Wednesday 28 December 2016

A modern madonna

This picture by Parker Fitzgerald depicts Jesus and Mary, and is designed to unsettle. Unusually, Mary is the very young girl tradition suggests, rather than the 30-something we expect from the usual iconographies. Furthermore, both Mary and Jesus are drawn to look contemporary, although the border, background and the dragon design on her robe are Celtic and otherworldly. Maybe the artist intends us to see a New Age Mary, liberating her from the bonds of traditional piety. the unkempt and rather desperate gaze suggests the role of refugee she briefly lived when Jesus was a toddler. 
     It's always good to see a well-known scene through different eyes. We may not agree with  everything it seeks to say (we may not understand either). Then again, perhaps we see in part and agree in part. But refusing to see a scene through anything but the same eyes we always use ultimately becomes tantamount to employing a filter --- itself suggesting a built-in prejudice.
     Seeing this Mary should help us see Mary in other women, and see Jesus in other babies. After all, as the hymn says, "Be born in us today".

Thursday 22 December 2016

Glory, glory --- halleluia!



I wonder if you’ve noticed how the stories of Christmas in the Bible are gift wrapped in light? On an obvious level, we light candles everywhere and put coloured lights on our tree. Christmas cards show pictures of stars and cribs in soft-focus.
     But if you think about it, the Christmas story itself is itself bathed in light. The wise men follow a star. The shepherds see the heavenly host as the sky erupts with light in a field to one side of tiny Bethlehem. What’s going on?
Image result for glory of God     At the very beginning of the Bible, the ancient Book of Genesis starts this way: 'In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void and darkness [...] And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.’ The light that God formed when kick-starting creation can’t have been the sun, moon, or stars because God made them during his fourth instal­ment of creation. No one could have made that mistake at the time of Jesus, for everyone knew that when the Bible says, ‘Let there be light’ it was referring to God finding a way to demonstrate his own glory. The light is the glory of God, and every time the glory of God appears in the Bible, God makes it visible as manifested by light. Indeed, light in the Bible is always a visual metaphor for the glory of God.
     Seen that way, we see the Glory of God everywhere in the Bible. When Moses first encounters God in the desert, he sees a bush that burns without being consumed. It’s not a flame but a visual manifestation of God and his glory. When Moses leads the Israelites across the desert from slavery to freedom, they follow a pillar of light — they are literally following the glory of God. When Jesus shows his divinity in the event we call the Transfiguration, he shines with light as bright as a car headlamp. That he radiates the Glory of God in this way means that he is God.
     So we shouldn’t be surprised therefore (when we look through this lens) that we see the glory of God in all the stories that surround the birth of Jesus. The Wise men follow a light in the sky, a star. Both the shepherds and the Wise Men only recognise Jesus from a light hanging overhead. The story of the shepherds in the fields seeing a light in the sky is quite explicit. Listen to this: “An angel of the Lord stood before the shepherds and the glory of the Lord shone around them.” The next bit is even more explicit: “Suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest heaven!” And in the original language in which the Bible was written, the angels actually say, ‘The Glory of God that is of the highest heaven!’
     The reason for wrapping the story of Christmas with glory is obvious. It’s this: the reason for God coming to earth is because God wants us to share his Glory. He wants us to move on from being the people we currently are — sinful and unaware of his loving purposes — to become Christ-like.
     But how? Human beings have a problem. All of us are made to follow God, and yet we don’t. We need God but don’t even know where to look. We can’t follow him because we don’t know how to reach him, how to understand him, how to listen to him. We don’t even know what a person living a God-filled life looks like.
     How do we know the God we need? It’s an age-old problem: as it says in this evening’s second reading, ‘Long ago, God spoke to our an­ces­tors in many and various ways by the prophets’. In other words, God’s first attempt involved speaking through human intermediaries — the prophets. It clearly didn’t work, so God changed tack. To continue from our second Bible reading 2, ‘In these last days [and these words were written at the same time as Jesus] God has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he created the worlds. [wait for it] 3He is the reflec­tion of God’s glory’. In other words, the central idea behind Christmas is that God was born into human history as a human being — baby Jesus. As I read from John’s Gospel a moment ago, ‘The word became flesh’, which is simply Bible-code for saying, ‘God who is a Spirit and therefore invisible decided to became a human being’. Or, to put it yet another way, when we see Jesus we see God.
     Jesus’ task was making God known. He did so by first ensuring our total forgiveness through the Cross. Removing our sins breaks the barrier between us and God, and we then access Him. In a sense, it’s the spiritual equivalent of being plugged directly into the mains. Indeed, in proportion to our accepting the forgiveness which comes from God, which incidentally means forgiving others, we are enabled to live the spiritual life that is everyone’s birth-right. That spiritual life is the life we were born to live. We can have a life lived in the beauty of a relationship with God. And as we live in God, so God lives in us, and the Glory of God rubs off. We receive his Glory into our lives. And we live. I’m reminded of a saying from one of the earliest of the Christian Saints, Saint Irenaeus: ‘The glory of a God is a person fully alive.’
     I wonder if you’ve noticed how the stories of Christmas in the Bible are gift wrapped in light? That light is intended to point toward the glory of God. That glory came to earth as a human baby, born in a manger in Bethlehem two thousand years ago. That same glory can be born in you and in me. The reason why we celebrate Christmas is not because of the past in Bethlehem but also what can happen here today. We can become Christ-like and share the glory of God, becoming fully alive. 

Wednesday 21 December 2016

The name of Jesus sounds so tweet

The whole point of Twitter is to say something using no more than 140 characters. It's hard. What can be said?
   When Jesus was asked to summarise the Law, he said, "The first commandment is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is the only Lord.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength'," but it's 79 characters too long and therefore will not do. I cannot tweet the Good News with this form of words.
Image result for the bible    We might next turn to perhaps the most famous Bible verse of all. It's John 3:16, "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son Jesus Christ to save us from our sins, to be our advocate in heaven, and to bring us to eternal life", but even this is 11 characters too long. Again, I can't tweet this message in full.
    This Christmas, I'm turning to a verse from John's Prologue. John 1:14 says, "The word became flesh and dwelt among us". This is perfect because it says everything. And it's only 100 characters in length. It summarises everything that needs to be said about Christmas. And, furthermore, it says everything about the loving purposes of God.

The collective nouns of school nativity plays

I was leading a nativity service at the Church. The atmosphere was noisy in a pleasant, expectant sort of way. All the while, children ran past me in costume --- here a shepherd, there a king or three. And then it happened: I saw a young child dressed as an angel. She was young (maybe five years of age?), and she flounced.
Image result for knitted nativity scene    I like collective nouns, and find myself looking for new ones. Some are obvious: it's a herd of cattle, a swarm of bees, a school of dolphins. Some are well-known but strange, such as an unkindness of ravens. I find some to be bizarre: what's the collective noun of hermits? Surely, there cannot be a collective of hermits precisely because they are hermits!? (In fact it's a conference of hermits, because the men we know today as the Desert Fathers lived in isolation in the wastes of the Syrian desert, but came together for the Eucharist each Sunday. They conferred. And in much the same way, delegates come together to confer at conferences today.)
   So I'm inventing a set of new collective nouns: it's a flounce of children dressed as angels. Let's go further. It's a pomposity of children dressed as Wise Men. A shambles of Inn Keepers. A desperation of Infant-School teachers. An exhaustion of pre-Christmas clergy. It's a cloying of proud grandparents. A chaos of shepherd costumes. But it's still a peacefulness of china-clay Christ-child babies.

Tuesday 13 December 2016

The naming of Christ



Jesus’s naming has great significance. In Jewish thought, the name given to a child was prophetic. In other words, parents chose their child’s name in order to point the child’s soul in a chosen direction. We see something similar in some African cultures today.

        
Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything.
People kill one another over idols.
Wonder makes us fall to our knees.

St Gregory of Nyssa
Image result for the naming of ChristThat’s why the Jews took such care when choosing a baby’s name. Indeed, they believed that giving an inappropriate name could cause a child to deviate from God’s path. And that’s why John the Baptist’s family seemed to panic when his mother Elizabeth choose the name of John. (From within this context the curious story in Luke 1:59–64 makes sense: John’s father Zechariah only regains his ability to speak when he finally listens to God. His words coincide with God’s words: he becomes a prophet in order that his son might also become a prophet.)
    ‘Jesus’ is the Greek translation of a Hebrew name ‘Joshua’, which literally means ‘The Lord saves’. The original Joshua gave his name to the sixth book of the Old Testament. This book describes the chosen people following Joshua into the Promised Land to accommodate an explicit promise from God.
    That Jesus had the same name as the first Joshua is significant: by following the new Joshua (Jesus), a new tribe of chosen people — us — can enter safety in a new land. The Lord lets us enter this new and spiritual life, which is how we are saved.
    Within this prophetic mindset, our salvation is wrapped up in the name of Jesus. That’s why as Christians we conclude our prayer with the words, “… in Jesus’ name”.


Pray in the spirit



Pray … as you can

Image result for prayerI find it easier to communicate when I face the person to whom I’m talking. That way, I can direct my voice toward them and observe the expressions on their face as we speak. I can also see to what extent my message is understood and if I need to say more or stop and listen.
    In the same way, it’s a good idea to look toward God when we pray. The Scriptures say that God is a Spirit, so we need a form of prayer that is spirit-led. During times of prayer, we direct our prayers toward God rather than into some vague space we might call ‘Heaven’. That’s why St Paul tells his disciples to ‘Pray in the Spirit’.
    When first learning how to pray in this way, it can be useful to consciously think of God or a picture of something that (for us) helps to represent God. We then direct our prayers to that image.
    This practice will probably feel artificial at first. Nevertheless, when this sort of praying seems a little less self-conscious, it generally helps if we next ask God to suggest a better image or picture. We hone the picture because our image of God is too small or immature. He will improve it make it more realistic.
    God is a spirit so the best images of God are not so much pictorial as representing God. For that reason, it’s not uncommon for God to gently lead us beyond images and introduce us to concepts. For example, he may ask us to use a single word such as ‘God’, ‘love’ or ‘spirit’.
    And do not be surprised when God asks you to dispense with images altogether. We still direct our prayers to God, but the sheer inadequacy of a pictorial approach actually gets in the way of praying.

When we intend to pray for goodness, let all our thought and
desire be contained in the one small word ‘God’. Nothing else and no other words are needed, for God is the epitome of all goodness. Immerse yourself in the spiritual reality it speaks
of yet without precise ideas of God’s works whether small
or great, spiritual or material.
The Cloud of Unknowing