takes many forms. God gives each of us gifts. Every single one of us has a vocation to make Christ known in our own particular way. John the Baptist is good model for us, because he is aware that he “is not”. He does not use his gifts to build up himself, or to draw attention to himself. He does not try to be the Messiah. He knows who he is not. He does what does, not for himself, but for the one who is to come, Jesus Christ. And that is what God calls to be and do, to have a love that focused beyond self and on to another. All the Baptist does is focused toward Christ, all he does, he does for God, and that liberates him to keep his life in balance and to be certain of who he is.

So it is with us. We are all called to a variety of ways of serving God in the way that we carry out our work during the week, in our service of others in our families, as husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, and as leaders in our communities. God sends us to the places we live and work to be a voice in the wilderness: a voice that proclaims the year of God’s favour, a voice that binds up the broken hearted and brings good news to the oppressed, a voice that encourages each of us to be fully human, people who share the love and compassion of God with one another. We are to cry out that the relationship God has with us is one of love, a love that he showed by sending us his Son. And as with John the Baptist, all who answer the call of God will be given the grace and the gifts they need to fulfil their call.

TV shows demonstrate a fascination with the stories of those in power. In recent years I have seen several movies and TV series about King Henry VIII of England and Queen Elizabeth I. At the moment there is a TV series called The Kennedys which tells the story of a well known American president. If there is a theme that runs through these movies, it could be the story of how to maintain absolute power. Always in these stories there is ruthless character who will do anything to maintain a grip on power; shady deals done in secret, an execution here and there, and even the odd murder or two. Henry in particular, tried to change the moral order and murdered two wives in order to get there. Money and wealth, flexing of military muscle and war here and there, the psychological pressures brought to bear by spies and the activities of the secret services, all these form part of a toxic mix of mechanisms used to stay at the top.

The gospels tell us that Jesus was also born into a royal blood line of impeccable pedigree. He was of the house of King David (in spite of the idealised memories of him, he who was not shy of using power to look after himself). But the gospels also tell us that Jesus was nothing like the kind of ruler we have been talking about. He was born in a stable rather than a palace, with no place to lay his head. He was first visited by lowly shepherds rather than princes and palace officials. His throne was a cross, his crown a crown of thorns, and his tomb was borrowed from a stranger.

Christ the King has nothing in common with the average earthly ruler. That means his kingdom will have very little in common with the typical earthly jurisdiction. In the world of Jesus, there is no ruthless ruler at the top of a hierarchy, because all are servants. Even Jesus said that he came to serve and not to be served. Those who aspire to the greatest are those who make themselves the least. The reward for service is not promotion or financial gain, but to be offered more opportunities for service. When his subjects become rich, they are more likely to be demoted, the mighty being cast from their thrones and the lowly raised up. Everything is turned upside down in the Reign of God. Tax collectors and sinners are given a place at the table before the Pharisees and the members of the religious establishment who expected the best seats in the synagogues. This is a very different world.

And this is the kind of kingdom that Jesus says in Good News. It is this kind of world in which we are called to live. Our task is to be partners with God in bringing this kingdom to birth: right here, rooted in this place, in Aotearoa New Zealand. After all, we are the Gospel incarnate in the places we live and work.

But this is not an easy task. If we are serious about living the Christian life, we can find ourselves straddling two worlds. We have to live in the one run by the world so that we can survive, but we are called to live in the one Christ has established. One temptation is to try and merge them together so that they look the same. If we can bring the values of our wider society into the church, that makes life in the church so much more comfortable. And, of course, we can get on with advancing our position in society and give a nod to God in church on Sunday mornings. But deep down, if you are like me, you are aware of the awkward juxtaposition we find ourselves in. There is an awareness that the structures of society that are not the same as those of the Reign of God.

We can see this unfolding in the story of our own country. The founders of our province, the leading members of the Canterbury Association, were Anglican. Many of the people they brought here were doing their best to escape the strictures of a class society in England. They wanted to get away from the lords and squires whose privileged position was based on the accident of birth. The Canterbury Association had an idealistic dream of a new society here, centred on the City of Christchurch. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, one of the founding members of the Canterbury Association, actually spent time in and English prison in the 1830s after deceiving a young girl to marry him. While in prison he came up with his idealistic dream about a new society that would be established here. It would be a society where people would be able to afford to buy land, so he would release small amounts at a time to make it affordable. Farm workers would be able to afford to buy land for themselves. Leaders of the new colony would have time to build schools and roads, and local government. Money from the sale of land would be used to bring more workers and build more services, especially a cathedral. Of course, those who came here would be of sound Christian character and would be under the strong influence of the Anglican Church.

All this sounds like building a slice of heaven here in this land. But the reality of it all turned out to be different. The deal to acquire land from Ngai Tahu under the Kemp’s Deed was a story of injustice. Kemp was only allowed by Governor George Grey to offer £2000 for virtually all their vast tracts of land, and there are suggestions that the agreement about price was reached under the threat of force from the navy. Ngai Tahu were promised important food gathering areas and reserves. But when Walter Mantell mapped the land in 1848, he reduced the size of the reserves and left out important food gathering areas. This was an inauspicious start. Human nature being what it is there were the usual grabs for land and wealth. Even some of the vicars who came here, and some lamented that they weren’t very bright anyway, spent more time acquiring land and farming it, than they did on their pastoral duties. There were problems with alcohol abuse and crime that dogged the new community. The odd recession and shortage of money in general meant plans for schools and churches went on the back burner. It was decades before the Cathedral could be built. Maori lost faith in the missionaries and in English justice and the gains of the early missionaries were lost.

Which brings us back to the essentials of the Reign of God, and the differences between the values of the wider society in which we live, and those of the Gospel. What are these? One is the willingness to repent, to be open to God’s challenge to apologise for the mistakes of the past and put past injustices right. That is what the Anglican Church’s commitment to a bicultural journey is all about. It is a journey of repentance, of learning to listen to the voice of another culture, of learning to share our gifts. It is why we use Maori language in our liturgy, and why we have ordered our constitution to give Maori a strong voice in our structures.

But even more importantly, the Reign of God is about grace, generosity, and forgiveness. That is the point of the parable before us today. Those who feel at home in the Reign of God are the ones who are ready to forgive and be channels of grace. They are people who feed the hungry, who give water to the thirsty, who welcome the outcasts, who clothe the naked and visit the sick, and who liberate those who are imprisoned. May God give us the courage, the gifts, and the grace we need to make this kingdom of God a reality in Aotearoa, New Zealand.

One of the realities of our humanness is that we have an innate instinct to protect our assets. In this community we have learned a great deal about insurance in recent months and what happens to those who don’t have it. We regard it as prudent insure everything that moves; our profits, our lives, our health, our homes and their contents, and our cars, our public liabilities. You name it and someone will insure it, and when the big one comes we keep our fingers crossed that all those premiums will result in swift and generous payouts on our claims.

The parable before us today, however, is a warning against using God as some kind of insurance policy. God is a generous giver of gifts, but God will hold us to account for the way we use them. God needs followers who will be enterprising risk takers. Living the faith, being a faithful community involves taking risks for God. God needs us to put our gifts to maximum use for the good of the kingdom. The parable we have before us today underscores the requirement that we should not bury any gift, any talent, no matter how small it may be. The backdrop to the parable is the parousia, the second coming of Christ, the moment when God turns up for a final inspection to ensure the church has its life in order. Many of us know what it is to live with the uncertainty of such an inspection. Imagine a new CEO is appointed at work, coming around to your department asking your team to justify its existence. Likewise, our parliamentarians are going through similar examination and scrutiny as the electorate weighs up the legacy of their local representatives in parliament. The scriptures remind us that God can and will call us to account at any time, unannounced, like a thief in the night. And when God does, God will be looking to see how we have developed and used our gifts for the extension of the kingdom. The question for us is this, “How will we be placed when that day comes?” The next parable in Matthew’s gospel will put the point even more sharply: how well have we fed the hungry, given water to the thirsty, clothed the naked, cared for the sick and the stranger, and visited those in prison? If we have done nothing on those fronts, we might well be classed with the person in today’s parable who buried his God given gifts in the ground leaving them unused.

The parable today is long and complex. The master, who is God of course, departs and entrusts his property to others. The master, having shrewdly weighed up the ability of each servant, generously gives to them his wealth according to their ability and then goes away. The five talent person immediately trades and makes five more; the two talent servant also doubles his talents. In the mean time the one talent servant buries his in the ground. Then we are told that after a long time, the master returns. By now we are coming aware of the real issue behind this story, “How well have these servants been faithful and trustworthy in their management of the talents?” And that is the question before us; are we being trustworthy with the gifts God has given us? Are we using wisely the gifts God has given or are we leaving them lying around unattended?

Well, as we know, the first two servants are treated well by the master, and both receive the same accolade, “Well done, good and faithful slave; you have been faithful over little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master.” It’s the harsh treatment of the slave with the one talent that shocks our sensibilities with all that weeping and gnashing of teeth and subsequent finger pointing. When the servant is summoned to give account he says that he knew the master to be hard and so he was afraid. The master never accepts he is hard but all the same he calls the slave “wicked and slothful” and casts him out into eternal darkness. This is harsh is it not? Unlike other slaves in Jesus’ parables, this slave has not beaten anyone up or put them in prison; he hasn’t frittered the talent away either. In fact, he returns it intact.

So how can we understand this harsh treatment? The best approach to understanding the harshness of the master is to look more closely at the slave. The defect of the slave in this parable is that he is crippled because he misunderstands God. The slave calls the master “hard” and he is “afraid.” He is stuck with the view that God is obsessed with justice rather than grace, and the slave is afraid. In fact, the master was anything but hard. He entrusted one talent to the slave. That’s 15 years of wages (say $700,000 to the average earner in NZ.). Not only has the slave got it wrong about God, he is filled with fear. It was timidity; a fear of failing by a person with a limited understanding of God that caused the downfall. All through Matthew’s gospel, it is those who are afraid, who are paralysed by anxiety, doubt, and lack of trust who are condemned by Jesus. The same thing is happening here in this parable.

The reality is that God is bigger and more generous than our minds can cope with. God gives gifts boundlessly and with great generosity. Our task is to receive our gifts as God given, not because we have earned them or because we deserve them, but because God is generous and simply gives gifts to us out of love and grace. All we have to do is be thankful and use them responsibly. Often the only think stopping us from using them is fear and timidity; fear of our own failure, fear that God might in fact be an ogre that we need to please through avoidance of wrongdoing.

This parable reminds us not to fall into this particular trap. God is infinitely generous and gracious. God wants us to seize life by the throat and live it to the full. God wants us to be bold risk takers for the kingdom and God will meet those risk takers with bigger rewards. Secondly, God makes us gifted people and we must always see ourselves as loaded with God given talents. But these gifts are not our private possession to be used for ourselves, but gifts of grace given by God according to our ability to be shared for the sake of Christ and his Church and for the building up of the body. What matters is how we use them. God needs you and me to use to the full the gifts he has graciously given us so that they bear fruit. Just as God gave us Jesus, who assumed human flesh, and placed him in our hands allowing us to nail him to a tree, so that Spirit continues to place himself in our hands. We can allow that Spirit to transform our lives and participate in bringing the kingdom of God to birth. Or we can allow fear and timidity to get in the way. God needs us to set about using our gifts diligently. Each of us needs to be responsible with our individual gifts; as a parish we need to take corporate responsibility for the gifts we hold together. It may be that we have an ability to work for justice; or to care for those in need; or to offer a simple word of kindness where it is needed. Whatever it is, our world is so deeply embedded in the love of God that one seed planted will flourish to God’s glory. And when the master returns suddenly, God’s “well done” is our compensation for hours of tireless working for the kingdom.