Same Story, Different Snaps.

Coolamon Baby - Glenn Loughrey 2016

Luke 2:1-20

 

Have you ever been to an event, concert or a holiday destination that has been a major disappointment only to read somewhere later a report waxing lyrical about what an outstanding event, concert or holiday destination it was?  You find yourself asking, did we go to the same event or destination, was the writer ever actually there; it seems like we attend two different events, or concert or holiday resort?

 

For most of my life that has been my experience of Christmas. Growing up in a household where Christmas celebrations quickly descended in an alcohol fuelled disaster, I came to dread Christmas and disbelieve the story we were supposed to celebrate. I listened to the story in church, watched the decorations in the shop windows and witnessed the joyful festivities of others and wondered if we were actually celebrating the same event? Did I somehow live in another dimension were the joy and peace of Christmas simply was unavailable to such as me? I still find this time of the year difficult.

 

This  split can also be found in the Gospel story we just read. Luke provides us with two polaroid prints of the same events but they could not be more different. One is a black and white print of  two scared and lonely young middle eastern people fulfilling the need to be counted by a tyrannical government and expecting their first child. They find themselves in unfamiliar territory, nowhere to stay and a baby due any moment. They take whatever refuge they are offered and find themselves sharing a space with animals and their food troughs. Their baby is born alone and un-welcomed except by the barn animals standing around and his parents. One can only begin to imagine how scared they were.

 

The other is a coloured photo full of lights, surround sound and a cast of thousands.  Here the angel Gabriel comes with the multitudes to announce to shepherds as representatives of those whom God favours the birth of the Anointed One. Terrifying but majestic, an advertising campaign launch bigger than anything a major ad company could dream up. It’s inclusive promises are writ big and bold and are so effective, the shepherds head into town to find out whether this is fair dinkum or not.

 

The little family would have wondered if they were in the same story, if their poverty and homelessness and the brutality of the birth was some how misplaced in a cosmic trailer to the incarnation event. How did they fit and why? How were they privileged to suffer poverty and violence and why wasn’t their child, the Anointed One welcomed in a way commensurate with his title and genealogy?

 

Jesus was born in a violent world. War and occupation was ever present in his life just as it had been in the lives of his parents. There is nothing beautiful about this manger scene and the heavenly messengers in the field fail to make it so. In fact they make it worse. Herod becomes inflamed when he hears of the goings on in Bethlehem and sets about genocide of his own. The isolation of the birth becomes an isolation of a people and a life until the predictable end.

 

How do we make sense of these two pictures and the crumpling of hope so loudly proclaimed? How do we live in the shadow of the manger and the shepherds’ field in a world that has changed little? Unjust wars destroy the babies born in Aleppo, Yemen, Mosul, the Sudan, West Timor, Myanmar and Central Australian indigenous communities. Violence destroys the hopes of little ones in houses in our cities where domestic violence has not lessened. Young people are being traumatised not for a moment but for a lifetime through the dysfunction of a world still clinging precariously to the promise of  ‘peace among those whom he favours’.

 

How do we embrace the hope of those words and the little boy in a food trough and change the world in which we live? The great intentions of God can only become real if they are embodied in ordinary actions every day by those he favours. It is us who has to take the steps to bring about peace on earth. It is us who has to resist the temptation to fear, the beginning of all violence and war according to Thomas Merton.

 

Our fears and anxieties lead us into savaging others with our words and our actions, our anxieties and fears make us defensive and protective to such an extent we have to eliminate or annihilate the other. No one sets out to hurt but does so when it is the most effective to protect him or herself from what they fear. It can start out innocently but escalates beyond imagination as our fears are magnified and feed by the ego self who cannot afford to fail.

 

We can begin by understanding that the baby born in Bethlehem was not a special baby due special attention. The baby born in Bethlehem is an ordinary baby just like your baby, your child’s baby and the babies being born this moment in places like Aleppo. When we do this we normalise the experiences of all born as a baby while elevating each to the sanctity we attribute to the Christ child.

 

In other words the affection and worship we save for Jesus is required of us for all born into this world. We are all, in some mystical way, the embodiment of God in the world. Our birth is special and unexpected, an expression of poverty and dependence we almost instantly seek to forget. Yet it is this innocence, this infinite trust in the love and nurture of God in others we bring with us which empowers us to be one of the many who make up the angelic choir.

 

If only we could let go of our fears and anxieties and begin to trust as we did at our first breath then we would begin to change our world. There would be need for violence for there would be no thing to defend. All would be valued and worshipped, the child born in Aleppo, Mosul or some remote township in Central Australia or the child born in a home near here, as we worship the boy born in Bethlehem.

 

It is the difference in the two scenes in Luke’s Gospel. It is no good the shepherds responding and going to visit the baby or the Wisemen who bring gifts, something must be transformed by the encounter, something has to be changed by what they witness.

 

Tonight as we come to contemplate this event we must come to be transformed by the birth of the Christ child so that we leave here committed to respect, justice and love and not to fear, violence and tyranny. It is up to us. 

A Christmas Card

A Christmas Card - Written in 1947

When the white stars talk together like sisters 
And when the winter hills 
Raise their grand semblance in the freezing night, 
Somewhere one window 
Bleeds like the brown eye of an open force.

Hills, stars, 
White stars that stand above the eastern stable.

Look down and offer Him. 
The dim adoring light of your belief.
Whose small Heart bleeds with infinite fire.

Shall not this Child 
(When we shall hear the bells of His amazing voice) 
Conquer the winter of our hateful century?

And when His Lady Mother leans upon the crib, 
Lo, with what rapiers 
Those two loves fence and flame their brilliancy!

Here in this straw lie planned the fires 
That will melt all our sufferings: 
He is our Lamb, our holocaust!

And one by one the shepherds, with their snowy feet, 
Stamp and shake out their hats upon the stable dirt, 
And one by one kneel down to look upon their Life.

http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/resources/poetry/merton.html - toc

Luke 2:1-14 - Christmas isn’t cute!

It’s Christmas time again – how it comes around so quickly – sneaking up on us benignly and full of niceness. Family, babies, furry animals, rotund ho ho’ing Santa Clauses and reindeers with red noses. What a sweet image Christmas has become for us and the marketing gurus.

Cute, Christmas has become cute and saleable, a hedonistic binge with the credit card hangover, and almost irrelevant in terms of meaning.

Yet the event we celebrate as the first Christmas was anything but cute and it was, indeed, full of meaning. There was no hint of the Hallmark Christmas card about it.

It had all the pathos and tragedy of the persecuted and the occupied, of the refugee and the downtrodden, of the forgotten and ostracised, about it.
☺ Take Mary and Joseph.
Here was a couple, one of which Mary, was in her mid-to - late teens caught up in, not only the demands of occupation and bureaucratic name taking and counting, but in the emotional minefield of pregnancy outside a formal marriage, a strange story of an angel announcing the baby was the offspring of the God of Israel and then stuck in an unknown city without accommodation or support.

Joseph had made the very difficult decision to take Mary with him to Bethlehem him because of the problems she would face if left at home and had the baby. The response from the community would have been less than favourable for a mother with a child out of wedlock.

So, even though there was no legal reason for her to be there, Joseph took her with him to safeguard her and the baby from local persecution. They stayed on in Bethlehem after the birth for the same reason but found themselves in a year or so, at odds with the local despot Herod, and fleeing for their lives.


☺ Take the innkeeper.
Compassion mixed with the desire to make a quid may have lead the innkeeper to utilise every square inch of his establishment, even the ground floor space in the inn where he kept his and his customers, animals. Or Mary and Joseph may have found a similar downstairs space in some distant relatives home, there is no clear evidence that it was the shed out the back of the Bethlehem Hilton.

It was, though, a place that smelt anything like the birthplace of a king. Yet it was compassion on the behalf of an unknown individual which made it possible for Jesus to be born undercover and in the midst of representatives of God’s creation. Not a great place but better than a refugee camp, a leaky boat or hiding from those who want to kill you.

☺ Take The Shepherds.
Now these blokes came into town because their sheep had all headed for the hills when the angels arrived and started singing. They came down to get their story straight and to have a gander, a sticky beak, a look, just in case what the angels told them was right. What they made of it, we are not sure, but they are moved enough to show their respects and be present. Whether it changed their lives or not, we will never know. But at least they went and had a look for themselves.

☺ Take The Three Wise Men.
Arriving later than the actual birth, possibly almost 2 years later, the wise men had a profound mixture of intelligence and innocence. They had divined through the stars a king would be born and quite rightly wanted to come and confirm that they were correct. They travelled, depending on where they came from, many thousands of miles to be there. Despite their obvious intellectual abilities they seem not to have been politically savvy and let the cat out of the bag to the tyrant ruler Herod.

Their arrival unleashes further carnage on the people in the area, “Herod slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under" (Matt. 2:16). As a result, Joseph and Mary become refugees in a foreign land just so Jesus survives.

As I said before, the story is not cute, it is real. Jesus, God Incarnate, God amongst us, did not avoid the nasty reality of humanity at its worst. He came right in the centre of it. God, being God, could have ordained an entirely different scenario, which was his prerogative. But he didn’t.

He came in the person of a vulnerable baby, to two lost and alone people, estranged from their families, in the midst of violence and powerlessness, and became a refugee fleeing with his family to safety in Egypt.

This is a modern story and it is the modern story we need to embrace. Is our world, the world we live in any different to that in which Jesus found himself? Have we addressed the issues that impacted on Jesus, his family and his people?

I fear not.

A quick glance across the newspapers, the tv news and the internet will confirm those issues are alive and well in the world today.

☺ More than 74,000 Africans, fleeing civil war, political instability, poverty, famine and drought in the Horn of Africa, crossed the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea on smugglers' boats and reached the shores of Yemen this year. This figure represents a staggering 50 per cent increase over last year's 50,000 arrivals, itself a record.

☺ Livestock farmer flees deadly drought and insecurity in Ethiopia and Somalia only to face climate change-linked flooding in Kenya's Dadaab refugee camps. The climate change which destroyed his livelihood through drought is now destroying his future through flood, alongside the violence of vigilantes and terrorists.

☺ Zimbabwean teenage asylum-seeker learns the high cost of freedom. All 17-year-old Tsitsi wanted to do was go to school and earn a living – but the men transporting her to a better life had other plans for her, they raped her and she now finds herself the mother of an unwanted child, no job and no place to go home to, ostracized by her own family and the society she finds herself in.

Sound familiar? What went wrong? Wasn’t that why Jesus came into the world, to bring peace to all, to make peace possible, to bring about the kingdom of God?

Yes but……..

But it’s a shared kingdom. We have a role in this kingdom as well. Remember the words of the angel, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours!”

Jesus makes it possible, we make it present.

Ian Cutmore, my Salvation Army Training College principal once said, ‘If it’s not happening where you are, it’s not happening’.

Jesus makes it possible, we make it present!

Jesus makes it possible by his birth, his example as found in the New Testament, by his death on the Cross and by his resurrection.

We make it present by our acceptance of that birth, life, death and resurrection in a way that radically changes how we live and how we relate to others; in how we celebrate Christmas; how we respond to those who are less well placed than ourselves, how we respond to refugees, the poor – how we respond to the other.

It is not about being guilty about how we are, who we are or where we are in this world. Guilt does not lead to the kingdom of God. What leads to the kingdom of God is the honest reflection on how we live on earth as peacemakers, as bringers of hope to others, and ourselves, as people who take seriously our place in this world.

If life was about individuals, if it was all about us, there was no need for Jesus to be born. There was no need for God to come into the world. We could just go on the way we always had.

Yet it is not about you or me as individuals. It is not about us. It is about what we do and become together. It is about how we respond to the carnage of global warming, the violence of the fundamentalist, the appealing lure of possessions and stuff we seek for ourselves – it’s about what we value and what gives us value.

Jesus was born an unlikely revolutionary, a vulnerable baby who survived because others, mostly unknown others, took great risks to ensure that he did.

The measure of our world, and of each of us, is whether we are prepared to take such risks everyday. It’s the only way the Kingdom of God will come.

What is thing called Christmas?

What is this thing called Christmas? What is this thing we have celebrated? What is the point of re-enacting an event which occurred so long ago and today has little meaning or relevance for those born into the consumerist world of advertising jingles, product placement and Boxing day sales? How does a baby born in an ancient and forgotten time speak to us today, at the cusp of another year?

How does this little child connect to us in the isolation and violence we encounter in our everyday life, for our world is no less violent than the one into which he was born, a time of military occupation, soldiers and oppression, of mandatory census taking and control, all of which is still the experience of those who live in the land of his birth.

Yet at his birth the world celebrated, the stars in the night sky shone brighter than before, the heavens seemed to sing and the animals of creation gathered to welcome him into this world. In the midst of tragedy was triumph, in the midst of violence was nonviolence, in the midst of angry voices came the gurgle of a baby boy.

This thing we call Christmas is a reminder of the birth that changed a world, of a day when all that occurred after was heralded by all that came before. It is the day in which God visited and said everyday you live can be as this one, the hello to the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God was incarnate in Jesus as he kicked and slept in the stable and is incarnate in us as we live everyday of our lives. Jesus grew and became a threat to the powers to be but also a symbol of hope to all who encountered him in the very ordinariness and oppression of their daily lives. He asks no less of us.

He comes to us in the extraordinary event of his birth to give birth to the kingdom of God in this world through the ordinariness of our daily lives. His coming was the epitome of nonviolence, the exact opposite of the power hungry oppressive violence of the society into which he was born.

He comes to us today into that same world, the world in which we live. William Shannon in discussing Thomas Merton and nonviolence comments ‘Active nonviolence must unmask the contradiction of a society based on force. Unfortunately, the affluent industrial society (in which we live), with all the freedom it presumes to offer its people, is a society that survives because it lives by systemic greed and a subtle violence that makes the affluent richer and the non-affluent poorer. Those who practice nonviolence will almost of necessity find themselves at odds with such a society.’ But always walking in the footsteps of the babe of Bethlehem.

God heralded in his kingdom, which Isaiah expressed as the hope of the people and that Simeon recognised when he met the little family in the synagogue. It is the kingdom Paul asks us to embrace and birth as children of God, not as slaves, but as those who freely live and act out of love for the love who came into the world as a little child.

Somehow this thing that happened at Christmas gives us permission to live reflecting the love which was the nonviolent birth and life of Jesus. Jesus did not come to confront the violence in others but save the world, to heal the deep disconnection in the soul of humanity and to do it through a life of nonviolent being.

He was not passive. His birth was not passive. His very birth disturbed all those who had most to lose, those who used oppression and power to further their own needs. Nothing has changed. He continues to disturb those who use the modern tools of fear, of desire fuelled by consumerism, by difference as we close our borders and protect our possessions, by the isms that identifies others as different to us. Yet the birth of Jesus calls us to a ‘”[Non-violence] (that) is not out for the conversion of the wicked to the ideas of the good, but for the healing and reconciliation of man with himself, man the person and man the human family”’.

Today as we move towards the New year we look back on the wreckage of 08, marred by the greed of the rich and powerful which will see millions of people around the world lose their homes, their livelihood and a future for their children, marred by violence which has ripped apart countries, peoples and families in places as diverse as the outback of Australia, small countries in Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan and Mumbai and more, marred by the egos of people like Robert Mugabe and ask ourselves what are we to do?

Perhaps the babe of Bethlehem speaks to us to find the violence in ourselves, in our very being and how the actions we do everyday impact upon others in our world and then to find a way to live in love with all, nonviolent in our being and in our actions. It is a sobering moment when we stand still and listening to the violence in ourselves and accept that we are called to mirror the incarnation of Christ, the most surprising entrance into our world of the Kingdom of love.

For that moment when the Jesus entered the world was the moment when the world remembered what it was called to be and began the long and difficult process of reconciling the fall of man into a resurrected world of love and nonviolence, three days after his death. Jesus lived and died so that we could do the same. He rose again so that we could rise above our fallen nature and become the children of God, and we are called to born again each day in the glowing reflection of Bethlehem

It is hoped that today and everyday forward we will discover what Ghandi meant when he wrote “Jesus lived and died in vain if he did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love.”

Sermon Sunday After Christmas Year B 28 12 08 St Judes