Tuesday 22 December 2015

Singing Mary's Song

Luke 1:39-56
 
 

In today’s Gospel story, we hear Mary & Elizabeth sing from their hearts the call and response of hope in a troubled world. Mary has just realised who the child she was carrying was and was filled with wonder and fear. Wonder that she was to be his mother, and fear as to the consequences for both of them and their family in a world waiting for a warrior king to depose the occupying forces.
 
As a result she withdraw from her daily village life and sought solace and solitude with Elizabeth in the hill country. Elizabeth was also pregnant ad about to give birth to John the Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus and the one who would mentor and teach Jesus. The future would have looked troublesome and precarious to both women and they spent much time together reflecting on where God was and what God was doing.
 
The kinship and relationship these two women feel is signified by Elizabeth’s exclamation Luke places at their first meeting, ‘as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.’ Luke connects both as bearers of ‘Good News’ and also connects John & Jesus as co-creators of this ‘Good News’. Right from the very beginning they are one in what they are here to do.

Luke’s Gospel presentation of the ‘Virgin birth’, Andrew Prior suggests, is not intending to present us with a miracle which contradicts biological truth and necessity. We make a category mistake if we believe he is even thinking about biology. He is presenting to us the intervention of God in our world; the filling of people with Holy Spirit. It is all to set the stage for Jesus' birth and subsequent ministry."

Mary's song is a song of revolution, and like all revolutionary songs it calls for the reformation of faith and story and a whole new way of living that story.

The birth of Jesus is the writing of a new story on a blank slate. Mary epitomises a humanity free enough to let go of expectation and past baggage and to allow itself to be written anew. While her song sings the story of Israel and the future of humanity as found in the freedom coming from the innocence to believe in the possibility of hope.

How we need Mary’s innocence to day. Without such innocence we will continue to live in fear of the other; to look askance at those who believe, dress and worship differently; to demonise those whose understanding of relationships, ways of life and engagement world is different to ours. More men, women and children will die in refugee camps, bombed hospitals and schools, as a result of domestic violence and gun crimes unless we begin to sing Mary’s song.
 
Stan Grant, in his excellent article, “The politics of identity: We are trapped in the imaginations of white Australians” dealing with search for identity within in the indigenous community, points out:
 
“Our struggle is too conveniently positioned as peculiar to this country. But the politics of identity are an international phenomenon – confusing and contradictory – heightened by the rush of post cold-war globalisation, the advance of new technology and the changing currents of geo-politics.
 
Patriotism, xenophobia, ethnic nationalism, sectarianism are among the many reactions to an increasingly homogenised and globalised world.
 
Look around us.
 
Islamic State has surpassed al-Qaida’s deadly ambitions, appealing to a brutal, radicalised, and selectively distorted Sunni Muslim identity.
 
In every corner of the planet people are questioning who they are. Is allegiance to state? Religion? Tribe? Politics?
 
Vladimir Putin has ridden new waves of popularity in Russia by crafting a comforting narrative of Soviet nostalgia coupled with military adventurism and intervention.
 
This has spilled over into the civil war in Ukraine, where the country is split between those who identify with greater Europe and others with allegiance to Moscow.
 
North Koreans are still defined by an unfinished half-century old war with the United States. As they construct a nuclear arsenal, and march in goose-step, they look dismissively at their cousins in the south and proclaim themselves as the true Koreans.
The Chinese speak of a 100 years of humiliation, the nation’s resurgence countering a history of foreign domination and exploitation.
 
The European Union – designed as a reaction to the continent’s bloody 20th century – is mired in mistrust and suspicion fuelling the rise of identity-infused extreme politics of the left and right.”
 
The situation expounded by Grant and experienced by each of us as we search for ourselves in this world finds hope in Mary's  song, the writing on a clean slate. Interestingly Mary’s song is not sung as a plea for something better. It is the pronouncement of the Good News which has always been present. Her song is sung in the past tense; she sings that this has already happened and now we are entering the place where each of us, in the power of self-sacrifice and the indwelling Spirit, can live out in the present what has always been here.
 
Mary sings:
“My soul magnifies the Lord, 47and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, 48for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; 49for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. 50His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. 51He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. 52He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; 53he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. 54He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, 55according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.” 
 
Here is our faith’s song line, Mary picks it up and sings into being justice, freedom, hope and peace. In call and response she is joins with Elizabeth and their babies within, and they now call to us across the ages to join them to sing in the Hope of the World this Advent.
 
The challenge Mary gives us is; are we innocent enough to sing her song in our relationships with other, in the way we shop and travel, in who we support and favour and in hospitality and welcome to those different in age, gender, race or creed? Are we able to connect to the forever story so as to sing the story into the present and teach others to sing it into the future, long after we are gone?
 

Our only hope is to sing heartily! Amen 

Monday 7 December 2015

Peace Is Our Responsibility

Luke 3:1-6
 
In 1962 Thomas Merton wrote the following an an essay in the Commonweal journal entitled ‘Nuclear War and the Christian":

 We are no longer living in a Christian world……..Today a non-Christian world still retains a few vestiges of Christian morality, a few formulas and clichés, which serve on appropriate occasions to adorn indignant editorials and speeches. But otherwise we witness deliberate campaigns to eliminate all education in Christian truth and morality. The Christian ethic of love tends to be discredited as phony and sentimental. It is therefore a serious error to imagine that because the West was once largely Christian, the cause of the Western nations is now to be identified, without further qualification, with the cause of God. The incentive to wipe out Bolshevism may well be one of the apocalyptic temptations of twentieth-century Christendom. It may indeed be the most effective way of destroying Christendom, even though man may survive. For who imagines that the Asians and Africans will respect Christianity and  embrace it after it has apparently triggered  mass-murder  and destruction of cosmic proportions?  It is pure madness to think that Christianity can defend itself with nuclear weapons. The mere fact that we now seem to accept nuclear war as reasonable is a universal scandal.”
 
Last week, at the Church of England Synod in England, the church accepted that armed intervention is inevitable in the Middle East refugee crisis. The Guardian reports:

The Church of England has effectively backed military intervention by the UK government in Syria by unanimously passing a motion which implied support for the use of armed force in establishing safe routes for refugees, with the personal endorsement of the archbishop of Canterbury.
Armed action was “almost inevitable” in response to the crisis in Syria, Welby said. The forces that were driving people to become refugees needed to be confronted, he added.
The motion, proposed by the bishop of Durham, Paul Butler, called on the government “to work with international partners in Europe and elsewhere to help establish safe and legal routes to places of safety, including this country, for refugees who are vulnerable and at severe risk”.

Welby told the church assembly that it needed to recognise the implications of the clause. “Let us support the motion, but do so utterly realistically about its implications,” he said.

The motion – passed by 333 votes, with none opposed and three abstentions”
 
And now Britain is at war with ISIS.
In todays Gospel Luke introduces John the Baptist and his call for repentance and Baptism. This Old Testament style prophet, a ‘replica’ of Isaiah’, recognises the crisis his world was facing and calls for radical action to be taken. What was that radical action? Personal accountability for the state of relationships in the world.
 
Luke makes it clear just how dysfunctional the world was by taking care to meticulously detail the time (In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius,), the key players who were recognised for the manipulation and brutality of each other and those under them (when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene,) and the complicity of the Jewish hierarchy 2during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas).
He then places John as a prophet, an outsider, who is not in cohorts with the world, but is aware of God and the role God wants each of us to play in bringing peace to the world, as the spokesman for the new world order - (the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. )
Peace in the world is not a world without unrest, but a world in which unrest first finds its answer in our unwillingness to maintain or feed the violence, thus ensuring it continues. If we continue to feed it, the crooked ways of humanity, even the crooked ways within ourselves, will continue to wind there way into the hills and high places of violence, war and hatred.
Peace in the world is not the sole task of God. John continues the voice of the prophets, institutes a radical pattern of repentance and baptism, putting the responsibility on all humans (flesh) in the world and points to The Way (Jesus) this will be achieved.
Peace is not the sole responsibility of Jesus, his birth, life, death and resurrection. Peace is what we do with that. Unfortunately while the church continues to be embroiled in scandals or in visible and damaging conflict and in-fighting at the local level, we do not contribute to peace, but to unrest.
Peace is found in actions bringing down those in high places, unwinding the corruption and power of those committed to violence in all its forms. These actions are to be peace bringing and non-violent. No where does Jesus advocate a violence response, that would simply have ensured violence continued.
Peace requires we seek and find ways to personally untangle ourselves from the patterns and structures which are committed to maintaining unrest in the world – political parties, big business, the weapons industry and more. Perhaps finding out how businesses operate, where they source their products, how  they make their money, where is you retirement money invested and more. We then can make decisions on who we support through our purchases for example.
The announcement this week that the founder of Facebook and his wife are giving 99% of his fortune to charity over his lifetime has been applauded. Yet it comes with strings attached and carrying much baggage as Devon Maloney of The Guardian website points out:
 
Simply by creating and overseeing the world’s largest social network and one of the most influential corporations on Earth – by gathering and selling untold amounts of data under the protection of inscrutable legal jargon, by implementing shaky harassment and reporting policies that permit certain kinds of abuse, by employing 68% men and fewer than 50 black people in a company of more than 10,000 employees (to say nothing of the unholy spectre of gentrification) – Mark Zuckerberg himself continues to reproduce the inequality he and his wife are taking aim at with their pledge.
 
John the Baptist, and Luke the Gospel writer, make it very plain. What we are waiting for is not a baby but the Way and the Way requires that we engage in deep self reflection, shed our baggage through repentance and become baptised in an active role in building a new world for all. While the repentance is personal, the Baptism is communal and unless we begin to walk this Way, peace will always remain elusive.
 
Thomas Merton warned in 1962 we were sowing the seeds of future war by our actions in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. We are now reaping what we have sown. It is time to ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” To ensure 5Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill made low, and the crooked made straight, and the rough ways made smooth;” so 6all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”


 May Christmas 2015 see the beginning of such peace in our world.