A Different Country?!

They came in to the little town
A semi-naked band subdued and silent.
All that remained of their tribe.
They came here to the place of their old bora ground
Where now the many white men hurry about like ants.
Notice of estate agent reads: “Rubbish May Be Tipped Here”.
Now it half covers the traces of the old bora ring.
They sit and are confused, they cannot say their thoughts:
“We are strangers here now,
but the white tribe are the strangers.
We belong here, we are of the old ways.
We are the corroborree and the bora ground.
We are the old sacred ceremonies, the laws of the elders.
We are the wonder tales of Dreamtime, the tribal legends told.
We are the past, the hunts and the laughing games,
the wandering camp fire.
We are the lightning-bolt over Gaphembah Hill
Quick and terrible,
And the Thunderer after him, that loud fellow.
We are the quiet daybreak paling the dark lagoon.
We are the shadow-ghosts creeping back
as the camp fires burn low.
We are the nature and the past, all the old ways
Gone now and scattered.
The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter.
The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone
from this place.
The bora ring is gone.
The corroboree is gone.
And we are going.”
(“We are going (For Grannie Coolwell)” by Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal)

The Matthean community, the community to which the Gospel of Matthew speaks and out of which the Gospel of Matthew arises, was a community on the edge of their society. They were being pushed out by the religious leaders, by their social groups, but most of all they were being pushed out by their families.

Kinship was everything in Mediterranean societies at the beginning of the first millenium. It wasn’t what you knew or who you knew, it was whose family you belonged to that counted. If you didn’t have a family support structure you were out on your own. There was no social security, no medicare, no superannuation, no welfare state. If you wanted to defy your family, turn your back on your tradition, or simply not do the right thing, you could find yourself in a pretty tough position without family support.

But it was probably never the intention of the Matthean community to put themselves in that position. They were so sure that they were part of the continuing tradition of the keeping and carrying of God’s law. They were so sure that they were part of the continuing movement towards the promised realm of God. That’s why it’s nearly four chapters or 82 verses into the Gospel of Matthew before we actually hear about the proclaimed message of Jesus. The first 81 verses have been establishing who Jesus is, how much he fits the tradition, and how well he fits into the spirit of the law of God—81 verses establishing Jesus’ credentials.

Now it’s always encumbent on a speaker to establish a rapport with their hearers before the meat of their speech is delivered, but 81 verses seems a little excessive even in Gospel terms. Mark has a very cursory introduction of 14 verses before we get to the all important message; John’s not so much interested in words as signs so in the very first chapter we get a run down on the signs which point to Jesus’ significance. Only Luke takes as much time on the introduction as Matthew, and you have to wonder whether it’s an historian’s love of story that’s playing a bit of a role there, or perhaps like Matthew, Luke is also speaking to an audience that needs to be wooed first. Yes, Matthew has very clearly and carefully set up the character of Jesus before his first real proclamation is made: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."

And significantly, immediately following this one sentence account of Jesus’ message, we are greeted by stories that assure the hearer that Jesus was not alone. He was not a lone messenger of this proclamation from God. He was part of a larger community, part of a greater family, surrounded by appropriate social support structures, albeit not necessarily by blood relatives. He was not alone. The collator of the stories of Matthew’s Gospel is very careful to show that the new community of Christ, like the Matthean community as part of that wider community, was a good family social support structure. They had what it took to belong to each other and, therefore, to their world.

Nevertheless, the Matthean community was fast becoming labelled by their surrounding culture as “deviant”. And in every culture, in every time and place, people who are labelled as deviant are always the target for attack. No wonder they are so concerned with arguing the case for Jesus and the community of Christ being in line with the truth of the tradition. This issue was a life and death matter in terms of identity, in terms of acceptance in their society, in terms of social and economic support, and perhaps even in terms of specifically targeted attacks against their presence in their region.

We may go home, but we cannot relive our childhoods. We may reunite with our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunties, uncles, communities, but we cannot relive the 20, 30, 40 years that we spent without their love and care, and they cannot undo the grief and mourning they felt when we were separated from them. We can go home to ourselves as Aboriginals, but this does not erase the attacks inflicted on our hearts, minds, bodies and souls, by caretakers who thought their mission was to eliminate us as Aboriginals. (Link-Up NSW).

That’s part of the submission to the National Inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families by Link-Up NSW, an organisation which assists separated and displaced people in finding their families again.

Separation from community is not a matter to be taken lightly, even though many of us treat it as such in our increasingly mobile society. More and more people move house, job and community through choice and compulsion with very little thought for the actual disruption which that that creates in people’s lives. Even when we move from one similar community to another with all our family ties intact, the move can cause considerable stress and strain on individuals. Moving communities is right up on the stress scale just below the death of a spouse, because moving involves the loss of key support structures and entails the need to re-build them. People forcibly removed physically, politically, economically or socially and those who move between communities which are quite different, and may even speak different languages are confronted by yet greater loss of support.

So when we hear the story of the disciples who left their boats to follow Jesus, we are not hearing about an individual choice, we are hearing about a shift in communities and social support structures. Take their boats, that was never an option, they belonged to the family. For whatever reasons people left their familial situations to become part of the emerging Christian community, they were taking an enormous social step. And to leave a father, that was tantamount to blasphemy itself. You have to wonder what really was going on in that society at that time, and in Matthew’s Gospel we can only read between the lines.

Those who came to form part of the emerging Christian community would more than likely not have come alone. While they may have left more important or powerful connections, they would have brought with them those family members that had more connection with the leavers than the stayers. That’s part of the significance of the stories of the baptism of whole households in Acts. Households, extended families, which included servants as well in richer establishments, stuck together. The group was more important than the individual. There was no sense that someone should do what’s right for them. It was always about family obligations and family ties.

So what happens when those family ties are severed or damaged? You have to re-build. You have to create a new support structure for yourself and those for whom you have responsibility. The early Christian communities were not only building a new community for themselves, they were re-building their lives, re-making social networks, re-structuring family supports. This time those supports were not necessarily based on blood relationships. This time those supports were connected to the desire to follow what they believed was the authentic law of God, revealed in Jesus.

What made them leave their original support base? Perhaps they were already outcasts for a variety of reasons. Certainly, it is in Matthew that we hear about the acceptance of the kinds of people that might have faced ostracism in their society simply because they were who they were: Gentiles, women, the ill and diseased. Perhaps in their ostracism, they discovered the acceptance of Jesus, and perhaps when they heard the message of Jesus “Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near”, they heard the promise of a new beginning and a new community.

When each person is reunited with their family, it’s the beginning of a slow process of getting to know their family and learning about their community. Support and counselling of the many underlying issues is normally required as an ongoing process for many years. (Link-Up Qld)

That’s part of the submission from Link-Up in Qld to the National Inquiry on the stolen generations.

Somehow, the early Christian communities were able to re-build themselves, to re-create the social support they needed to survive. For them, the message of repentance was a message of acceptance. It proclaimed the need to re-evaluate their lives, to see them in connection with a new community rather than the support structures which they had been denied.

The Greek word for “repentance” literally means a change of mind. Centuries of overlay has made us hear that word only in terms of personal guilt, but perhaps in its early context it meant something more like, “Don’t despair, change your attitude, change your understanding, the community of God is always with you. You are always part of it. It’s okay to leave your boats behind because there is safety with the people of God.” And perhaps it was also a call to the wider society to re-evaluate their tendency to ostracise those who did not fit certain criteria, to see the community of humanity as a community which could encompass all, and to understand the eternal law of God as a call to that kind of inclusive community.

Our story is in the land...
It is written in those sacred places.
My children will look after those places,
that’s the law.
Dreaming place...
you can’t change it,
no matter who you are.
No matter you rich man,
no matter you king.
You can’t change it.
My children go to hang onto this story.
This important story.
I hang onto this story all my life.
My father tell me this story.
My children can’t lose it.
When that law started?
I don’t know how many thousand years.
European say 40,000 years,
but I reckon myself probably was more because it is sacred.
(“Australia’s Kakaduman” by Bill Neidjie)

The community of Matthew is carving out a new country for itself, spinning a new story of identity—a country born out of the margins; a country steeped in the law and the tradition; a country that offered new hope, a new society, a new family; a country that the Matthean community understood to belong to God: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." This new country is God’s sacred realm and Jesus is at its heart.

Call to Worship for Year A Ordinary Sunday 3

The Lord is our light and our salvation:
whom then shall we fear?
God is the stronghold of our life:
of whom then shall we be afraid?
God gives us shelter:
a place to honour God and seek God’s way.
Just one thing we ask:
to live in God’s house forever.
In God’s house, we celebrate God’s beauty:
safe to ask questions and sing God’s praise!
Adapted from Psalm 27: 1,4-6 NRSV.

To Fulfill All Righteousness

“To fulfil all righteousness.” My mother used to say that when there seemed to be no other plausible reason for having to do something. “To fulfil all righteousness.” It’s the letter of the law not the spirit. We have to do it because there is some rule or other that says we have to do it, even if we don’t know why we have to do it. “To fulfil all righteousness.” But I don’t think that’s what we’re meant to hear when we hear those words in the story of the baptism of Jesus. I don’t think that that is what “to fulfil all righteousness” quite means here.

Because “righteousness” is really just another word for justice in the Gospel stories. The righteousness of God is about God’s justness. So the story of Jesus’ baptism is not about Jesus undertaking something that he had to do for no apparent reason. And the fact that the story is included in 3 gospels and alluded to in the fourth means that the early Christian communities and the gospel editors didn’t think that it was that kind of story either: a story about nothing, if you like.

No, the story is included in the early church’s memories of Jesus because it had significance for the early church. The fact that Jesus was baptised had significance for them: so much significance that baptism becomes a very important ritual in the early Christian community—the rite of initiation into the community itself.

But baptism was around long before Christianity. Water is such an important symbol for human beings. It lends itself so well to symbolic gestures. It is an ambiguous sign. Water has the power for life and the power for death. The power to cleanse and the power to sweep entirely away. Long before Christianity, baptism, the act of going under and coming up from the waters was used as a sign for conversion or new directions in religious faith. The word “baptism” comes from a Greek word meaning “to dip” or “to plunge”. The new convert is dipped or plunged into water to signify a cleansing, renewing, rebirthing into a new faith direction.

That’s why one of the suggestions for the reason why the story of Jesus’ baptism has been so significant has been to argue that Jesus’ baptism is the point at which he receives his call to ministry. This story is said to recall the moment when Jesus’ destiny was fully revealed. It’s a good suggestion, but not my personal choice.

The story itself, particularly in Matthew, doesn’t seem to see things that way. It’s a pretty definite Jesus that says “it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness”. And according to the preceding piece about John the Baptist, Jesus stands out from the crowd long before the act of baptism. No, the story of Jesus’ baptism is the Gospel of Matthew is not presented as the moment of the truth, the moment of his call.

No, for me, it’s the water to which I return in the story of Jesus’ baptism, and in Matthew’s Gospel, the Jewish-Christian Gospel, I think that it’s the water that’s quite significant: the going down and the coming up.

You have to remember that, at the time that the gospels are being put together, the early Christian communities are still in the process of becoming separated from their Jewish beginnings. The Jewish faith story still runs through their attempts to understand who Jesus was and why he was significant. And the defining story for the people of the Jewish faith is the story of the Exodus: the rescue of the oppressed people of Israel from the tyrannical Egyptian pharoah—the story of the Prince of Egypt as DreamWorks would like to tell us.

This story of going down and coming up, of descent and ascent, has already appeared as an echo in the Gospel of Matthew in the tale of the escape of Jesus’ family to Egypt after the warning from the wise visitors. And we are still meant to hear its echoes in the story of Jesus’ baptism. Because this story is yet another story about establishing Jesus credentials.

In chapter 1 we hear about his genealogy in the line of Abraham and David. We hear of his birth in fulfilment of the prophets. In chapter 2 we hear of his recognition by nations beyond Israel, and his appearance in fulfilment of the wisdom from the East. We also hear of the journey to and from Egypt, just like the ancestors of the Jewish people. And in the baptismal story we are meant to keep hearing these echoes of faith and tradition, placing Jesus in the line of the faithful and prophetic people of God.

To be a person of the Jewish faith means being able to recount the ancestral story as your story:

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor who went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Deut 26:5b-9)

This is the tradition to which Jesus is linked because this is a tradition of depth. In this tradition, there is a sense in which faith in God is discovered in the trials of life, in the moments of despair when even God seems far away—in the goings down before the comings out which only God can do. “To fulfil all righteousness.” To bring about all justice.

We don’t really know anything much about the life of Jesus. We don’t really know what his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood was like. We don’t know what prompted his ministry. We have only the records of the gospel writers, memories and re-tellings of a very short period in Jesus’ life. But they all include or allude to the baptism of Jesus, and for Matthew in particular, the image is attached to the powerful stories of the Jewish faith.

Jesus is the one who went down to Egypt and who came up again not to be saved, but to save. Jesus is the one who went down in the waters, not to be saved but to save. Jesus is the one who endured the pain of degradation and humiliation to continue his message of justice and peace. Jesus is the archetypal child of God—the one who discovers relationship in God in the depths of life, and who emerges from those depths to point others towards God’s love, to bring others into the realm of God’s love.

This is God’s righteousness. This is God’s justice. Jesus participates in the tradition, identifies with the tradition of the righteousness and justice of God “to fulfil all righteousness”, to fulfil all justice, to expand the community of the people of God.

And now we are the baptised people of God. Jesus’ story is our story. For we have participated symbolically and in reality as human beings in the goings down and the comings up of the human story. Our God is the God we have discovered in the depths, who is the one who brings us up out of the water into the light. Our God is the God who demands the fulfilment of all righteousness, not because there is no apparent reason for doing it, but because it is the will and the justice of God.

And as God’s baptised people we are called to bring others into the community of God: to help others stand in the tradition where God never leaves the people even in their deepest despair; to proclaim that the work of God happens in the goings down and comings up of a people of faith as they seek to fulfil all righteousness; to bring about God’s community of justice and peace; to allow ourselves to be baptised in the tradition, the continuing life of the people of God, and the continuing life of humanity as it cries out for justice and peace; to be prepared for our own goings down and comings up in our own journeys of life and faith towards the justice of God.

Playing With Light

So it’s the 9th day of the Christmas season, the second Sunday of that season and the day we may also commemorate as Epiphany, the celebration of the revealing of Christ, the “unfolding vision of wholeness that God has made manifest for all people in Jesus the Christ” (Seasons of the Spirit). Epiphany means “revelation” or “manifestation” or “display”. The day of Epiphany, 6 January, is the day after the Christmas season. It marks the unleashing of the impact of the incarnation upon the world.

At Epiphany, we hear and tell the story of the wise visitors to the infant Jesus, not in a manger, but in a house. And as we do, we disentangle a piece of Matthew’s story about Jesus from the trappings of the stable and the shepherds at the birth of Jesus.

We hear the story of the visit of the Magi, the wise ones, to the infant Jesus, not as part of the prettiness and wonder of the Christmas story, but as part of the ongoing storying in which the early Christian communities were involved in about the life of Jesus. This story is not a lovely story about some strange visitors. It is a strange story about knife-edge politics—a story about the challenging and confronting of traditions, about the way in which the emerging Christian story was being read back into the life of the infant Jesus.

We hear about the interplay of the light and the depth of the Jesus experience on the unfolding understanding of the early Christian community, and the way that that interplay was being enfolded into their own story.

Have you ever sat somewhere and watched the play of light on water? Perhaps you were at the ocean, or by a waterfall, or near a river. Maybe the sun was high and the glare was intense, so that you almost had to turn away. Perhaps the light was diffused by some rainforest trees so that the light jumped like the water constantly changing pattern and form. Perhaps there were clouds in the sky that cast intricate shadows of varying shades. Light illuminates and light obfuscates; light makes it impossible to see. We don’t see the light. We see that which the light shines upon.

Water is a symbol of the Christian community—the baptised ones; those immersed in the depths of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And light is a sign of the revelation of God in Christ. And in this interplay of the light of Christ on the depths of the Christian community, the story of the sages who recognise what is right before the eyes of Israel, the light to the nations, emerges.

It is through our stories that we make sense of our world. It is by our stories that we describe who we are. And it is in the re-telling of those stories, the re-storying of our traditions, our histories, our identities that we learn to cope with our ever-changing world and ourselves within it.

The communities out of which the Gospel of Matthew arose were discovering who they were—as a reformist Jewish movement, as Jewish Christians, and then as Christians distinct from their Jewish counterparts. They valued the depths of Judaisim, the insights of their faith, the Jewish faith, and they understood that that faith had sustained the people for a long, long time. Within their tradition, there were various elements that were particularly important: respect for the law of God; interest in the idea of God’s wisdom and how that wisdom interacted with the wisdom of other peoples around the Jewish faith community; the challenging story of the people’s descent into Egypt, their liberation by God and the journey to the promised land. But they were also experiencing something new—something that stemmed from their faith, and extended it.

Now on top of the deep traditions of the Jewish faith, the people of the communities which Matthew addresses have the depth of the Jesus experience. The light is playing on their water and producing new understandings of who God is and who they are before God. The depth of the traditions which they embody are being illuminated anew to produce different patterns and different ways of seeing; and their storytelling reflects those new experiences and understandings. So they tell a new old story about a visit of some wise folk from the East who recognise the light when they see it.

In the telling of this tale, they confront the depths of their traditions with the light of the new, and in that process some of the old has to go, some of the new has to be re-interpreted and some of the old definitely has to stay. Because you cannot watch light play on water if there is no water, and none of us begin our stories from nothing. We all build from what we have storied before.

So a story is told which involves confronting a dubious part of the tradition. A bad king, Herod, takes the role of that which must be defied. The story includes a newer part of the tradition: an emphasis on wisdom in the persons of the visitors from the East. The wisdom tradition was barely centuries old at the time of Jesus. And the new light—the infant Jesus—more than a baby, not still in the manger, but residing with parents to protect and care for him—takes centre stage.

The old story is quoted to back up the plot. Bethlehem is cited as the place most likely to sporn a new ruler to defy the might of kings like Herod, no longer loyal to the tradition, but operated like puppets behind the scenes by Roman rulers. Last week you heard more of that story. The fear of Herod, the attempt to kill the infant, the journey to Egypt and out again: an upside down version of the earlier tale of the Exodus. This week we heard that story’s beginning: the alerting of Herod to a possible rival by the Magi from the East.

And when the old traditions have been subsumed into the new, the wise visitors and Herod the king depart the story, and the light falls fully on the new light and the teaching of Jesus, but that’s where our story continues next week.

The story is alarming, more like a crime novel, or a movie thriller than a cute fairy story for children. Because in this story there is confrontation and intrigue, violence and elusive escape. And it’s not just in the plot. It’s in the very story itself. For as the story unfolds, we are drawn into a re-storying of tradition; a playing of the light on the water that can at first dazzle, sometimes transfix and maybe even confuse. When we confront a new story, when we are confronted by a light that startles and overwhelms us, it is our traditions that we fall back upon, the things with which we are familiar. And it is from these old stories that we draw the stuff of the explanation for the new. In a way, that is a kind of violence too, because as we make the new story, we destroy the old. And while we always hope that our continuing story will help us to understand our living better and better we can never be sure. We trust in the play of water on light. Like the infant Jesus, we journey to Egypt in vulnerability uncertain whether the traditioning process will help us to re-make our stories again.

Re-making our stories is something we do every day of our lives, but it is particularly something that we do in times of immense change and challenge. The ability to re-make our stories is part of being resilient, part of being able to cope with life’s highs and lows.

The emerging Christian communities whose stories only Matthew records find comfort and resilience in the story of infant Jesus, visited by the wise, foretold by the prophets, bringer of light and keeper of the depths of old traditions. And in that delicate balance, they re-make their story and the story of the world.

So where does that leave this Christian community today. We continue that re-storing process. The light of Christ continues to play in our lives and to produce new patterns and experiences. And we are called to proclaim them.

Let All Creation Praise God!

Let all creation praise God! Let all creation praise God! It’s such a strong message in the Christmas season. The angels sing it. We sing it. And we want so much for the whole world to join in. Let all creation praise God!

The Psalms frequently testify to creation singing God’s praises. The Psalm for today (148) does just that... This Psalm calls on Earth, sea and sky to be filled with celebration and singing… [T]he psalmist calls on all the components of creation to praise God because all creation has the creative impulse of the Word of God as their source [In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.] The psalmist calls on Earth, the elements of Earth and the creatures of Earth to praise God. This colourful list includes sea monsters, fire, wild animals, humans, and birds. Everything from ants to atoms seems to be included. [Excerpted from Kinship with Creation by Norman C. Habel as found on the Season of Creation website. Seasons of the Spirit Year A Advent/Christmas/Epiphany 2010-2011]

But tragedy is never far from the Christmas scene; just as it is never far from the scene of creation, the very scene of our life. The cross looms over the horizon of our celebration of the birth of Jesus. The real world of pain and hunger, sickness and need is barely hidden below the surface of our celebrations; and the very day after we celebrate the joyful birth, we hear the story of the slaughter of the innocents. Let all creation praise God! But in Ramah, there is “wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel [is] weeping for her children; [and] she refuse[s] to be consoled, because they are no more." (Matthew 2:18)

How can we sing the Lord’s sing in this foreign land?

And yet that is what we are called to do: to sing God’s praise, to honour God in the midst of life whatever that is. Perhaps it is not easy for us in our comfortable setting to understand this calling, this vocation as it is for those who have less, who know their need more closely.

Taizé is a village in southern France that is home to an ecumenical Christian community. The community began in 1940 by Roger Louis Schütz-Marsauche (Brother Roger), a Swiss born theological student studying in France. When it first began, the Taizé community offered a safe haven to refugees during the Nazi occupation of France. After World War II, the community slowly established a mission to promote peace across Western Europe and eventually around the world. This mission is most evident in the international, ecumenical gathering of thousands of youth each week in the summer. Daily worship includes short, musical selections that are sung repetitively and often use a variety of languages. [Indeed, many of the songs are sung in Latin, a language that belongs to nobody now.] It is said the meaning of the songs transcends any particular people represented by the language, furthering the evidence of peace within all creation. Many congregations use Taizé prayers and songs in their worship, some offering a monthly service of Taizé prayer. The minister of one church tells how people ask him why the church continues to offer such a prayer service, as the attendance is low. [After all, why do we bother to continue to praise God when our numbers are small or when the world is in need of such proactivity?]

“Two of the brothers took part in prayers in many cities in Germany throughout nearly the whole of November. After the prayer in Hanover, a woman doctor shared this story: ‘I’ve just arrived today from Faluja, Iraq. I accompanied a seriously wounded American soldier. After these very difficult weeks in Iraq, I wanted to see something beautiful: a concert, a theatre performance, or something in a church. During the flight I asked the pilots what was on in the city this evening. They told me there would be a prayer with songs from Taizé. ‘I have never been to Taizé. These last weeks I have been working as a doctor in the emergency service in Faluja. One day during the fighting I had to operate on a man who would probably need to have both legs amputated. During that difficult operation I heard a melody with words in Latin. I didn’t understand, for I had to concentrate on the operation. The song became louder and louder; it sounded like a chorale; my colleagues – French, British, American, German, and Iraqi – were singing together. ‘Carried by the melody, I calmed down, and could even see a chance of saving the man’s legs. And finally, we succeeded. After the operation was over, I heard the French doctors saying that it was a song from Taizé. I had never heard of Taizé until then. From then on, the Taizé songs often accompanied me during operations and I felt protected by God in very dangerous circumstances. This evening, I discovered that the song I heard for the first time in Faluja was Laudate omnes gentes. [Let all the people praise God!] And there were others that we sang back there too. I am so grateful.’” [Fraser MacNaughton has been minister of St. Magnus Cathedral,Kirkwall, Orkney, Scotland since 2002. He also has served as minister in Ayrshire, University of Dundee, and Glasgow. Seasons of the Spirit Year A Advent/Christmas/Epiphany 2010-2011]

The prayer and praise of God’s people sustains them in hope. It forms them in love and it upholds them in the most extreme of difficult times when in Ramah, there is “wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel [is] weeping for her children; [and] she refuse[s] to be consoled, because they are no more." (Matthew 2:18)

Even in the midst of life, let all Creation praise God! Because as we turn to God and recognise that we are created and sustained by God, we may catch a glimpse of the reconciliation that God desires for the whole of creation—wherever there is need; wherever there is conflict; wherever there is illness; wherever there is pain, it is in recognising the God who calls us to something beyond the immediacy of our own situations towards God’s promised realm of justice, love and peace, begun in Jesus and being brought up through us the people of God as part of God’s mission in God’s world. Truly, may all creation praise God!

God Has Sandy Feet!

“From a distance, God is watching us,” Julie Gold wrote (1985) and Bette Midler (among others) sang. The song described the way in which a beneficent, a good, a caring God envisioned the world that God had created—a world of peace and harmon and environmental sustainability. It hinted at the disappointment that the real world may have become for God, with its litany of conflict and pain.

From a distance we all have enough, and no one is in need.
And there are no guns, no bombs, and no disease,
no hungry mouths to feed.
From a distance we are instruments
marching in a common band.
Playing songs of hope, playing songs of peace.
They're the songs of every [one].
God is watching us. God is watching us.
God is watching us from a distance.

Even at Christmastime, God can seem somewhat distant from our lives, hoping for something grand and being disappointed with what God has ended up with. Sometimes, this picture of God seems the only possible one when we claim God’s goodness and look around us at the mess of God’s creation; or experience something particularly traumatic and difficult at a time when we’re supposed to be celebrating.

Have you watched children on a beach playing from a distance? It can all look so idyllic, so pleasurable, so inviting… and then you walk over and get involved… and the scene is not nearly so serene. There’s a need for give and take—whose road goes way and which tower gets built and how? From a distance, the castle rises from the beach; but up close the builders are not just working with their hands, but also with their hearts and their hopes and their dreams; and different designers clash, and sometimes there’s tears, and maybe even a temper tantrum or too. Watching from a distance is not where the real action is, although it can sometimes be somewhat more serene.

But watching from a distance can also be lonely and boring. If you don’t get down on your hands and knees on the sand, you can’t discover the feel of the building material; and the way that you can gently drip mixtures of sand and sea water to make walls and towers of astonishing complexity and beauty. And you can get so much more done before the tide comes in when you have helpers—a small sand castle can mushroom into a medieval city in no time at all when a few people get together to work the sand.

Another song-writer, Eric Bazilian (1995), and another singer, Joan Osborne asked a slightly different question from Gold and Midler. Not “What is it like watching from a distance?”, but “What would it be like for God to be in the sand with us?”

What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin' to make his way home?

This is a God in the midst of the construction of sand castles with the kids—in the joy, in the tears, in the tantrums, in the sense of achievement, in the disappointment when the waves wash it all away, and in the anticipation of the next sand castling building expedition tomorrow. This God is with us! This God is in the midst of it all, getting hands and feet sandy and messy, windblown and sun-tanned, in the fun and the learning to share, and the discovering of injustice and the trying to get along with each other.

In reflecting on the lyrics of the song “One of Us”, liturgical theologian, Brian Wren writes:

What if God was one of us? Not watching from a distance, but taking the risks and having the inside knowledge of being born, being human, living and facing death? This is the good news of Christmas… Every one of us, and everyone on earth, is born into a particular time, a particular place, a particular language and tradition. It is the only way of being human... In the song refrain… the line “just a slob like one of us” seems to have a slightly self-mocking tone. It suggests that the singer and her peers, or human beings in general, are average, ordinary, and unappealing. More often the word “slob” is an insult, a term of abuse for someone who is coarse, lazy, dirty, or rude... the adult Jesus was a controversial prophet, loved by many but also insulted and abused, treated as worse than a slob… (Advent/Christmas/Epiphany, pp. 126, 127, 130-131).

But even as a child, the story isn’t such an idyllic one.

God, fully human, fully with us, fully within God’s own created order—as a vulnerable child, at the mercy of authorities who take censuses and kill potential rivals, in inadequate housing and facing an uncertain childhood—the incarnation (God becoming human) is the great doctrine (teaching) of the church that we celebrate in the Christmas season.

This doctrine is one to blow our minds—God becomes human—the Creator enters the creation—the all-powerful becomes all vulnerable to the vagaries of creaturely existence. God just doesn’t watch us from a distance; God lives our life. God just doesn’t empathise with us, God knows what it is to live as a mortal being.

When I was a small child, on holiday with my family at the beach, one evening as we were walking along the beach, we were writing with sticks in the sand. I wrote in the sand what nearly everyone writes at some time in their lives, "I was here". It was a celebration of the great event in time of which I was a part, walking along the beach with my family without a care in the world.

A man came up to me. He was smartly dressed. He even had shoes on his feet as he walked along the beach. I don't think he really saw me or really understood what my sign was saying. For he gravely bent over to read the words and jauntly said, "Ah, but where are you going?" Politely, I responded, "I don't know" but I felt terrible inside. Didn't this man see this wonderful place we were in? Why did it seem not to matter to him?

The man smiled smugly and without another word he continued his walk along the beach. As he walked away, I wondered to myself, how differently he might have reacted if he had bothered to take his shoes off to walk along the beach so he could feel the sand and the water on his toes.

In Jesus, God has taken off his shoes to experience our life. Everything we experience, Jesus experienced. God was prepared to give up all the perks of divinity in order to show us just how much we are loved—in order to stand in utter solidarity with us, God’s creatures, God’s beloved children. God knows the frailty and the fragility, the vulnerability and the suffering, the wonder and the joy of being human just like us.

Julia Esquivel from Guatemala puts it this way (Bread of Tomorrow, pp. 46-48):

The Word, for our sake, became poverty clothed as the poor who live off the refuse heap. The Word, for our sake, became a sob a thousand times stifled in the immovable mouth of the child who died from hunger. The Word, for our sake, became danger in the anguish of the mother who worries about her son growing into manhood. The Word cut us deeply in that place of shame: the painful reality of the poor. The Word blew its spirit over the dried bones of the churches, guardians of silence. The Word awoke us from the lethargy which had robbed us of our hope. The Word became a path in the jungle, a decision on the farm, love in women, unity among workers, and a Star for those few who can inspire dreams. The Word became Light. The Word became History. The Word became Conflict. The Word became indomitable Spirit, and sowed its seeds upon the mountain, near the river and in the valley, and those of good will heard the angels sing. Tired knees were strengthened, trembling hands were stilled, and the people who wandered in darkness saw the light… The Word became the seed of justice and we conceived peace… The Word made justice to rain and peace came forth from the furrows in the land. And we saw its glory in the eyes of the poor transformed into real men and women. And those who saw the Star opened up for us the path we now follow.

For God indeed is one of us! Our God has sandy feet... and hands... and there's quite a bit of sand in God's hair too!

Glory in the Wilderness!

In the midst of a Venetian orphanage for poor and illegitimate children, Antonio Vivaldi and his choristers (all female) produce the dramatic and weighty proclamation of God’s greatness, “Gloria”—a version of the great doxology of Christian tradition. Modelled on the song of the angels to the shepherds in the Gospel of Luke, the song proclaims;

Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace to people of good will. (ICEL 2007)

The proclamation of the children and the “red priest” from this place of exile from their families and polite society—a veritable wilderness—declares the significance of the God who comes into the midst of God’s own people, God’s own creation. It announces and celebrates weighty matters indeed.

Isaiah, too, is intent on celebrating the weightiness of a God who brings new life to landscapes apparently barren; new hope to people afflicted and infirm; and a God who dares, not to wait for people to travel God’s way, to come in search of them in order to save, to liberate.

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom… They shall see the glory of the LORD, the majesty of our God… He will come and save you (Isaiah 35:1-2, 4c).

This glory is a weighty matter indeed—the Hebrew word, kebod, refers to its heaviness. These are matters of significance. God is a God who matters. God is a God who acts.

From the Babylonian Exile, Isaiah proclaims the significance of God in the wilderness of a people without a place; and the proclamation asserts that God is well and truly aware of the heaviness of the burden born by the chosen people; and of the weighty promise made generations before to Abraham and Sarah and the descendants—the promise of a great land and a great people. And God will do something about it!

The people have been in the wilderness before; and even then magnificent songs proclaiming God’s greatness held God’s promises before them. Miriam and Moses sang in the wilderness: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously” (Exodus 15:21). They celebrated God’s significant delivery of the people from Egypt; but the people still had a long way to go. The wilderness stretched before them. God’s glory, God’s weightiness, wasn’t just about the previous triumph but the journey ahead. It would accompany the people on a pilgrimage that would test their spirits, their faith, their lives. God deals in weighty matters indeed.

From another kind of wilderness, Mary sings her song, proclaiming the significance of God’s action even in the midst of her own intolerable predicament—an unmarried women with child:

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant... He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever." (Luke 1:46-55)

These are weighty matters. God will bring new life to dry land; new hope to desperate people; and God will not stand back waiting for all this to happen. God will come to bring it about. God will enter God’s own creation. God’s glory, God’s substance, God’s significance will be made known.

The poetry of Isaiah’s proclamation draws attention to its central claim: “Here is your God… God will come and save you.” God is with the people in creation. God is among the people in their despair. God is coming to the people to save them. God is a God of substance who concerns God’s self with substantial matters—the plight of God’s creation and the welfare of God’s people.

Such weighty actions of God deserve a weighty response. Don’t just stand there—start travelling—out of exile back to the land; out of despair into hope; out of waiting for someone else to do something and into taking responsibility for being part of God’s mission in the world now! Take the road made for God’s people through the wilderness towards the promise. This is a journey of significance; a expedition of substance.

I’ve been enjoying the local wetlands coming back to life in the midst of the lovely rain we’ve been experiencing. You can’t actually get into the bird hide at Dangar’s Lagoon because the entrance is under water. I didn’t think I’d get to see that!

The ebb and flow of the waters we share are weighty matters indeed—they are matters of life or death. They affect what birdlife will prevail; what food we can produce; what parts of this country will continue to be habitable. The things of God are equally as weighty. Indeed the ebb and flow of the very creation is a thing of God.

The ebb and flow of God’s living water is also a matter of substance—a matter of abundant life out of desperate death. It affects who we are and what we do; and where we stand before God.

Here in the midst of our own wilderness—the wilderness of living—there will be times when we are tempted to give up the hope of God’s promises. But it is precisely in those times when it is even more important to hold them before us; to remember God’s weightiness, God’s significance, God’s glory; to give God, God’s due; and to be prepared to sing “Glory to God in the highest!” Our God has significance. Our God has substance. Our God is present. And our God is coming to save us! Gloria in excelsis! Glory to God in the highest and peace to people of good will!