A light shines in the darkness

A reflection on John 1: 1-5, 10-18, Jeremiah 31: 7-14 and Ephesians 1: 3-14, preached Sunday, 4 January 2009

I’ve been rereading some of my recent sermons. “Why on earth would he do that?” you’re thinking. Well, I wanted to check just what it is I’ve been saying to you in the last few weeks. We had four weeks of Advent – the Sundays of Hope, Peace, Joy and Love – and then Christmas Day and last Sunday, the first Sunday of the Christmas season. All of those opportunities for excitement and rejoicing in anticipation of the coming Good News. But after revisiting those sermons, I’m starting to think I may be a miserable sort of person.

It’s been good news and bad news, with plenty of opportunity to think about the bad news: there’s been wandering in the wilderness and AIDS and war and poverty and injustice and loneliness and sadness, and a church in decline in Australia, and even on Christmas Day I managed to talk about the Millennium Goals and the millions of people dying unnecessarily each year, deaths which we have the resources and the ability to prevent.

Cheerful soul, aren’t I? It seems I’m not so much a glass half-empty person, as a “someone took my glass and drank it, and even when I did have a glass, it wasn’t as big as everyone else’s” kind of person.

In my defence, however, I want to say that from the very beginning I have been putting the bad news together with the good. My starting point was to suggest that good news only makes sense in the presence of those things which are not good news. I’m not talking about bad news because there is nothing else. I’m talking about bad news and the Good News which breaks into that and transforms it, removes it, converts it.

There is a light which shines in the darkness.

In the beginning, all was darkness, and God said, “Let there be light”! John tells us the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.

There is bad news, but the Good News is greater.

By way of illustration, my sermon on this Sunday six years ago (yes, I even read sermons from other times and places) my sermon was all about Australia’s refugee detention centres, and it was about the prevailing attitude in some circles which seemed to suggest that refugees somehow brought their bad news upon themselves. Six years later, detention centres are no longer headline news in our country. Somehow, good news has replaced the bad; a light has come into that particular darkness.

Of course, that is not to suggest that we no longer have refugees in our country or that we no longer have detention centres, or that there is not still much work to do. Terrible damage has been done to an unconscionable number of people, some of which will never be healed. But there has been and continues to be a move towards the light of reason and compassion. A light shines in the darkness.

And those who believe in the light have been a major part of the change which has taken place. Christians have proclaimed the necessity of good news for those living in darkness.

It’s not often that I use three readings from Scripture on a Sunday morning. In part, it’s a time thing; it’s also a “how on earth can these readings go together?” kind of thing.

But this morning we have heard from Jeremiah and Paul and John, and all three of them are about how good news overcomes bad, about God’s great desire for hope, peace, joy and love in our world, in this time and in this place.

Jeremiah proclaims, “Sing! Exile will not last forever.”

Paul says, “Rejoice and give thanks. There is forgiveness for sin, and adoption for orphans.”

And John pronounces, “There is grace upon grace.”

Grace – that extraordinary love which imposes no conditions, no limits, no exceptions. In the face of all that would deny it, there is grace.

So, what will 2009 be like for us?

For the world at large, I’m imagining that it will be more of the same: more economic crises, more job losses, more natural disasters, more unnecessary sickness and death, more ills for the health of the planet; but there will also be more acts of random kindness, more cures developed, more children raised in healthy families, more expressions of love and compassion, more efforts to heal our fragile earth, more good news even as there is more bad news.

And for the church? What lies ahead in 2009? I’m imagining that Christianity will also experience both good and bad news. It’s likely that, in the developed nations, people will continue to turn away from traditional expressions of the faith in search of a different spirituality which they feel speaks more directly into their lives; and it’s likely that in many other parts of the world – Asia, South America, Africa – that Christianity will continue to grow as more and more people see how the Good News of Jesus Christ is extraordinarily applicable to their everyday lives.

And for us? The fact remains that we live with the former reality rather than the latter. That is the bald bad news. But the Good News is that there is a light which shines in the darkness. And the darker things appear, the more clearly the light shines.

The spirituality which people in our culture so desperately seek at this time is still the spirituality of grace, of love, of compassion, of relationship, of all those things which lie at the heart of our faith, that have always lain at the heart of Christianity, and will always remain at the heart of Christianity. The Good News is still good!

One extraordinary part of the grace of God is that we are invited, indeed commanded, to work with God in bringing Good News. We need to remember that it is God who is at work – each of our readings makes that abundantly clear; Paul says, “With all wisdom and insight God has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to God’s good pleasure” – it is God who is at work and we are asked to join in with whatever it is that God is doing.

What will God do with us in this place in 2009? I don’t know. But I do know that, whatever it is, whatever it looks and sounds and feels like, it will be Good News.

The celebration of the meal we share each Sunday morning reminds us that the central metaphor of our faith is that of death and resurrection. We believe that God brings new life out of death. And we are called to hear and to speak words of hope, new life, new possibilities in a future with God.

Jeremiah, Paul and John tell us that God breaks into the world, for all those who are in need, in need of love and in need of hope. We are called to live hope-filled lives, proclaiming that God is with us, and praising God for God’s blessings.

A light shines in the darkness! Amen.

It's a miracle

A reflection for Christmas Day 2008

It’s a miracle! It is, isn’t it? That helpless infant lying in the manger is God come to earth, God born as one of us, Love made flesh. The tiny squalling child, entirely dependent upon his mother, is the Creator of all things, the Alpha and the Omega, the Lord of all, yet somehow one of us, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone?

 

It’s a miracle, but I’m not quite sure what to do with it.

 

I read somewhere that miracles are never answers to our questions; they are, at best, questions. Miracles are questions that set us seeking answers, in much the same way that the miraculous star sends the magi, the wise ones, far off into foreign lands in search of an answer. What does this mean? We must search for an answer.

 

The birth of the Christ child is a question: a “ Why?”; a “What is the point?”, a “What is the purpose?” inbreaking of the Divine into our human existence. And seeking the answer is our life work.

 

A week or so ago, I stumbled quite by chance upon a movie on TV. It was called “The girl in the café”. And I found the movie to be a kind of miracle; it was a question popped unsuspectingly into my life when I least expected it. (And isn’t that also one of the main criteria for miracles? We don’t expect them.)

 

The movie’s premise is quite an intriguing one: an aging career civil servant falls for a young girl he meets in a café. And he then takes her with him on his next trip, which just happens to be advising the British Chancellor of the Exchequer at the 2005 G8 Summit.

 

I don’t know how good your memories are, but the 2005 G8 Summit had on its agenda the Millennium Goals, the bold declaration made at the turn of the century to Make Poverty History. Now, the young woman turns out to be a bit of a problem for the civil servant because she keeps asking questions and she won’t stop asking questions, even when she’s in the presence of the Chancellor or the Prime Minister or even the heads of the other nations at the summit.

 

She asks, Why do 30,000 children die every day from preventable diseases?

 

Why are the major powers of this world spending obscene amounts of money each day on armaments and warfare when children are dying?

 

Why isn’t anyone doing anything when, for the first time in human history, we actually have the resources to halt poverty, to eradicate diseases like AIDS and cholera, and to provide education for all?

 

She even interrupts the Prime Minister’s speech at a special dinner, and this is what she says:

I don't know how much the rest of you … know about what's going on but my friend … tells me that while we are eating a hundred million children are nearly starving. There's just millions of kids who'd kill for the amount of food that fat old me left on the side of my plate, children who are then so weak they'll die if a mosquito bites them. And so they do die. One every three seconds.

[snaps fingers]

There they go.

[pauses, snap fingers again]

And another one. Anyone who has kids knows that every mother and father in Africa must love their children as much as they do, and to watch your kids die, to watch them die and then to die yourself in trying to protect them, that's not right. And tomorrow eight of the men sitting 'round this table actually have the ability to sort this out by making a few great decisions. And if they don't, some day someone else will. And they'll look back on us lot and say - people were actually dying in their millions unnecessarily, in front of you, on your TV screens. What were you thinking? You knew what to do to stop it happening and you didn't do those things. Shame on you. So that's what you have to do tomorrow. Be great instead of being ashamed. It can't be impossible. It must be possible.

 

The girl from the café keeps asking, “Why?”

 

“The girl from the café” is a miracle movie because it asks us questions just when we least expect it.

 

And the birth of the Christ child is a miracle for the same sort of reasons.

 

Why? Why does God bother entering into human existence? Why does the Almighty put on human flesh, identify with us? What is the purpose? What is the point?

 

And we cannot celebrate Christmas, truly celebrate Christ-mas, unless we are looking for answers, unless we are searching the Scriptures trying to work out why we have to have an incarnate God, why we have to have a baby for a Saviour, why can’t things just go along as they always have gone along without God having to get in the middle of it all. Why?

 

It’s a miracle all right – but it isn’t comfortable; it isn’t just a sweet story of a young mum and a beautiful infant and angels and wise men – always three, always men – and simple shepherds with woolly lambs.

 

It’s a miracle! The helpless infant lying in the manger: God come to earth, God born as one of us, Love made flesh, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone.

 

It’s a miracle and it’s a question. It’s any number of questions.

 

How about, What does God coming mean for those millions of children who are hungry today? How about, Why do we need more presents when some folk don’t even have a roof over their heads? How about, If God thought the world was a good enough place to be, then why are we destroying it with our green house gases and our fossil fuels and our carbon emissions?

 

In just a moment we’re going to sing again. “Infant holy” is, I think, one of the sweetest and most poignant of the carols, but I wonder how we’re meant to respond to the last line. “Christ the babe was born for you.”

 

If Christ was born for me, then surely Christ was born for each one of those children the girl in the café was talking about too.

 

Christ the babe was born for you. (Click *)

 

Christ the babe was born for you. (Click *)

 

May this be a blessed Christmas for you all: one full of little miracles in the shape of questions, and full of searching. And may we be great in 2009. Amen.

"Peace" and its meanings

A reflection on Isaiah 40:1-6 and Mark 1:1-8

According to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, “peace” can mean one of three things:

1. Freedom from disturbance, or
2. Freedom from or the ending of war, or
3. Within the Christian Church, the peace is an action such as a handshake, signifying unity, performed during the Eucharist

 

The dictionary also tells me that “peace” is used in a number of common English phrases such as “at peace”, or “hold one’s peace”, or “keep the peace”, or “make one’s peace”.

 

Because this is the second Sunday in Advent, I would like to take a moment or two to consider some of these meanings and uses of the word “Peace”.

 

For a start, I’m not entirely happy with the notion that “peace” simply means freedom from disturbance. I’m quite sure that there are lots of people whose lives are basically free from disturbance but I’m not equally sure that their lives are truly peaceful: a prisoner in solitary confinement has a bed and three meals a day, but is hardly likely to describe their circumstances as peaceful. A patient in a coma in Intensive Care is free from disturbance but their family is not going to say that that is a peaceful situation.

 

Similarly, I’m not convinced by the definition of peace as an absence of war, any more than I would want to define war as simply the absence of peace. Yes, I recognise that the ending of hostilities between warring parties is a great and good thing: the end to death and destruction is to be hoped for and hungered for and celebrated when it arrives, but I would want peace to be something more than just an absence of war.

 

My problem with both these definitions is that they suggest peace is not something rather than is something: they tell us that peace is not disturbance and war, but they don’t tell us what it is.

 

Where we find the word “peace” in our bibles, it is most often the word used to translate the Jewish term “shalom”. But there is a difference between “peace” and “shalom”. Shalom is a positive word, a word to describe positive attributes, things to be sought after, rather simply the absence of something.

 

The Encyclopedia of Jewish concepts tells us that:

"The Hebrew word shalom has a wider meaning than the English equivalent peace, for it signifies welfare of every kind: security, contentment, sound health, prosperity, friendship, peace of mind and heart..."

 Encyclopedia of Jewish Concepts 
by Philip Birnbaum

 

When we celebrate the Sunday of Peace, surely these are the things we wish to celebrate: security, contentment, sound health, prosperity, friendship, peace of mind and heart. These mean so much more than merely an absence of disturbance or freedom from conflict.

 

Last week, I spoke about hope in the context of good news and bad news. Hope is what we hold to when our circumstances are bad news circumstances. The family gathered around the bed in Intensive Care needs hope; they reach out to the possibility of good news. In any number of circumstances, in the midst of bad news people hope for good news.

 

And peace is a good news thing. Security is good news – when all around us the world is in financial turmoil, security is to be hoped for. Sound health is a good news thing as well – the family gathered around the sick bed will attest to that. Friendship is very good news – someone to depend on, to offer counsel and support, to share the journey through the valley of shadow: friendship is surely good news.

 

Where is John the Baptiser in this morning’s reading? In the wilderness. Where is the way of the Lord to be prepared? In the wilderness.

 

As Australians, we tend to think of the wilderness as a bad news place – without water, surrounded by dangerous creatures, without knowledge of where we are or how to get out of the wilderness, it seems like bad news.

 

But I wonder how we would feel if the story of who we are took place in the wilderness; if our identity had been shaped by a forty year journey from captivity to a Promised Land? Perhaps then the wilderness would be the place of hope. Perhaps then we would see the possibility of good news springing forth from the journey.

 

It is into the wilderness of our lives and the wilderness of our world that Jesus comes. He comes to bring good news; he comes to bring peace: security, contentment, sound health, prosperity, friendship, peace of mind and heart…

 

Not that we will necessarily recognise these things because the world has been blinded by false definitions; the hopes of the world have been dulled to the point that we have come to believe that peace is nothing more than an absence of disturbance. Our culture has been deluded into thinking that prosperity means money in the bank, and contentment means shopping trips with credit cards.

 

In short we have settled for less than mountains leveled; highways smoothed; valleys filled. We haven’t dared to hope for a wilderness transformed with roadways straightened; ruts plugged. It has been beyond us to ask for rocks to be rolled from the doors to new life.

 

But it is into this disillusioned world that the Messiah comes, bringing hope and bringing peace.

 

I want to leave you with one last reference to “peace” in the dictionary – the phrase “to make one’s peace”. The dictionary tells me that this means “to be reconciled with another.” Jesus is the peace bringer, who hungers for us to be reconciled with God, with one another, and with ourselves.

 

And that is why we greet one another with words of peace in church: as a foretaste of that reconciliation, as sign of our unity, as a symbol of shalom.

 

Peace be with you. Amen.

Watch, wait, be ready

A reflection on Isaiah 64:1-9 and Mark 13:33-37

A patient wakes up following an operation to find the doctor standing beside him. He’s not feeling at all well, but he manages to ask, "Doctor, how did it go?"
"I have good news and bad news", says the doctor.
"Give me the good news. I feel terrible and I need cheering up"
"The good news is that we managed to save your kidneys."
"That’s terrific. What's the bad news?"
"The bad news is I have them here in this jar."

 

My suspicion is that, if we are offered a choice between good news and bad news, we will want the good news. And not the good news first, but only good news. Being rational human beings we avoid the bad news if we possibly can.

 

I think that’s one of the reasons we like Christmas: it’s a good news time. A story about a little baby born in a stable – that’s a good news story. A story about a fat man dressed in red bringing presents to all the girls and boys – that’s a good news story. The whole idea of Christmas parties, gatherings of families and friends, gift giving and receiving, it’s all such a good news thing, isn’t it?

 

But our Bible readings this morning don’t seem very good news at all; they seem far more bad news. I mean, just listen to some of these verses from the first reading. God’s chosen people are speaking to God and they say:

   There is no one who calls on your name,

    or attempts to take hold of you;

    for you have hidden your face from us,

    and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.

(Now that’s bad news.)

 

    We all fade like a leaf,

    and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

(And that’s bad news too.)

 

   You meet those who gladly do right,

    those who remember you in your ways.

(Good news!)

 

    But you were angry, and we sinned;

    because you hid yourself we transgressed.

(Bad news.)

 

The reading from the gospel of Mark, the words of Jesus himself, aren’t terribly positive sounding either:

Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come… you do not know when the master of the house will come [and] he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. 

 

Sleeping when the boss returns? Bad news!

 

So what is this all about? This time of the church’s year is set aside to prepare for Christmas. So why the focus on bad news rather than getting excited about the good news that is to come? Surely we can prepare for the good news of Christ’s coming into the world without having to think about anything too depressing.

 

Or can we?

 

Perhaps, we need to face the bad news in order to recognise our need for good news. Perhaps, we have become so accustomed to good news – comfortable lives, security, good health, good times – that we don’t even recognise that there is something missing, some need in us that is not being met because we are anaesthetised by too much good news.

 

And the Bible is really excellent at this: pointing to what is real in this world to remind us that we need something from beyond this world. The Bible is a consistent reminder that the world in which we live is not just a good news world. There are countless biblical references to what is wrong, and each of those references is meant to point us towards what is needed to make what is wrong right.

 

Instead of living in a fantasy world, where everything is jingle bells and Christmas stockings and plates heaped with turkey and ham and enough food to provoke the most profound indigestion, instead of a fantasy world where everything is all right, we are asked to recognise a greater truth: all is not well, and Christ comes into the real world in order to do something about it.

 

Did you know that tomorrow, the first day of December, is the fiftieth anniversary of the day Rosa Parkes got on a bus? “Who is Rosa Parkes?” you ask. On December 1, 1955, a black woman got on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in the United States. She was required to go to the back of the bus because the front was for whites only. This is the U.S. just fifty years ago. But Rosa Parkes was tired and weary from a long day of hard work, and she sat herself at the front of the bus and refused to move. Her small act of defiance is seen by many as the initiating event for the movement for civil rights in America; the whole Martin Luther King revolution which has made it possible for a black man to move into the White House began with a tired and weary woman who refused to change her seat.

 

We are watching and waiting for Christmas, but are we ready to allow our dissatisfaction with the way things are to bring Christ into the world?

 

Another thing about the first of December is that it is World AIDS Day. Do you have any idea how many people in our healthy, rich, well-educated world are going to die between now and Christmas from a disease which could be controlled if not defeated through education and spending some money on making medication available where it is needed most?

 

But, of course, those who suffer from HIV/AIDS aren’t on our TV screens at this time of the year. They aren’t even in our country. So we can choose to ignore HIV/AIDS; this is a problem we don’t have to see unless someone is rude enough to disturb our good news preparations with some bad news.

 

We are watching and waiting for Christmas, but are we ready to do something about bringing real good news into this world?

 

Jesus says,

Beware, keep alert… It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work.

 

There is work for us to do while we watch and wait; there is a readiness we have to adopt. Perhaps this year it is finding a red ribbon to wear tomorrow, the first of December, World AIDS Day, and to keep on wearing right up until Christmas to remind ourselves of the bad news and to remind ourselves that good news is needed and good news is coming.

 

Watch, wait, be ready.

 

Where will we look in the days and weeks to come? Will we look only under the Christmas tree? Will we only wait for Santa Claus? Will we be ready only for good news for ourselves?

 

Or will we look for the lost and the lonely, the despairing and deprived, the suffering and saddened? Will we wait with those whose daily news is bad news? And will we be ready for the good news that comes into our world at Christmas?

 

Watch, wait, be ready.