Two Poems. Christmas 2020

YB Yeats – The Second Coming (1919)

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

Yeats wrote this poem in 1919 as the world lay waste in the wake of the Great War, and as Ireland held its breath to see how the British would respond to its independence movement, and as his wife lay sick in bed, apparently dying in childbirth, having contracted the Spanish flu. The poet expresses his real anxieties about both the future of the world, and about his personal and domestic peace.  What is to become of us, he muses, if the centre cannot hold, if the falcon can no longer hear the falconer’s voice, if every sense of order and meaning that one might have once counted on is no longer there? What if anarchy takes over and the notion of a common good is replaced by the rule of the angry mob or, worse still, the rule of  some kind of monstrous sphinx-like dictator who cares nothing for life or for common decency? Is the monster a man, or is it a virus, some kind of cosmic force? The poet doesn’t know. But he has a deep sense of foreboding and wonders whether an anti-Christ slouches towards Bethlehem to be born in a grotesque mockery of the birth of Christ. 

Greg Weatherby 'Birth of Jesus'

There are equally anxious voices out there in the ether right now, on this very night.  For it has indeed been the worst year many of us are able to remember. The Australian bushfires that raged from late December to mid-January were the most destructive on record, destroying 9 million hectares of forest, farmland, town and residential country in the states of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. In some places, the fires burned so hot that stone structures melted and even the biomatter below the surface of the ground was utterly obliterated. Ecologists are now saying that in such places, nothing will ever be able to grow again. Even where this is not the case, in parts of the forest where regeneration is possible, whole ecosystems – millennia in the making - have been utterly laid waste. It is also estimated that over 1 billion native animals perished in the fires, many of them belonging to species already close to extinction such as koalas and mountain pygmy possums. A large portion of those animals apparently died either because the fires were travelling too fast or because they could not make their way through fences erected by property owners.  The response of government is to continue to bury its head in the sand and go ‘la la la la’ with regard to the now decades of warnings about climate change that have been coming in, across the airwaves, from scientists and Indigenous peoples alike.  2020 has been the warmest on record, and next year will be warmer, so get used to the Australia you know going up in flames or being washed away by floods and gale-force winds.

And then there’s the pandemic. Not the Spanish flu this time, but Covid-19. To date Covid-19 has killed 1.8 million people and sent the global economy into its worst recession since the early 1930s. The disease has been cruel in the choices it forces upon both governments and individuals. Some have continued to work, to keep their businesses open, to meet with friends and family in the same way as we’ve always done.  The cost of this choice is very often contracting the disease and passing it on; many who chose this path have died.  The other choice is not so good either, really. To stay at home, to cease working in the social way we have been used to, to stop meeting up with friends and family in order to slow the progress of the disease through the community. But, for many, embracing this second set of options – often in the name of caring for others – has unleashed unprecedented levels of loneliness, isolation and, for some, a life and death struggle with that equally merciless killer, depression.  To avoid one kind of pandemic, it seems, many of us have had to throw ourselves into the path of another.

Climate change. Pandemics of body and mind. We could go on to consider the impact of these things on the refugee crisis, the plight of Indigenous peoples, international students, casual workers and so on. We could talk about Trump and Sco-Mo and Boris, we could talk about populism as a symptom of anxiety. But I will refrain.  You get the point. There’s a lot of anxiety out there, and the anxiety is not a response to things that aren’t actually there. There are very good reasons to feel anxious.  There are good reasons to believe that the centre can no longer hold, that the order of things we have come to take for granted is about to go belly-up.  Very good reasons.

I want to point out, however, that when Yeats wrote his poem in 1919 he conveniently forgot a few things. He forgot that the British has been brutalising and starving the Irish for several centuries already, and that the prospect of a new crackdown on the independence movement was therefore hardly unexpected.  He also forgot that the Great War was not the first conflict to have devasted Europe. It was simply the latest in a continuous series of conflicts that had already killed or maimed millions and destroyed economies utterly. Hardly new. He also conveniently forgot that the Spanish flu was not Europe’s first pandemic. There had been plagues and 'black' deaths for centuries.  Again, hardly unprecedented.  All of which is to say that whilst Yeats brilliantly captures the anxiety he felt in 1919, his poem can hardly be taken as a witness to something entirely new or unforeseen in the story of humanity. 

Quite simply, there has never been a ‘centre’, some kind of cosmic or moral order, that is suddenly falling into rack and ruin. Rack and ruin has been the name of the game from the beginning. There has always been war, there have always been bully-boy politicians, there has always been poverty. There has always been illness and death. At the time when Jesus was born, for example, the Jews had been ruled by foreign powers for three centuries already.  They knew well that everything had gone to pot. The life-expectancy of your average landless male peasant was around 30 years, and just 40 years if you happened to have a trade, such as carpentry. Most of the Jewish population now expected that life would be short, and it would be brutal. You were born, you worked yourself to the bone to keep your family from starving, and then you died very young, and usually left a widow but hopefully some sons and daughters who could take over the family business and do it all again.  To a family like that, just like that, Jesus was born.

It’s easy to give into despair. Very easy. Most days, especially in the lead-up to Christmas, I am sorely tempted to go there. Afterall, my own people were colonised by the British and felt the savagery of the moral 'order’, the ‘centre’ they wished to impose. I still carry the trauma of that in my mind and my body. So, too, this stolen ‘country’: our lands, seas and waterways. There are deep wounds in our dreaming-places wherever you turn. But I don’t go there: to despair, I mean. And the reason I don’t is actually very simple.  I believe that in spite of all that is wrong, there is a power in the world for right. That is spite of all that is brutal and cruel, there is a power in the world that is caring, and knows how to offer love and succour to all who are hurting. I believe that in spite of the darkness and ignorance that floods our country and our lives, that there is a power in the world for light and life, and for living with country as kin, as family. That this power is here with us - that it is all around us, that it waits patiently to seep into our minds and hearts at the first indication that we are willing and in need - I can never prove to anyone. Not in the unassailable manner that many expect, anyway. But I can testify to its reality, to its power, and to its essential character: love, kindness, welcome, shelter, hospitality.  I see and feel and know these things every single day.

Rather than rabbit on and on and on about love, and about Jesus as the way in which love shows itself to the world, I want to read another poem: a poem, this time, from a humble parish priest from the Welsh countryside, a place somewhat subaltern to the English seats of power. 

RS Thomas - The Coming

 

And God held in his hand

A small globe.  Look he said.

The son looked.  Far off,

As through water, he saw

A scorched land of fierce

Colour.  The light burned

There; crusted buildings

Cast their shadows: a bright

Serpent, A river

Uncoiled itself, radiant

With slime.

               On a bare

Hill a bare tree saddened

The sky.  many People

Held out their thin arms

To it, as though waiting

For a vanished April

To return to its crossed

Boughs.  The son watched

Them.  Let me go there, he said.

The Son did come here, to live amongst us, to teach us his way of love, and to save us from the worst excesses of our inhumanity and hatred of country. It is that coming, the coming of light and love and kindness and compassion, that we celebrate tonight, and to which we commit ourselves anew for a more hopeful future.

I wish you all a holy and most joyful Christmas.

Garry Deverell

Christmas Eve 2020

The Three 'Christmases'

In contemporary Australian experience there are actually three kinds of 'Christmas' celebration. In this short article I’d like to describe each of them, with a view to distinguishing a genuinely Christian way of doing Christmas.

1. Yuletide

The first kind is arguably the oldest, because it takes its inspiration from the pre-Christian midwinter festivals of the Germanic and Nordic peoples.  This festival, known in its Anglicised form as 'Yuletide', apparently culminated in a three-day celebration encompassing the winter solstice at which much ale was consumed, animal sacrifices were made and the blood of sacrifice sprinkled over representations of the gods as well as over their worshippers. The meat of the sacrificed animals became food for the feast. Toasts were dedicated to Odin, the king of the gods, to Njörðr and Freyr for good harvest, to dead ancestors, and to the chieftain who presided at the feast. Scholars have connected these events to the Wild Hunt led by Odin through the night sky to kill a sacred boar or stag, which signified the taking of life at midwinter which had the power to inaugurate the return of life with the oncoming spring. 

Contemporary neo-pagans are both reviving and creating Yuletide traditions which emphasise the cyclic nature of fertility in the natural world. They point out that many elements of contemporary 'Christmas' celebrations probably have their roots in paganism, including Santa Claus and his reindeer (Odin or Freyr on the Wild Hunt), Elves or other magic folk who give or seek gifts (symbols of the presence of magic or the 'other world' on midwinter's eve), Christmas trees (evergreen to signify the eternal power of life returning from death), mistletoe (the key ingredient in a druidic fertility drink), the roasting of a pig (a vestige of the tradition of fertility sacrifices), and the prolific use of the colours red (signifying sacrificial blood) and white (representing midwinter).

2. Christmastide

At least as old, perhaps, is the Christian festival of Christmastide, which celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ to Mary in Bethlehem as the Son of God and saviour of all the world.  Although never as important as Eastertide in the Christian imagination, there is clear evidence that a festival surrounding Christ's birth was beginning to take shape in the ancient Near East as early as the 3rd century CE.  Contrary to much public opinion, there is no evidence that the early candidates for Christ's birthday (December 25 and January 6) were chosen to coincide with pagan midwinter festivals in either the south or the north of Europe.  More likely is Andrew McGowan's proposal that since ancient Christians believed that Christ was conceived on the same day as his death (roughly March 25) he must therefore have been born on December 25.  

Between the 4th and 12th centuries, celebrations of the Nativity of Christ alternated between December 25 and January 6th. The latter date was celebrated in the Eastern church as the Epiphany (or 'manifestation') of Christ as Son and Messiah of God at his baptism.  Eventually, in the Western rite, Christmastide became a season that spanned the days between the eve of January 25 (when Luke's birth narrative about Angels and shepherds is featured) and the feast of the Epiphany (which, in the Western church, became the day when Matthew's birth narrative about Herod and the Magi from the East was ritualised as the first manifestation of Christ to all non-Jewish people).  Christians have long celebrated the season with joyful liturgies of word, carol and sacrament occurring on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, the Sundays of Christmas and the Feast of the Epiphany (whenever it variously occurs). The one note of sobriety within the season is usually reserved for the Feast of the Holy Innocents (Dec 27 or 28) which commemorates the infanticide visited by Herod on the children of Bethlehem at hearing that a Messiah had been born.  Contemporary churches in the ecumenical tradition often connect this event with the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt, and therefore with the plight of refugees fleeing oppression and persecution in the modern world.

The period now known as 'Advent', beginning from the 4th Sunday before the Feast of the Nativity, probably began with a desire to prepare for Christmas in a way that paralleled the long-established practice of preparing for Easter baptisms with forty days of prayer, fasting, exorcism and theological reflection. In this spirit, the primary theme of Advent eventually became not the 'first' coming of Christ at Bethlehem, but Christian hopes for a 'second' coming of Christ at the end of the ages, when all that is evil and unjust in the world will finally be put to rights.  Advent therefore encourages Christians to consider their experience of hope - the 'not yet' of faithful expectation - and asks them what God would call them to do by way of prayerful self-transformation and common human service as they wait for the grace and justice of God to be revealed in all its surprising fulness. 

The origin of gift-giving at Christmastide is unclear. Some surmise that the practise was taken over from pagan mid-winter festivals when offerings of food were given to the gods or else to vengeful ancestors in order to guarantee their blessing for the year to come.  A more likely origin is strictly theological: gifts are given to the poor and marginalised in imitation of God's gift of Christ to all who are poor, broken or despised by the world. This theology is certainly at play in the story of St Nicholas of Myrna, whose feast day is celebration on December 6.  St Nicholas is said to have distributed alms to the poor and desperate of his diocese anonymously, under the cover of night.  The migration of this tradition to the English-speaking world also seem to have effected a migration of St Nicholas' gift-giving to the Eve of the Nativity, perhaps under the influence of some of the pagan traditions we note above about Odin or Freyr. Certainly, the modern Santa Claus myth created by American advertisers owes more to pagan than Christian sources.

3. Consumertide

Christmas as it is celebrated in contemporary Australia certainly owes more to the re-weaving of traditional devotional practices by capitalism than it does to anything that is more genuinely pagan or Christian.  Capitalism is like a magpie that seeks to feather its own nest by stealing the treasures of others. And 'Christmas' has become the most prominent example of this. A consumer festival that begins in early November and continues through to the early weeks of January, this 'Christmas' evokes traditional religious practices and desires, but transforms and channels them for its own overriding purpose: to produce profits.

The new 'Christmas' temples are neither pagan nor Christian but vast shopping centres like that at Chadstone in Victoria.  If you visit these temples you are strongly encouraged to participate in the worship of Capital.  The sound-systems spew forth sentimental 'carols' that evoke traditional religious feeling, but redirect that feeling toward buying.  Carefully prepared 'Christmas' pantomimes are filled with elves, fairies and Father Christmases who have the power to grant one's every wish. Instead of encouraging worshippers to surrender themselves or their livelihoods to Christ or to those most beloved of Christ (the poor and marginalised) like St Nichlas of Myrna, the rituals associated with Santa Claus encourage consumers to buy gifts solely because either they or their loved-ones desire them. For Christmas is now almost exclusively about 'family' - the pilgrimage to far-flung family, spending time with family, spending money on family, feeding one’s family - and all to the most hideous levels of excess.  Obscenely, to my mind, the multi-billion-dollar industry that provides Christmas wrappings, tree ornaments and decorations, is run almost entirely off the back of cheap- child- or slave-labour in vast manufacturing compounds found in China, India, Mexico and Bangladesh.  

The consumertide which is the modern Australian 'Christmas' allows no room for those spiritual disciplines associated with Advent, disciplines like prayer, waiting, and fasting - all of which are about NOT getting or having what you most desire. Indeed, what these disciplines traditionally inspired and encouraged was the transformation of human desire into the more holy desire of God, thereby bringing light, love and hope to those in most need of such things. Consequently, Advent as Advent has been completely obliterated.  Advent has become simply another part of the consumertide that is 'Christmas', a season of feasting, buying, gift-giving, and sentimental storytelling about the importance of enriching one’s own family. It is no longer about a disciplined waiting for the grace of God made known in Jesus. And this is increasingly the case not only in the many 'evangelical' protestant churches that have most always followed the deepest impulses of secularism, but also in the ecumenical churches that are supposedly committed to the disciplines preserved in the observance of the liturgical year. Even in these churches, Christmas very often arrives in the first or second weeks of Advent, with parties and carol-singing and nativity festivals as far as the eye can see.

Conclusion

It seems to me that Christians are faced with a choice at Advent and Christmastide. Either to be carried along by the tide of neopagan and consumerist desire or else to choose the disciplines preserved in the genuinely Christian liturgical year. For these disciplines, if we listen and participate in them fully, teach us who the God of love is, what we are worth in God's estimation, and what the world could be if we would only give ourselves over to God's desire, rather than our own.  And that, I submit, would make all the difference in the world.

Christmas: the gift of peace

Texts:  Isaiah 62.6-12; Psalm 97; Luke 2.1-20

A moment ago we heard the story of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem, and how the angels sang ‘glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom God favours’.  But what is this peace that the angels sing about?  And what has it to do with the birth of this particular child?

Is the peace of the angel’s song the ‘peace’ promised by superpowers like China or the United States, the peace you get if you are big enough and strong enough to cower everyone else into submission?  Is the peace of the angel’s song the peace promised by a good many infamous leaders in this past century, that specifically fascist kind of peace which says ‘Don’t be afraid.  I know best, trust me.  I’m taking away your freedoms in order to protect you from our enemies?’  I doubt it very much.  The child born in Bethlehem grew up to say things like ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’ And ‘If your enemy strikes you on one cheek, offer him the other as well.’  And as to who one might trust with one’s life or liberty, he said: ‘Do not call anyone on earth teacher.  The Christ is your only teacher.  Put your faith in God alone.’

Well then.  Is the peace of the angel’s song like the ‘peace of mind’ you apparently get if your house and contents, your car, your health, your mortgage, and even your life are fully and comprehensively insured against disaster?  I suspect not.  The child born in Bethlehem was not, apparently, insured in this way.   Indeed, his whole life might be described as totally un-insurable!  First he becomes a religious nutter, then he neglects his responsibility to contribute to the family’s economic fortunes, then he goes all anti-globalisation, preaching against the powers that be.  Finally he is executed by the Roman State as a dangerous criminal.  As far as I am aware, neither he nor his family received any compensation for any of it.  And I doubt that a modern insurance company would have paid them out either.

So then, perhaps the peace of the angel’s song is more like that ‘inner peace’ promised by the ‘new’ spiritualities and therapies?  You know, the calm you are supposed to feel by getting away to a deserted beach or mountainside, where the factions and fractions of our tumultuous world cannot intrude?  Or that ‘peace’ you are supposed to receive, in Buddhism, when you rid yourself of every desire?  I doubt it very much.  Now don’t get me wrong.  The child born in Bethlehem was very often alone in prayer or meditation.  But when he was, it seems that the tumult of his world went with him, so that he wrestled inwardly with a deep sense of care and responsibility for the lost and broken all around him.  He wrestled also with his own desire, praying earnestly that he might be delivered from the temptation to seek the safe and easy way through life.  But that should not be taken to mean that he was a good Buddhist.  For instead of doing away with desire altogether, as the Buddha taught, Jesus immersed himself in the desire of another, that one he called his ‘Father’, the God of Israel.  His whole life, it seems, was filled with the strongest kind of longing, a groaning and a pining towards a world in which the poor were no longer poor and the rich no longer rich.

Well then, is the peace of the angel’s song finally a certain kind of political peace, a democratic tolerance of all our many differences?  You could certainly get that impression if your only exposure to Christianity was the many ‘Carols by Candlelight’ celebrations that have colonised the countryside in the past couple of weeks.  You know their message well, I’m sure: ‘We’re all different, we have different aims in life.  Some of us are less well off than others.  But let’s not bicker.  Live and let live.  Let’s just get on with each other.’  Is this the peace promised by the angels?  Again, I doubt it very much.  When the child of Bethlehem was grown, he got himself into all sorts of trouble because he was certainly not very tolerant.  He was intolerant towards poverty.  He was intolerant towards the indifference of the rich and the powerful towards their suffering neighbours.  He was intolerant towards the racism of his fellow-Jews towards non-Jews.  He was intolerant of the way his society relegated women and children to the bottom of the food-chain.  But deeply imbedded in all these intolerances was the intolerance that motivated them all:  his refusal to accept that human beings can find a real and genuine peace apart from a relationship with God.

For it is this peace—the peace that God gives to all who acknowledge, deep down in their hearts, that there is no peace apart from the loving favour of God—that the angels announced at the birth of Christ.  The peace given by Christ is also the peace given by God.  It is not a peace that can be generated by either prayer or politics, insofar as these attempt to create something out of the raw material of the human heart.  For the whole of human history bears witness against us.  We cannot make a peace that lasts.  Even now, we are at war, and many of these wars are being waged against phantoms of our own devising, demons hidden in our own souls that have been projected onto the faces of others so that we will never have to acknowledge our own failings. 

And for all our fantastic progress in science and research, for all our privileged economic fortunes, can we really claim to be reconciled, to be at peace with our neighbours and ourselves?  I doubt it very much.  There is considerable research now to show that the more prosperous we become the more possessive, and then we become 'unhappy', in proportionate measure.  I have spoken about these things often in this church.  I shall not go on with all that again this morning, except to say this:  that peace, a peace that lasts, seems to elude us.  And Christians are not immune from his experience.  Insofar as we have been seduced by modernity, Christians are at least at troubled as everyone else.

The peace that Christ gives cannot be given by the world or anything in the world.  It cannot be generated by either prayer or politics.  The peace that Christ gives is, as Titus would have it, a gracious gift: the gift of a deep and profound communion with God that transforms every dimension of one’s life, whether in body, soul or community.  The peace of Christ is something that, as the apostle Paul wrote, transcends our understanding.  The peace of Christ is not, therefore, something you can make a project of.  It is not a feeling you can induce by thinking happy or positive thoughts.  It is a state that comes upon you slowly, wheedling its way through your defences, making its way into your heart like a transfusion of life-giving blood from another’s body.  It is a gift.  It is pure communion.  It is a deep down sense and conviction that because God is for us, nothing can prevail against us:  not other people, not our own misguided desire, not the present, nor the future, not anything in all creation.  It is a peace that comes to us as we look and listen for God’s word of favour in the story and event of Jesus, who is called the Christ.

May the peace of Christ wheedle its way into your heart and your community today.

This homily was first preached at St Luke's Uniting Church, Mt Waverley, on the Feast of the Nativity in 2007.

Advent. It sure isn't Christmas!

Advent is the first season of the Church’s year. It encompasses the four Sundays prior to sundown on Christmas Eve, when the shorter Christmas-Epiphany period begins.  The word ‘Advent’ literally means coming, which also reveals the main theological theme of the season:  that time in which the Church looks, with great anticipation, for the coming of Jesus into the world. 'Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly!' is the oft-repeated prayer.

The ‘coming’ we reflect on in Advent is not, in fact, primarily that first coming of Christ as a baby in Bethlehem, but the second coming of Christ at the end of the ages, when God will put right everything that is wrong, and the poor and faithful will finally inherit new heavens and a new earth.  The Scriptures read during this period talk of the hope of all God’s people for peace and justice in the world.  They speak also of a messiah who will inaugurate this age by taking up the ancient throne of David.  Startling cosmic images are used to speak of what things will be like when the messiah arrives: wolves lying down with lambs and children playing safely over the nests of snakes (Isaiah 11.1-10) are just two examples. 

Of course, the flip side of such hope is a very real sense that the messianic age has not yet arrived.  We do not hope for things that are already ours!  This indicates a fundamental difference between Advent and the Christmas season which follows.  Christ has come a first time, certainly, and it is the special function of the Christmas-Ephipany period to reflect this fact and tell that story.  Yet the Christ who came two thousand years ago has still not arrived in all his glorious fullness.  We know this because the universe does not yet experience the wholeness of his promised peace.  It is dominated, rather, by sin, suffering and despair.  These realities are frankly acknowledged during Advent, and worshippers are encouraged to repent of the part they play in making and keeping the world in its deplorable state.  Thus Advent, like its twin season of Lent, invites Christians to consider the ways in which Christ has actually been rendered absent or irrelevant in both their own lives and that of the world. Advent, then, encourages worshippers to place their hope and trust in Christ who, when he arrives in his divine glory at the end of the age, will put all such faults away for ever. 

To help Christians reflect on what the coming of Jesus might mean for us today, the Church makes use of a number of interesting symbols.

The Jesse Tree

The Jesse Tree is named from Isaiah 11.1: "A shoot will spring forth from the stump of Jesse, and a branch out of his roots."  It is a symbol of the faith and family of God from which Jesus came. Jesus is like a new branch springing from an old family and faith.  We use the Jesse Tree to think about the importance of our forbears in teaching us to place our faith and hope in Christ.

In Australia, the Jesse Tree is often a eucalypt.  Eucalypts are regenerated by fire; they have to be destroyed in order to be born anew.  The biblical Branch is a sign of newness in the midst of destruction or discouragement.  The idea of the new Branch from an old stump became a way to talk about the expected messiah (e.g., Jer 23.5) who would save Israel from all its troubles. The presence of the Jesse Tree in churches during Advent reminds worshippers that Jesus came to suffer the full consequences of our all-too-human sin and despair, but then to rise again as a sign of hope for all who would follow him.

Christians long for the full reign of the messiah, and the kingdom of Peace that he will bring. So, while we celebrate the birth of the Branch, the new shoot from the stump of Jesse, we anticipate with hope the Second Advent, and await the completion of the promise.

Wreath and Candles

At the front of many churches you will notice, during Advent, the presence of a circular wreath of green, with four candles about it.  The wreath is a circle of evergreen branches that reminds us of God’s love.  Like a circle, God’s love has no beginning or end.  Like an evergreen tree, it is forever alive and growing.  God’s love never fails.

The Advent candles are variously purple, white, and pink.  Purple is the colour of kings, but it is also the colour of bruises.  It reminds us that while Jesus may indeed be the royal Son of God, in fact he came to share our humanity, to suffer and die that a new kind of humanity might be born from his suffering.  Purple is also the colour of Lent, the season in which we remember Christ’s journey to the cross and resurrection.  It is used during Advent to remind us that God’s love is not insipid or sentimental, but costly and real.

A pink candle may be lit on the third or fourth Sunday of Advent as a symbol of Mary, the mother of Jesus. It was her special obedience to bear the Christ child who would live and die and be raised for us all. The pink candle might also stand for Gaudete ('Rejoice') Sunday, something of a joyous break in the otherwise penitential tone of Advent.

The white candle that stands at the centre of the wreath is known as the ‘Christ’ candle.  It is lit on Christmas Eve to signify Christ’s arrival in our midst. It parallels and represents the lighting of the Paschal candle at the Vigil of Easter, a new light for a new world.

Nativity Scene

The traditional name for Christmas is the ‘Feast of the Nativity’.  The word “Nativity” literally means to “become native” or to be born into a particular community and place.  For Christians, the Feast of the Nativity celebrates the very human birth of the unique Son of God to Mary and Joseph of Nazareth.

During Advent, churches often anticipate the nativity of Christ by introducing parts of the traditional nativity ‘scene’ during the final two Sundays of Advent.  Around the (still-empty) manger where the saviour was laid are placed his parents, a stable, animals and shepherds, as well as stars and angels.  This scene can become a symbol of cosmic anticipation as the church, together with the whole creation, await the messiah’s arrival.

The ‘O’ Antiphons

A key component of the gathering rites during Advent worship are a series of responsive invocations known as the ‘O’ Antiphons.  Each antiphon contains an invocation of Jesus, using one of his biblical titles: O Wisdom, O Lord etc., ending with O Emmanuel, meaning ‘God with us’. Each contains a tiny prayer for God's people, and the petition that Christ will come very soon.  The ‘O’ Antiphons are very old, going back to the Vesper Prayers for Advent offered by the faithful in the eighth century Roman rite.

The antiphons represent a tiny theology textbook on who Christ is. O Wisdom reminds us that Christ is the Logos, the Word of God, through whom all things are created. O Adonai calls upon the Lord who spoke from the Burning Bush, telling Moses to lead his people to freedom. O Root of Jesse speaks of Christ born of the line of David; God, born into a human family. O Key of David refers to Christ who has the power to open all the prisons we may find ourselves in, and to lock away all things that hinder us in our journey to God. O Rising Dawn is the promise that even in our darkest times, Christ, the Light of the World, will shine forth. O King of the Nations looks forward to Christ's reign of justice and peace. O Emmanuel brings us to Bethlehem, to that moment in history when Christ became a human being.  

The church uses the Antiphons throughout Advent, either as a spoken litany or by singing the well-known 9^th century hymn “Come, O Come, Emmanuel”. 

Conclusion

In our consumer-dominated Western culture, the reflective experience of Advent is very often lost, even in the church. We are all so very keen to get what we want, and to get it now.  We want to celebrate Christmas as early as possible, especially that kind of Christmas which is all about the exchange of gifts and the telling of sentimental stories about middle-class values.  Advent, on the other hand, creates a space in which we are invited to reflect on the experience of not yet having what we desire or, more profoundly still, of relinquishing our own sense of what is desirable in favour of what the coming Christ might desire for us.  Advent is an invitation to stop doing all the things that make our lives miserable – including consuming, being busy and stressed! – and to listen, instead, for the coming Word who alone can give us the power to become children of God.  In my experience, one can only do that by refusing to participate in the Australian summer festival that is called ‘Christmas’, the Christmas that begins in November and has almost nothing to do with Christ.

I wish you all a holy Advent.

The Making of a Prophet

Texts:  1 Samuel 2. 18-20, 26; Colossians 3. 12-17; Luke 2. 41-52

Today’s lectionary readings encourage us to reflect on the process by which God raises a prophetic voice in the world.  In reading the stories about Jesus early life in Luke, we find that Luke knows very little about the concrete historical circumstances in which the infant Jesus became a boy and then a man.  That is why New Testament historians call this period ‘the hidden years’.  Instead of writing a history of Jesus’ boyhood, we find that Luke presents a deeply theological reflection upon the way in which the bearer of God’s message is made or formed.  With a deft hand, he explores the environment and influences which create a prophet – one who can both hear God’s voice and become a vessel by which that voice becomes audible for a particular place and time in the world.  And we find that Luke is profoundly influenced in this endeavour by the portrait of another great prophet: Samuel, the first prophet of Israel’s nationhood.

Luke’s account of Jesus birth and boyhood is closely modeled on that of Samuel.  Like Samuel, Jesus is conceived by the direct intervention of God.  Like Samuel, Jesus is specifically set aside from the beginning for a life of divine service.  The song of Mary in chapter 2 of Luke, which celebrates the coming of a liberator for God’s people, is closely modeled upon the song of Samuel’s mother, Hannah, in chapter 2 of 1 Samuel.   And today’s story of Jesus in the temple also follows many of the leads which Luke found in the story of Samuel.  As with Samuel’s parents, Mary and Joseph visit the temple each year for the Passover festival.  As with Samuel, Jesus seeks out the instruction of those who know God’s law, in the precincts of the temple.  As with Samuel, the young Jesus is described as one who increased in wisdom and stature, and in divine and human favour.

What is Luke trying to tell us about Jesus, by entwining his life so tightly with that of Samuel?  Well, to put things very simply, Luke wants us to know that Jesus will be a great prophet in Israel, just like Samuel.  And he wants to show us how great prophets are made.  I’d like now to spend a little time exploring that theme. 

According to Luke, great prophets are both born and made.  On the one hand, it is clear that both Samuel and Jesus are destined before their birth for particular purposes known only to God.  But exalted destinies and plans do not a prophet make.  They must also be trained, placed in environments where they will learn how to fulfill that destiny.  Skills need to be acquired, skills for interpreting both the wide world and human nature. Passions need to be discovered and nurtured.  Ethical and spiritual disciplines need to be practiced and perfected.  But most of all, that native spiritual sensibility, that gene for listening to God, needs to be exercised and honed to a high degree of sensitivity.  A prophet with a destiny but no discipline is no prophet at all.

Luke emphasizes that both Samuel and Jesus were training in the religious lore of Israel.  He places both in the temple at crucial stages in their adolescent development, listening there to the wisdom of the elders and exploring the ways of God with obvious dexterity and depth.  By learning the stories of the faith, they found out who they were, and what their destiny was to be.  By attending to the teaching of their elders, they learned a particular way of seeing the world, a way which cut through the nonsense with which most people fill their lives, seeing instead into the very heart of things, where God dwells.  To my mind, the one thing that distinguishes prophets and mystics from everyone else, even the most devoted of religious practitioners, is their capacity to see and to hear what very few others can see and hear.  Luke tells us that Jesus could pick up an ordinary mustard seed and see there a profound lesson about the designs of God for the small and unassuming.  So it goes with the prophet.  He or she has a native spiritual intelligence, but that gift needs to be nurtured and honed within the discipline of a religious tradition, and within a community of dedicated religious teachers, before it can ever come to fruition.

Now here’s what I reckon all this means for us this morning.  There are people talking these days about the demise of Christianity, the demise of the church, the demise of all things to do with God.  And there is no doubt in my mind that our culture is becoming increasingly secular, increasingly unconscious about the things of God.  But that does not mean that we are all headed for a godless future, where the gains of Christian civilization are lost forever, and our kids are condemned to ever-deepening crises about the meaning of their lives.  For I believe that God always raises up prophets – still small voices in the wilderness, spiritual intelligences who continue to listen for God, and continue to speak the very words of God for a hungry and thirsty generation.  When Samuel came along, we are told that Israel was in disarray, that the nation was like a sheep without a shepherd.  When Jesus came along, the Jewish people were occupied by a foreign power, and were bewildered and confused about matters of spirituality and ethics.  In both cases, God sent a prophet, a person with special passions, to lift the vision of the people towards God once more.

And God continues to send prophets.  In the fourth century, when Christianity was becoming the official state religion of the Roman Empire, God sent St Anthony and St Pachomius to call his people back to the simple gospel of poverty, prayer, and dependence on God.  In the fourteenth century, when the church had become rich and powerful, God sent St Francis and St Dominic, to remind us that Christ was a poor traveler who healed and taught the simple lessons of the gospel.  In the twentieth century, God sent Mother Theresa and Dorothy Day to challenge the dominance of economics as a theory which legitimizes the permanent impoverishment of whole classes of people.  And Martin Luther King, and Bishops Romero and Belo, who stood with their suffering people against the might of evil armies of murderers.  And Thomas Merton, who lived and wrote in solitude, to remind a busy world that noise and rush and accumulation are killing us all.

And so here we are on the brink of a new century and a new millennium.  Even now, somewhere in the world, God is choosing, and training, and nurturing prophets, people who will remind us of the most significant fact of our world, a fact most of us so easily forget.  The fact of God.  And the prophet might be from your small town.  It might even be you.

This sermon was delivered at the Longford Uniting Church, Tasmania, on the first Sunday after Christmas in 1999.

Christmas: creating a body of resistance

Texts:  Isaiah 9.2-7; Titus 2.11-14; Luke 2.1-14

The stories and readings of Christmas will have little power or consequence unless we understand that the events they describe take place within a particular kind of political reality – worlds dominated by an imperial super-power, a military emperor who can make ordinary people do and say whatever he wants them to do or say.  When Isaiah was preaching in Jerusalem at the end of the 8th century BCE, that power was the king of Assyria, whose empire stretched from India to Egypt.  The darkness of his harsh and oppressive rule extended even into the daily lives of the people of Israel, whose labour and produce was heavily taxed to enrich the emperor and support his expansionist policies.  In this environment, the power of the local Jewish King was so insignificant that there was really little option for him except to become a local supporter of the Emperor’s will.  To defy the Emperor would have left Judah open to attack by one of its small neighbours, some other petty king with powerful ambitions.  In this environment, “security” and “safety” was guaranteed only by sucking up to the biggest power on earth, the Emperor of Assyria.  Yet the situation of the ordinary people could hardly have been described as “safe” or “secure”.  The Jewish people suffered terribly because there was little practical sense in which they could claim to be free.  They belonged to the Emperor of Assyria.  The economic and social privileges granted them under the covenant with Yahweh their God were severely curtailed, because the Emperor now claimed to own their bodies, their houses, and all they produced.  There was precious little of their lives or their livelihoods that the Emperor could not claim as his own.  In the words of Isaiah, they were a people who walked in a very great darkness.  They were an oppressed people ruled by the soldiers of a foreign power.

The situation was not all that different when Jesus was born over 700 years later.  The global power had changed, certainly.  It was now the Romans who ruled the roost.  Yet the lives of the Jewish people were much the same.  Their political leaders, whether kings or councils, spent most of their time sucking up to the Romans and doing their bidding.  That was the way to survive.  What that meant for the ordinary folk, the folk who actually produced the food and built the roads and the houses and whatever else, was misery.  For again, whoever they were or whatever they produced ultimately belonged not to themselves, but to the Emperor of Rome.  So that while most people could feed themselves, if they worked hard, and while some people could even become quite wealthy if they worked very hard to supply the Romans with what they wanted most, everyone (whether rich or poor) belonged not to themselves or even to God, but to the Emperor.  If the Emperor demanded something of you, through the agency of a governor or even a local solider, you had no right to resist.  If you valued your life, or the lives of your loved ones, you did as you were told.  That is what Luke is trying to tell us with his tale about an Imperial command that the whole world should be registered.  He is telling us that in the world in which Jesus was born, you did as the Great Power told you.  To resist was to die.

Lest we think all of this is ancient history, and that we have somehow transcended such oppression, let me invoke the name of General Augusto Pinochet - until the late 1990s the President of Chile.  Chile is a very small country in the grand scheme of things.  But Pinochet did in his time what the great power in our modern world - the United States - wanted him to do.  He promoted the policies of contemporary neo-liberalism.  He forced his people to give away any privileges they might enjoy under international human rights or labour agreements in order to turn the country into a quarry to fuel the engine of Western consumerism.  He killed and tortured anyone who resisted his policies, and he did so with secret police trained by the American intelligence services – principally the CIA.   And all the time he pretended to be a good Catholic.  When he was finally excommunicated from the church by the bishops of Chile, he threw some of them into prison, where they joined many other Christians, lay and ordained, who had dared to challenge the power of the state.  In the end, Pinochet fell from power because Christians finally found their voices once more, and started to articulate a different vision for Chile.  Against the story told by Pinochet - in which every person was required to sacrifice themselves, their families, and their livelihoods for the economic glory and prosperity of the nation - the church posited a counter-story in which the bodies of the people belonged to a God of love who would never force them to do anything against their will, who nevertheless called them to a different kind of prosperity, the prosperity and security that comes when people love one another, and share whatever they have so that the rich may never be too rich and the poor may never be too poor.

So what the promised coming of a Messiah meant for Isaiah’s Judah and Joseph and Mary’s Jerusalem is exactly the same as it means for us in our contemporary world.  It means that God does not surrender the bodies of his people to the oppression and slavery of whatever global power is wanting to have its way with us.  It means that just as God took our human flesh to himself in Jesus so that our bodies were no longer simply ours but God’s as well, God continues to take a body to Godself in the church, a social body which God makes for Godself in the conversions wrought through baptism and Eucharist.  It means that God stands with us and for us against the powers of this world, not in Spirit alone, but also in the body and in bodily practices that make for peace, justice and the integrity of creation.   For in Jesus the yoke of the oppressor’s power is broken.  In Jesus we see a body broken up, tortured, and finally killed by the power of an evil state. Yet.  When the powers appear to have his body absolutely within their control - enclosed within the silent tomb of death - at precisely that moment, Jesus breaks free in the power of the resurrection to show that not even coercion and death is finally strong enough to defeat the power of love.  For the truth revealed in the resurrection of Jesus is this: that the power of our political overlords is ever only the power we grant them through our fear and our failure to believe that we can be what God has called us to be.  If a child born amongst the poorest can one day threaten the power of Empire – not because he is smart or strong, but because he believes absolutely in liberating word of God that stirs within him – then the church, too, can become a community of resistance that threatens the power of Obama, Putin and Abbot to enslave us all in the neo-liberal lies of our time.

I pray that we, who take the name of Christ to ourselves tonight, may give our bodies not to the state, out of some kind of fear that we shall miss out on the ‘relaxed and comfortable’ life it promises, but to God and to God’s mission of love, that the world may find its liberation through the revolutionary giving of Jesus.  For in the end, it is only the gift of God, ever given again by his people, that shall save our world from its lies and self-deceptions.  It is precisely that radical sharing and giving, that politics of love, which we remember and perform in the Eucharist, which we shall now prepare to eat together.

Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to all God has favoured with his care.

This sermon was first preached at St Luke's, Mt Waverley, on Christmas Eve 2006. Another version was subsequently published in Cross Purposes: a forum for theological dialogue 26 (2011):8-10.

Why do we need a Saviour?

Luke 2.8-20

In Luke’s story about the birth of Jesus, an Angel drops by the fields around Bethlehem with a rather startling news-break for the Shepherds who worked there.  “Do not be afraid,” says the Angel, “for see, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day, in the city of David, a Saviour who is Christ, the Lord.”  Now, it’s a marvellous scene isn’t it, a scene recreated a thousand times over every Christmas.  Shepherds, angels, bright lights, heavenly choirs, wise men from the east . . .  hang on, there aren’t any wise men in Luke’s story! . . .  but anyway.  It is clear that most of us like the story.  We must do, because we keep telling it at a thousands “carols by candlelight” events all over the country.

What I reckon we’ve lost in all this retelling, however, is what the story actually means. What did Luke mean, for example, when he has the angel say:  “To you is born a Saviour”.  What’s a Saviour, and why would you want one?  A friend of mine at Uni asked a question exactly like that a few years ago.  We were having a discussion about why one might become a Christian, a follower of Christ.  I testified that for the writers of the New Testament, one became a Christian out of a deep-down conviction that life without Christ was no life at all, that it was, rather, a half-life in which one was afraid of everything and driven by that fear to a futile assertion of one’s own existence against the void of nothingness that we know, deep down, is wide open and beckoning beneath us all.  Turning to Christ, I said, is like turning to a life-saver when you are drowning:  Christ does for us, and in us, what we cannot do for ourselves: Live!  Live as God intended us to live: free of fear, free to breathe in God’s air and God’s love, free to give ourselves away.  “Right,” says my friend.  “But I’m quite happy as I am.  Why would I need a saviour?”

Now I reckon that’s a line you’ll get everywhere you turn today.  “A saviour is born.  So what?  Why would I need a Saviour?”  Many of us live in Saviour-free zones, these days, I think.  Especially if we are middle-class.  For middle-class people are raised by their apparently successful parents to believe that the successful life is the self-made life. “It’s up to you,” they tell us, “if you don’t make a go of life it will be nobody’s fault but your own.  So study hard, and work hard; save your cash and be careful with it and the good life will be yours.”  A few years ago another friend of mine, a psychologist, gave me a book with the curious title:  If You See the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!  The book was a clear message from him to me, in the psycho-babble that characterizes our time:  “You don’t need a Saviour; saviours are bad; they encourage dependency.  It’s only when you kill off your personal saviours that you’ll finally give yourself a chance at the good life.”

Now, I reckon there’s a little bit of truth in that, but not a great deal of truth.  I don’t doubt that all of us responsible for our own lives.  That is a deeply Jewish and Christian notion.  Neither do I doubt that many of us avoid accepting such responsibility by shifting the blame for our misfortunes to others.  Again, in Jewish and Christian thought, such blame-shifting is seen as a very big problem.  But to then conclude that each of us, alone, are capable of both imagining the good life and then making it come to pass, is nothing less than sheer fantasy.  The paradox of the “Kill the Buddha” book, and all the other self-help therapies on the New-Age shelf at your local bookstore, is that the writer is himself posing as a Saviour, that is, as someone who can help his readers in a way that they, alone, and left to their own devices, cannot.

To my way of thinking, Jesus is a Saviour precisely because he provides us with the spiritual vision and strength do that which we cannot, I repeat, cannot do for ourselves.  Now the very person who, at Uni, told me that she didn’t need a Saviour was, I think, bound up in all kinds of chains.  She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see they were there.  But they were there nevertheless.  O yes, they were there.  There were the chains of the beauty-myth.  You know, “In order to exist, to be worthy to exist, I must look slim, trim and terrific.”  There were the chains of the nuclear-family myth:  “I must have a man and some kids in order to be worthwhile in life, to fight against the fear that I shall cease to be”.  And there were the chains of the status myth:  “I must have a big house and successful professional career in order to be really worthwhile, to register my value in the eyes of my friends.”  I could go on, but I won’t.

What I want to say is this: that Jesus is not only a Saviour, he is THE Saviour.  That is, he can do for us what nobody else, not even our therapist or the Buddha, is able to do:  to release us from the fear that lies beneath every other fear and every other anxiety that there is:  the fear of death.  You see Jesus arrived in a time and place that, in many ways, was plagued by the same fears and sins as our own.  People believed that they had been put on the earth to assure the future of their families.  They worked hard to leave their children in a better condition, money and status-wise, than their own parents had left them.  The fear that this might not be so drove them to compete with everyone else, with other families, for an ever-larger slice of the limited resources bequeathed in creation.  Underneath it all, of course, was the fear that we may cease to be.  People feared that if their families fell into poverty and ruin, they might well die out.  Not even the memory of a name would be left as a witness to having ever existed.  Such fears run deep in all of us, any anthropologist will tell you that.  They dominate our own lives as much as they dominated the lives of our ancient forebears.

What Jesus said to the people of his own time and place, and would also say to us today, is this:  that there is no need to fear death.  Death is not something that troubles God.  Trust in God and he will give you life even if you die.  Now listen carefully, lest you get the impression that Jesus was interested only in physical, biological death.  He was not, and I am not.  Jesus spoke, rather of the many deaths we must face as a part of life, the deaths which tell us, in fact, that life can never entirely be something of our own making or genius.  The slow dying of our young, fit bodies.  The diseases that limit what we can do to one degree or another.  The loss of a job.  The loss of a friend.  Disappointment in love or career.  The fact that our children may not care to do what we think they ought to do.  Not being able to have children.  Or whatever.  According to Jesus, all these things are a sign in the world that we are not the masters of our own destinies, that we cannot accomplish the good life out of our own resources, nor can we even imagine what it might be like.  Jesus saves us by helping us to see that life comes when we are able to both accept and embrace the fact of death.  We are not immortal souls, no matter what the many new age sages might say.  We are mortal.  We will die.

But the good news is this.  If we can die to our desire to make a way for ourselves in the world, if we can let go of our need to keep up appearances and wear the socially-determined badges of status and success, if we can trust not in these human artefacts of success and happiness  but in God, then God will grant us life, life in all its fullness.  Let me quote to you from a passage later in Luke, a passage which goes to the heart of how Jesus would save us:

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves (that is, their socially-constructed desires) and take up their cross daily and follow me.  For the one who wants to preserve his life will lose it, and the one who wants to lose his life for my sake will save it.  What does it profit anyone to gain the whole world but lose their very selves in the process?

Christ, you see, lived a life designed to please no-one else but God his Father.  He knew that God loved him, and that was enough.  Because of that single fact, he was then able to give away the mad rush to get ahead in the world.  The assurance of God’s love freed him.  Instead, Jesus spent his time and energy in works of prayer and compassion.  Freed from the concern to please everyone else, he was able to please his Father God, to live as though people mattered - not competing against them (as in a market economy), but giving himself to them, as a gift without need of return.  In the cross and the resurrection of Christ, we therefore see both the paradoxical logic and the message of his life writ large:  “It you will die with me, you will also live with me.  If you will let go, God will give you all things.”

At Christmastime the Christ is born to us, a Saviour.   Let me gently suggest that despite all appearances to the contrary, and despite the so-called wisdom of the self-help gurus, we might all need a Saviour after all!