The World of Rev Ken
Epiphany 5 2006Isa 40.21-31, Psalm 147, 1 Corinthians 9.16-23, Mark 1.29-39.We’ve heard this morning possibly my favourite piece of scripture in all of the bible.
It’s the reading from Isaiah. In particular the bit about being lifted up on eagles wings. It’s a powerful image to me, because there is something about eagles I really like. I like eagles so much that I had one tattooed on my right arm a long, long time ago. I remember how much of a thrill it was a few years ago, when I was riding my last motorbike, my long suffering Honda 500, around Kangaroo island, and I saw an eagle at the side of the road. It just sat there and watched me ride past. It was magnificent, such a wonderful, majestic creature. And so unafraid, so unconcerned with this noisy motorcycle going past, so aloof and unaffected by the passing world.
What does the image of an eagle mean to you? To the American forefathers, who chose as their national emblem the bald eagle, it apparently meant strength, courage, freedom, and immortality. I also read that the eagle can symbolise spiritual energy. The eagle is the symbol of St. John the Evangelist, which by coincidence is the patron saint of the church where I became an Anglican and identified a calling to ordained ministry.
But I think it’s the freedom that I like the most about the symbol of the eagle. That the creature is not stuck on this earth, that it can soar above the turkeys stuck on the ground, all the rubbish, and be distant, removed, aloof.
On Monday I got back from a week on the bike. 2700kms or thereabouts, to Melbourne via Port Fairy, the Great ocean road, then from Melbourne to Wodonga via Healesville and the Blacks Spur, Beechworth and the Bakery, and home via Shepparton and Bendigo, through Horsham. What a fantastic ride. When my butt had recovered, by about Wednesday, I found myself wanting to be back out on the road, traveling. This has been exacerbated by watching the dvd of the series “The Long way round” with Ewan Macgregor and Charley Borman riding around the world, northern hemisphere at least, on BMW motorcycles. It’s not always easy for them, the journey, especially in Mongolia and Siberia, but the freedom, the travel is the thing. It’s not so much the destination, it’s the journey. I had a much easier time of it than they did, I only had to ride through very hot conditions, like 40 degrees for days on end. No bogs, no river crossings, no freezing conditions, although the heat was hard enough. Yet through the hardships, the freedom, that feeling of traveling, of being in between, rootless, removed from the cares and the petty worries of the world was a wonderful feeling. It’s very easy to get addicted to that feeling and to feel a bit lost when it’s all finished, even though you get home to the family and friends, and back to normal life. Ewan and Charley recognized the feeling was coming, that let down at the end of a journey, when a destination is realised.
I was talking to someone about this phenomen a couple of days ago, the fact that I kept thinking about the trip and pining for the road, and this person described the feeling as “freedom withdrawal”. So this “withdrawal”, combined with the eagle’s wings reading, has got me thinking a lot about freedom.
Freedom has become a commodity. Harley Davidson try to sell their rather agricultural motorcycles on the basis of freedom. But considering the more desirable models in the larger engine range cost upward of $23k all I can think of is being shackled to a huge personal loan. That’s not freedom to me I’m afraid. But Freedom is a desirable commodity. People are prepared to pay for it. Yet as with the Harley, its rarely actually freedom. It’s an illusion of freedom. There are still dependencies, there are still ties, there is still a cost in the end. True freedom is something totally different.
We tend to think of freedom as the ability to do whatever we want to, some sort of personal anarchy. There is a common misconception that religious people, particularly Christians, aren’t free, because we have lots of rules to follow, and spend all our lives trying to curtail other people’s freedom and fun as well. Hippies were free, the idea was to have no ties man, free love, all that stuff, until sexually transmitted diseases started running rampant in communes. Funny how herpes can make people square again, turn them into good middle class citizens. Our concept of Freedom is but an illusion, I think. Our version of freedom could never make us happy. If we did just what we wanted to do, then imagine the chaos, the anarchy, the mess, the herpes. No, as Pope John Paul 2 once said, "Freedom is not the power to do what one wants. Freedom is the power to do what is right." Freedom is not being shackled to the evil of this world. It is the ability to love in spite of who we are and the situation in which we find ourselves. It is the ability and the desire to heal and be healed ourselves, and to live that healing for the world. It is the freedom to dare to be whole. It is the freedom to love God and let God love us. It is the freedom to believe that Jesus did something wonderful for us.
God restores us, frees us.. That’s what we hear in the reading from Isaiah. God is the one behind it all, the one who made it all, the one beside whom we are very very insignificant. Yet in Gods saving grace, the gift of Jesus Christ, we see that we are not insignificant in God’s eyes, we are loved, we are offered freedom to choose to love God and love God’s creation, our fellow creatures. And people who are freed, restored to fullness in creation are going to want to tell others about it. That is our commission, as Paul writes in the letter to the Corinthians. It is something we are entrusted with. Paul is free, yet in this freedom he chooses to serve others and tell them the gospel. He is free to act appropriately in a context, being inclusive and tolerant with his behaviour amongst different cultures, telling the gospel in relevant ways and treating different peoples with respect. Freedom means he did not have to follow an oppressive set of laws, but could follow the law of love, and in so doing share in God’s blessings. We are free to believe in something, freed of the pessimism of this world, free to hope.
Free to do a lot, really, contrary to popular opinion.
Being a Christian isn’t too bad, is it?
The Lord be with you.
Christmas Eve 2005No room at the inn.
What sort of a welcome is that to the world for the Son of God? No place for them at the inn.
Well, it’s to expected really and I doubt there would be a better reception today.
It’s not that there would be any problem accommodating the expectant mother and her husband. Perhaps room for a donkey might be a bit more tricky. I mean, hotels don’t have stables anymore, they have subterranean car parks, cavernous dirty places where the air is full of carbon monoxide and the stench of stale cigarettes and alcohol. A donkey would suffocate in one of those all night. But the family would have no trouble at all. Unless of course they were homeless, destitute – then they would have trouble. But the pertinent issue these days is that there doesn’t seem to be real place for Jesus in the present world, or at least, here in Australia. And sadly, even less room for Jesus at Christmas time in this heavily secular society.
I wonder about the fact that there was no place for Mary, Joseph and the soon to arrive Jesus at the inn. I wonder if its not just that there was not the accommodation left, but that the inn keeper didn’t like their kind. I mean, they’re from Nazareth, country hicks. She is pregnant, they’ve been traveling, they’re probably filthy from the road. I wonder perhaps if they were treated the same way we treat homeless people these days. We have trouble finding places for them. They don’t fit in,they disturb us. Its not just that they are homeless that disturbs us, often its because they are different, strange, unwell, that makes them outsiders. They don’t fit anywhere and so are left on the streets. Its easier for us to leave them there.
So it’s kind of a strange paradox we have here – God’s Son, our Saviour, born into a world where there is no place for his kind. Born amongst the animals and their smells, their dung. Born amongst the lowly – the King in the outhouse. No finery, no fanfare, no thrones or bells ringing here. It reminds us of His death as well, a King on a cross, no crown of gold, just a crown of thorns, a crown of pain. We can’t separate his death from his birth, or his birth from his death. They are the bookends of His life that give it the meaning, they are the significant events of grace and mercy and love.
Because it is love, above all, that brings us Christmas. I guess we imitate this love a bit with the so-called Christmas spirit, that warm fuzzy feeling that makes us slightly more charitable at this time of the year, that makes us a little more friendly, until we’ve had too much to drink and start threatening photographers of course. It’s that Christmas spirit that inspired the truce on the battlefields of Gallipoli, where they stopped shooting at each other and got out of the trenches and met in the middle for fellowship. But just as that ended too quickly, and they got back to the process of shooting at each other, fighting some earthly King’s war, so our Christmas spirit seems to evaporate on Boxing Day. Yet the true Christmas spirit, that love and grace and mercy that God shows us in Jesus, never ends, never gives up, never evaporates. This love is what St. John writes about in the gospel attributed to him, 3.16, “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that all who believe in him shall not die, but shall have everlasting life.” It’s a love given to all, regardless of who we are or what we have done. All we have to do is accept it from God.
Now there is implicit in this equality, isn’t there. We are all offered God’s love. Yet I think there are some who are favoured in the message of Christmas, and it is made plain here in our gospel reading for tonight.
Its not one particular denomination, its not members of a secret sect or people who worship a particular way or who speak in toungues or who prophecy. Who is it then? It is the poor. The message of hope is primarily directed at the poor, the outsiders, the outcasts, the rejected. It is a message that God does not regard them as outsiders – indeed, God regards them as the true kingdom, those most deserving of God’s love, those who need it the most. In this, it is also a critique of the religious and political systems that keep them poor and outcast, that keeps them in poverty. Systems that are still in place today in one form or another. Perhaps our annual subscription to the “Christmas spirit” is our way of denying our complicity in this.
We see further evidence of Christ’s significance to the poor in the announcement by the angel to the shepherds of the birth of their Messiah. The shepherds were outsiders. They couldn’t leave the flocks at all, so they couldn’t worship at the temple. They slept rough, they probably didn’t clean all that often, and I imagine they would have been covered in wool fat and dags. Although perhaps the lanolin made their hands soft, who knows? But anyway, they were quite definitely outsiders. Yet they heard the news first. Blue collar workers heard it first. Outcasts, outsiders, the unclean, heard it first. They got the scoop. And they responded first. They accepted the Good News first, because it was meant for them. It was good news that they could handle, that was not threatening.
Now I wonder if the angel had appeared at the temple, and the religious authorities had heard the news first, what would have happened? If the angel appeared in the palace of Augustus, what would have happened? What if it happened now? I imagine the spin doctors and politicians having a field day, the religious authorities arguing over the theology and whether or not it fits in with what they believe, and what sort of service they should have to commemorate it. I imagine Bishops and Pastors and elders referring the matter to endless committees and conclaves and board meetings, the issue being pulled apart in the colleges and procrastinated about, finally being forgotten about cos it’s all too hard, and besides, we do have a church to run, don’t we? I imagine us rejecting him. Which is what happened back then. Jesus was rejected by those he came to save. Because He didn’t fit in with their plans, their politics, their power games, their bigotry. He upset too many people. He was friends with the powerless, not the powerful.
God’s rejection of human values of power and wealth can also be seen in the fact that God’s Son himself came into the world in the most vulnerable human form possible – a baby, new born, in a poor family in rustic and crude surroundings, laid to sleep in the feeding trough of cattle. The miracle of birth combined with the miracle and wonder of God encapsulated in this tiny, helpless body. That’s love. That’s true sacrifice, giving up the greatness, power, strength, of being divine, to be vulnerable for the sake of others. That’s real love.
I’m not trying to make us all feel guilty. Christmas is a celebration, isn’t it? But I am trying to say, in a roundabout way perhaps, that God’s love for us is huge, and in Jesus we see this. And that God cares about the little people, the defenceless, the vulnerable. I also want to encourage you not to give up the Christmas spirit, on boxing day, but rather to nurture it, and to make a place for Jesus in your lives all the time. Let him be born in you and dwell in your hearts. Live the wonder of Christmas everyday, reveling in the incarnate God, this God who is with us.
Have a wonderful Christmas, and may God fill your hearts and homes with joy.
The Lord be with you.
Christ the King 2005Hasn’t this year gone by really fast?
I mean, here we are already at the end of the year.
What? Its not the end of the year yet? But it is. Oh, you mean its not December 31st yet. No, it isn’t, but it is the end of the year. It’s the end of the churches year.
Next Sunday we begin the countdown to Christmas. Next Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent. We start at the beginning again, we remember Jesus birth and how this is the fulfillment of God’s promise of grace to humanity. The wheel turns, the end becomes the beginning.
But this week, today, we celebrate the end of the year with the feast of Christ the King. How appropriate. Because we finish of with a reminder of who is really in charge, who’s agenda it is, who’s church it is. Its Jesus’ Church, and He is the king.
The King. Now that’s a troublesome title in Australia today, isn’t it? I mean, we are not the most fiercely royalist nation on earth, although I think if we had the Danish royal family we might be a little more so. Our lot have so much scandal, don’t they? But the title is not terribly helpful to many of us. What do we think of when we hear the word king? In an Anglican context we might remember King Henry 8th, who whilst he was in many ways responsible for the Anglican Church breaking away from Rome, was not a terribly nice person. When he didn’t want to be married anymore, he usually found permanent ways to rid himself of the missus. Not a very Christian thing to do. We may think of persons in power, good and bad, who are waited on by many servants, who live lives of luxury, privileged and power, in great big mansions and castles behind big walls and with many guards. They are untouchable, they are above us, they are out of reach. Is this what we mean when we affirm Christ as the King?
Of course, when we look at the Gospel reading we see a very different type of king. We don’t see the king of luxury but the king of poverty. We see a King who identifies with the least of the world, not the most. Its not some patronising visit to a childrens hospital or to see people whose legs have been blown off by land mines, but is so identified with the least that He chose to die the death of the Least, after being born as one of the least, in a place where animals were kept, and attended by dirty smelly shepherds. This is the real idea of Kingship, an idea that humanity just can’t seem to grasp. What does he say “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” This is an example of leadership, of relationship that we could all benefit from – treating each other as if they were Christ, treating each other as if they were royalty. It’s a good lesson to remember today as we reflect on the year gone by and remember who the boss is. It’s not me, in spite of what my cup says, it’s Jesus. It’s his church in the end. Not mine, or yours, or the Archbishops, or even MDC’s. Jesus is our Lord. It is Jesus’s church. That’s who is in charge.
How many kings, or any other leaders, for that matter, lead from the front? How many presidents, or prime ministers, or government members lead wars from the front? Would the answer be none? How many leaders lead from the streets, where people live rough, or lead through their lives in outback communities, or by doing it tough some where? How many church leaders really do it tough these days? Not many, I would imagine. I’d include myself amongst the ones who don’t do it tough. But Jesus as King did it tough. He led from the front lines, the battle against oppression in the name of religion, the battle against injustice, the battle against the habit we humans have of being in-human with each other – in short, He led the battle against evil, the battle for life. Perhaps militaristic language isn’t entirely appropriate but it is a battle sometimes, it is tough sometimes, and Jesus copped the worst of it. For us. That’s a real King. That’s a real leader. Even at the end, on the cross, when hope could have been abandoned, it instead became the defining moment of His Kingship, the point at which all human concepts pertaining to the Kingdom of God were destroyed forever. The Kingdom is in this world but not of it. It was the end of the old, the beginning of the new. The Kingdom here on earth. A possibility that Jesus won for us.
End times are tricky, they can be difficult, they can be sad. The end of a life can be a sad time. My Nan died on Friday morning, and that’s sad. I guess the fact that she was very very ill, at 90 years of age, makes it a little easier to take. I’ll never forget her jelly cakes, they were the best. Its sad for us left behind.
We are at an end time now in this parish. We are at a crossroads. We cant afford to have full time ordained ministry here anymore. In effect, we cant be a parish in the way we have been used to being a parish.
How do we feel about this? I imagine many of you will feel as I did, quite down about it, and that’s natural. What I want to say though, is this – that even though it’s the end of the way we were, it is the beginning of a new way of being. It is freeing, in a sense, because we can go for broke now, with reckless abandon. We can try stuff out, without fear of failure, because we have nothing to lose, and plenty to gain. Before a resurrection there has to be a crucifixion. Before the beginning again, there is an end. The end is a transitional phase, just as death is. It’s a way of being something different. That is the opportunity that confronts us now.
What do we do? Do we accept that our parish is dying? Do we just let it go, not changing our attitudes, not struggling, not attempting to call for help? That’s the key – calling for help. We need to ask God for help, if we really want this parish to keep going.
