Summing Up

Texts: Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew 25:31-46

Today we come to the end of our present Liturgical Year; next Sunday is the First Sunday in Advent, as we start the countdown to Christmas.  So we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King, the exaltation of Christ over all creation.  I often think of this Sunday as "Summing-up Sunday" because it gives us an opportunity to complete the jigsaw of the biblical story.  We can look back over the last year, centred this year round St Matthew's Gospel, and try to look at the big picture that has been put before us week by week in small pieces.  All the major events of the life cycle of Christ are there – his birth, his death, his resurrection, his ascension, and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost; and, of course, his teaching, his instruction particularly to his disciples, those who seek to follow him in their daily lives, has been dealt with in some detail by St Matthew.  So we can usefully use today for summing up our Christian story.

But we need to give ourselves a word of caution here.  We need to remind ourselves that what we are summing up is the story so far.  It hasn't finished yet.  We can sum up only to the present time, while still looking ahead to all that is to come.  So perhaps we can use today for a sort of mid-term report, a check to see how we're doing, do we need to correct our course, or are we still on track?  And if we want to do that, where better to start than with our readings this morning, each of which makes at least one thing very clear.  The story does have an ending: it is not open-ended.  And a second point is this.  The story has a consistent plot.  God is not making it up as he goes along.  To get this clear it may be best to take these readings out of order, and to start with the second reading.

The whole of chapter 1 of the Letter to the Ephesians is one of those glorious passages that show the breadth and depth of St Paul's vision.  In just 23 verses he sets out God's mission statement for the whole of creation, and our role in it both as individuals and as the Church.  God's aim is to bring all things into a final unity and harmony in Christ.  That's the big picture.  And St Paul goes on to say that God has called each one of us to be a part of that, to help bring it about.  So if today we are preparing a sort of mid-term report, the question is, how are we doing?  Can we say that we are getting ever nearer the fulfilment of God's goal of universal unity and harmony, are we standing still, or are we going backwards?

And, of course, we can ask that question at very many levels, from personal to international.  Have I as an individual grown closer to God and to other people over the last twelve months or not?  Is my family more or less united than it was twelve months ago?  What about our parish, our diocese, the Anglican Church in Aoteroa, New Zealand and Polynesia, the worldwide Anglican Communion, the worldwide church in all its denominations, traditions and strands?  Are we going in the right direction, are we moving towards greater unity and harmony or not?

And, of course, we can apply the same criteria outside the Church as inside it.  Is our local community growing towards a greater togetherness, a caring for one another, or are we becoming less united and harmonious?  What of our city, our country, and our country's relationships with the other nations of the world?  Perhaps this is a particularly good time to ask these questions, with the election and installation of a new Government.  Should that be the true test of its policies and programmes in three years' time – are we more united and harmonious as a country, and have we got better relations with other countries?  That perhaps is the basis on which judgment should be given by the electorate in due course.

And judgment is the subject of our other two readings this morning.  Ezekiel gives us the image of God as the Shepherd of Israel; and there can be no doubt of the strong ethical element in this image.  I don't know enough about the behaviour of sheep to know how accurate some of the details in this passage are, but the point is clear.  The sheep will be sorted out according to how they have shared with the other members of the flock.  The fat and the sleek will be culled, because they are the bullies of the flock.   They grab all the best grass for themselves, and chase the weaker sheep away.  Worse still, they are careless towards the environment: they trample down the grass and pollute the waterways.  That charge has a strikingly modern sound to it, although it's usually the dairy industry that stands accused today.

The ethical message to us is strong.  Do we take for ourselves more than we need, and deny enough to the weak and the injured?  Are we careless with our environment?

The traditional interpretation of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats has long been along similar lines.  It is usually preached as a creed of social justice and outreach.  The sheep are the ones who care for the poor, the sick, the naked and prisoners; the goats are the ones who do not.  I must say, as one who has rather a soft spot for goats, I have never been comfortable with this parable, so I was pleased to see that this parable doesn't really say that.  It says we humankind (all the nations of the world) will be sorted out like a shepherd sorting his sheep from his goats; and the commentator I was reading assures me that the only point of the analogy is to stress how easily Christ the Judge will be able to recognise one group from the other.  We will be as different as sheep and goats.  I warmed to this man immediately.

But then he went on to challenge the main understanding of this parable.  He says it is not addressed to Christians as a sort of ethical charter, warning us that we will be culled if we do not act generously towards those in need.  Rather, he says it is directed to the persecuted Christian community at the time, assuring them that the "Gentiles" (the nations of the world, or non-believers) will be judged according to how they have treated the Christians sent to them to preach the gospel.  He points out that there is a strong strand in Jewish teaching that the nations of the world (the Gentiles) will be judged according to how they have treated Israel; so he says this parable simply develops this idea in terms of the Church as "the new Israel".

Well, that's a possibility, I suppose; but one of the great qualities of Scripture is its ability to speak to all people at all times in all circumstances.  It may well have conveyed a message of assurance to the persecuted community of Matthew's day; but the question for us is what the passage is teaching this community of faith today.  And the key to that question may be what we might call the pantomime element in the parable.  Think of how fairy stories, legends and pantomime plots work on the issue of the hidden identity.  The poor beggar turns out in reality to be the handsome prince; and there is something of that in this parable.

In fact, Christ's identity is hidden in two ways at the beginning of the story.  Suddenly we are told about "the King" without realising that he is Christ; then we discover that he is also hidden in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked and the prisoner.  In serving those, people served him; in failing to serve those, they failed to serve him.

And that is a very good place to end this liturgical year – to sum up the story so far; because threaded throughout the year is always the true identity of Jesus of Nazareth.  Who is the one who is to come?  Who is the babe in the manager?  Who is the one with extraordinary powers to calm the sea?  Who do people says he is – and who do we say he is?  Who is the one hanging on the Cross, the one whom a Roman soldier identified as the Son of God?

The story continues, and that central question remains.

Here is Your God

Texts: Isaiah 40:1-11; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8

Last week I gave you what I called "an Advent mantra"; and those who were here then will no doubt remember what it was.  "Grace and peace to you from God."  Remember?  Those seemingly simple words from St Paul contain the entire Advent message, which means they contain the entire Gospel message.  God has responded to Isaiah's cry to "rend the heavens and come down" by doing just that at Christmas.  So that's the first Advent message I want to put to you this year.  Grace and peace to you from God.

Today we have another one, and this too is very special and very short.  This one comes directly from Isaiah, the great prophet of the Advent.  He says a great deal in this marvellous passage this morning, but I want to draw your attention to the last short phrase in the rather lengthy ninth verse:  "Here is your God."  We hear a lot these days about the need for evangelism, for church growth, for outreach, and all the rest of it; and hardly a year goes by without some new crusade, programme, seminar, course, or whatever, all aiming to teach us how to grow the Church.  Well, Isaiah says it all in those four simple words: "Here is your God."

Those words have been special to me for some years now.  When I first went to the parish in Wellington, there was a long-standing issue about the large notice-board outside the church.  The church was built on a high point overlooking the surrounding township, and the notice-board had high visibility.  It had on it the usual stuff; the name of the church, the service times, and the Vicar's contact details.  What it did not have was any words of Scripture, and this had been a source of ongoing debate for some years prior to my arrival.  There was widespread agreement that it would be good to have a short verse of Scripture on the board, but in fine Anglican tradition there had been no agreement as to which short verse of Scripture it should have.

I was unaware of all this when I preached on this Scripture in the first Advent Season I was there, and I focussed on this phrase: "Here is your God."  I said this is the proclamation that the Church needs to make to the community; and I pointed out how appropriate this ninth verse was to that particular church.  This is what the whole verse says: You who bring good tidings to Zion, go up on a high mountain.  You who bring good tidings to Jerusalem, lift up your voice with a shout, lift it up, do not be afraid; say to the towns of Judah, "Here is your God!"  And suddenly people thought, "That's what we should put on the notice-board – "Here is your God."  If I had known about the issue, and had put a paper to Vestry suggesting those words, my bet is no one would have been convinced.  But for some reason, in the context of a sermon, the idea seemed so much more convincing.

So here's our second Advent mantra for this year: "Here is your God."  There is the role and mission of the Church in four words – there is evangelism in four words.  There is the message – the only message – we have to proclaim to the world.

Let's think about each of those words for a moment.  The first one is "here".  What does that say about God?  It says that God is not there, but here.  God is not up there, distant, lost in the realms of heaven.  God is here with us as we speak.  That is the message of Advent and Christmas.  That is what this part of the story is all about.  God has come down, God has left there and come here, God is with us; that's why we use the name Emmanuel at Christmas time.  It means God with us.  It tells us in more personal terms what our Doctrine of the Incarnation says in more churchy language.  God is here, God is present where we are.

The second word is "is": "Here IS your God."  Present tense.  It is not that God was here once, back in the glory days, before the church started dying on the vine.  And even in Advent we are not talking about some distant, future hope when God will be here.  Our message now is that God is here: God has rent the heavens and come down.  So the whole purpose of this message, it's whole thrust, can be seen to be an invitation.  God is here now – come and see for yourself.  There's the edge of evangelism – an invitation to meet the God who is here with us now.

The third word is "your", and that's surely a very important word for the Church to remember as it proclaims this Advent message.  The God whose presence with us we proclaim is the God of those to whom we are calling.  God "belongs to" the world: or, to put it better, God is the God of all people, and not just the God of the Church.  Perhaps we tend to forget that sometimes.  We may sound as if we have a God whom others are invited to share if they first join our church.  No, says, Isaiah, we do not call people to come and share our God; we call them to see their God and ours who is already among them and us.

And the fourth word is "God".  I may have mentioned before that one of the best sermons I have ever heard was given in Wellington Cathedral by the Director of Music, who was leaving for a new position in the U.K.  At his last evensong the Dean invited him to preach, and in ten minutes he spoke about worship.  He said his great worry was that all too often we seem to forget that worship is God-centred or it is not worship.  And he didn't pull his punches.  He said that if people come to the cathedral to hear the choir sing well but forget that they are singing God's praises, those people should not come again.  And if people come to the cathedral to hear good preaching and forget that the preacher is bringing them a message from God, those people should stay away.  And if people come to the cathedral to have fun and fellowship with others and forget that we are members of the Body of Christ and participants in the great communion of saints, those people should stay away too.

We are not called to proclaim to the communities and cities of this land, the presence of our churches, or of fine choirs, or of good preachers: we are called to proclaim to them, "Here is your God".  There's the challenge for the Church as a whole, for our Diocese as a whole, our parish as a whole.  Above all, as each of our congregations head into next year, those words should be a challenge and a guiding star for us.  How can we draw attention to the presence of God here and now?

 How can we see the Christ Child in the midst of all the commercial and sentimental rubbish that attaches to Christmas these days, and say to the people of Port Chalmers/Warrington, and to the people of our city, "Here is your God"?  How can we point to an agonised figure dying on a cross and say to those around us, "There is your God"?

Perhaps only by following the example of John the Baptist.  John's whole ministry was about denying himself and pointing to the One who is to come and who has come.  Perhaps as a church we have to stop trying to draw attention to ourselves, and concentrate on drawing attention to God.  John shows us how: he it was who turned his own disciples to look at Jesus: "Look," he said, "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."  He could equally have said with Isaiah, "Here is your God."

 

Grace and Peace

Texts: Isaiah 64:1-9; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37

Grace and peace to you from God.

Such simple little words, words that are very familiar to us.  They are the first words to be spoken in our first liturgy (page 404).  They are the words with which we start our service on Wednesday mornings.  They are the words with which this morning's second lesson begins as St Paul greets the community of faith at Corinth.  They are just that, words of greeting, and like all words of greeting, we may be inclined to take them for granted, to skip over them, to cut to the chase.

Yesterday, our archdeacon, Jan Clark, rang me up.  As always, she greeted me, "Hullo, Roger, Jan Clark here.  How are you today?"  And I replied as I always do, "Hi, Jan, I'm fine, thanks, how about yourself?"  Nothing terribly profound there, was there?  Neither of us expected a full medical bulletin from the other.  I knew that she hadn't rung me up to ask how I was; and as we were going through the ritual of greeting I was wondering what she wanted, and she was probably rehearsing what she was going to say.  The words of the greetings were not important.  They were the prelude to the real message that Jan wanted to give me.  She could equally well have said, "Hello, Vicar, how's life treating you?"; and I could have said, "Greetings, Archdeacon, how lovely to hear your dulcet tones!"  It would have made no difference to either of us.  Words of greeting are not significant in themselves; they serve a purpose, and when that purpose has been served they can be forgotten.

But I don't think that's the case with these words we have before us today.  Grace and peace to you from God.  These words are very much more than a pro forma greeting; they seem to me to be part of the substance of the message St Paul wants to get across to these new and somewhat unruly Christians.  And to get something of a handle on just how significant these words are, we should hear them against a backdrop of this impassioned cry from the great prophet, Isaiah: "Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!"

God, it seems, has fallen silent.  All around him, Isaiah sees evidence that his society is going off the rails, but God seems indifferent.  Isaiah expects God to turn the volume up, to call the people back from their path of self-destruction, to give them a stirring message of law and order, to threaten, to warn, to exhort, to say SOMETHING!  But there is only silence.  God has nothing to say to his people.  He seems to have abandoned them, lost interest in them, left them to their own devices, is no longer interested in being their rescuer.  And so he utters this terrible cry of dereliction: "Oh, that you would rend the heavens, and come down!"

It always reminds me of Christ's terrible cry from the cross:  "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani - My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  Those words come from the psalmist – but Jesus dying in agony could just as easily have cried, "Oh, that you would rend the heavens, and come down."  They are words of despair, of abandonment, of dereliction. They convey that awful sense that God no longer cares; that God has abandoned us to our self-made fate.

With that in mind, now listen to these words of St Paul again: "Grace and peace to you from God."  St Paul is telling us, reminding us, that God has indeed rent the heaven and come down; in a way, of course, that staggers us today.  God rent the heavens and came down as a mere baby in Bethlehem.  It sounds terrifying, the idea of God rending the heavens; it sounds like the worst versions of the Apocalypse, doesn't it?  And yet we know it was nothing like that, because we have eye-witness accounts.  A bunch of shepherds saw and heard the whole thing.

St Luke says the shepherds were keeping watch; that's a good Advent expression.  And while they were watching an angel of the Lord appeared, and glory shone around.  Then the heavens were rent and a great company of the heavenly host appeared, praising God and singing: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to those on whom his favour rests."  "Those on whom his favour rests" could be translated, "those to whom God has given his grace."  It's the same message: "Grace and peace to you from God."  That wasn't what Isaiah expected, perhaps, but it's exactly what he wanted – he wanted God to rent the heavens and come down and God did just that in Bethlehem.

We seem to be living in a time much like Isaiah's.  We only have to think of some of the stories that we have had in the media in the last few days to question the direction of our society.  Horrific cases of child torture, leading to death.  A ninety-nine year-old woman attacked and indecently assaulted in her home; a retired teacher murdered in his.  Two men accused of stealing millions from our local hospitals; reports of school bullying are now so commonplace, they hardly make the news.  A survey finds that over 70percent of respondents would not leave their contact details if they damaged someone else's car in a supermarket car-park (or anywhere else, presumably).  And in parts of Auckland, people are afraid to walk down some streets for fear of being accosted by kerb-crawlers, prostitutes, pimps and drug-pushers.

Now turn on the television!  Thailand in uproar, terrorist attacks in Mumbai, deliberate tainting of milk in China causing infant deaths, in the United States hundreds of men and women queuing in gun-shops to stock up in case their new President tries to take away their "right" to arm themselves with machine guns and heaven knows what else.  And already we have two cases of companies being bailed out with taxpayers' money using it, not to reduce toxic debt as they were supposed to, but to pay millions in bonuses to the very executives who led the companies into the financial mire in the first place.  Greed has no shame, it seems.

Truly we can understand Isaiah's anguished cry: "Oh, that you would rend the heavens, and come down!"  BUT – Advent is the season of hope, not despair.  Advent begins with these words from St Paul: "Grace and peace to you from God."  They could well be our mantra for this Advent Season.  Whenever we feel downhearted, whenever we are hurt by yet further evidence that our human race is going in the wrong direction, when yet another bad news story assails us from our TV screens, whenever we are tempted to scream with Isaiah at an apparently silent, uninterested heaven, let us instead recited these simply words from St Paul, "Grace and peace to you from God."  And in the privacy of our own homes, in front of the bathroom mirror, we might even say, "Grace and peace to me from God."

That's the Advent message.  In fact, we might go so far as to say, it is the gospel message.  God in his grace has made peace with us.  All we have to do is hear the message, believe in the message, and live our lives accordingly.  God has rent the heavens and come down; if we are watchful, we will see the evidence for that all around us.   As we commence this new year in the Church calendar year, may we re-commit ourselves to listen, to watch, to receive God's greeting to all humanity:  Grace and peace to you!

Gifts and Talents

Texts: Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11; Matthew 25:14-30

Our theme today is "Gifts and Talents", and we only have to think about those two simpler words for a moment to realise they are rather slippery.  Each has more than one meaning, and the latter has changed its meaning radically from Biblical times to today.  Both are timely, relevant words; they are, we might say, in season, or in vogue at the present time.  But what do they actually mean?

Today's parable is traditionally called "The Parable of the Talents", and is the second of the three-part mini-series that we have in this 25^th chapter of St Matthew's Gospel.  And one of the interesting common factors of the three parables is that at least the first two are in need of a change of name these days.  Last week's parable has long-since given rise to blushes among us modern clergy who want to be inclusive and PC.  For centuries it was called the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins.  Dear me – those really were the Dark Ages!  These days no one believes in virgins any more, wise or foolish.  So in modern translations of the Scriptures this story became known as the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Bridesmaids.  More recently, concern has been expressed about the word "bridesmaid"; is it sexist, and is "maid" really another word for "virgin"?  So now we have the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Wedding Attendants.  I suspect that soon we will decide that "Foolish" is too negative; and maybe we will end up with the Parable of the Differently Abled Wedding Attendants.

Today's parable needs re-naming for a different reason.  The word "talents" has changed its meaning.  I'm sure none of you watch "New Zealand Has Talent"; but if you did you would find (I'm told) that it is not about people with money, as it would have been in Jesus' time.  More strictly, a "talent" was a particular weight, used for precious metals and other commodities.  But in Jesus' parable we can take it to mean money.  Today, of course, if we say someone is talented, we don't mean that person has money, but some ability or other; or we might use the words "natural gift".  Which gets us to the different meaning the word "gift" may have.

Again, this is quite topical, with the pre-Christmas season in full swing.  We have gift catalogues, gift coupons, free gifts, and all the rest of the advertising hype, and will be bombarded with it for the next few weeks.  Just when we have escaped from political waste-paper, we get the retail version!  But in all this the meaning of the word "gift" is pretty clear: we are urged to spend our money to buy their products to give away free to our special people.  That's the true meaning of Christmas for the retail industry.  "Gift" is a thing that we give away.

But sometimes we say of someone, he or she has a real gift for languages, or art, or something.  He or she is a very gifted violinist or hockey player.  Originally that probably reflected the view that our abilities were given to us by God, our Creator.  Today, we speak of natural gifts – he or she is "naturally gifted".  Presumably this is the secular version: our abilities have not been given to us by God, but by Nature.

And just to complicate today's word-game even more, we call our abilities today, "talents" – he or she is very "talented", or even, he or she is "naturally talented".  But in this new modern sense of gifts or talents as abilities, there is one common element.  They need to be exercised, and they need to be exercised for two reasons.  Firstly, if they're not, they tend to atrophy, or not develop at all.  And secondly, we can only recognise them in action.  We only know when a child is a gifted artist, or has a real talent for art, when he or she produces artwork.  The gift or talent may be there – in the child, as it were – but it has to be exercised by the child in order for it to develop and be recognised.

And here we have at least one link with today's Scriptures, and particularly with today's Gospel passage – this Parable of the Talents.  It's another of those "going away" stories, where the owner or master goes away and entrusts his servants with his business.  This guy seems to have been in the financial sector; a banker, perhaps, or a money-lender.  We don't immediately take to him, therefore, until we realise that he is the Christ-figure in the story, so we should!  It is a judgment parable, a story that repeats the clear NT message of a final accounting, which is the motif that runs through the whole of this chapter.  The master had at least three servants, and he entrusted these three servants with his business capital, his investment funds.

He gives each of the three responsibility for different amounts, according to their respective abilities.  One gets ten talents, one five, and one two.  And we are told the result of their work.  The first two get a one hundred percent return on the investment capital; but the third guy is what we call today "risk-averse".  He is afraid that if he invests the amount in his investment portfolio, it may lose money and he would be in trouble on his master's return.  So he looks for the safest place to put the money to ensure that he does not lose it.  When the master returns, the first two are applauded, and the third guy is fired.

There is a direct and obvious way in which that parable is directed to each and everyone one of us.  As we constantly remind ourselves, everyone has specific gifts and talents.  In our funeral liturgy, for example, we pray this: God our Father, we thank you that you have made each one of us in your own image, and given us gifts and talents with which to serve you.  (And I usually add, "and one another").  Our gifts and talents are not for our own benefit; they are, according to that prayer, given to us for the service of God.  For that reason, we are accountable to God for the use to which we have put our gifts and talents, or failed to put them, during our lives.  So that's one clear message for us as individuals this morning.

But as I pondered this parable in preparation for this sermon, it occurred to me that it has an important message for us in this Diocese.  As you know, I am working with a group of people to consider the financial difficulties facing the diocese; and at a recent meeting at Hampden, someone suddenly suggested that we should sell Selwyn College because, in his view, it is no longer bringing in a return for the Church.  And what was particularly interesting to me about that was that this guy was not talking about a financial return.  He meant that Selwyn College as it is presently conducted is not serving the purposes of the Church.  Now, there is room for two views on that, and Selwyn College does have its supporters and defenders, but the question is a good one.  In terms of this parable, are we as a church using Selwyn College for our Master's purposes, or are we simply holding on to it and, so to speak, keeping it safe?

And, of course, the same applies to all our capital assets, and not just Selwyn College.  Are we using the assets entrusted to us – our land, our churches and other buildings, our resthomes, our social agencies – to further God's purposes, or are we simply hanging onto them and trying to keep them safe?  And if the latter, then safe from what and for what?  That is the sort of question that our diocese has to face as a matter of urgency; and that means our parish has to face it too.  What return are we getting on the treasure that has been entrusted to us?

And as we face that question, we need to hear those words from Zephaniah this morning.  At that time I will search Jerusalem with lamps and punish those who are complacent, who think "The Lord will do nothing, either good or bad.  Their wealth will be plundered, their houses destroyed.  Or, as Jesus himself puts it at the end of this parable: Throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The Diocese has talent.  The question is, are we prepared to take the risk of using it for the furtherance of God's purposes?

A Season of Humility

Texts: Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6, 8, 19-28

Shirley Murray has written a wonderful Christmas carol called "Upside-down Christmas".  I'm not sure if we've sung it here in St Barnabas, but we certainly have in Holy Trinity.  The point of the carol is that all the traditional imagery associated with Christmas is drawn from the Northern Hemisphere, so it has to be "translated" for us in the south.  And she does that in the carol.  The point is well made, and well dealt with.

But there is a sense in which talking of an "upside-down Christmas" is a bit of a tautology, because the whole thing about Christmas - the real Christmas, that is, not the commercial one, nor the sentimental one we try so hard to create – the whole point about the real version is that it turns everything upside down, beginning with commonsense!  The whole idea of the Incarnation – of the Creator of the whole universe appearing among us as a helpless babe - is a bit topsy-turvy, to say the least.  And then there is the list of characters who are entrusted with the news of this astonishing event, such as a bunch of shepherds who are the first to see what's going on.  The choice of Mary to be the baby's mother is also a bit of a departure from the norm – a teenage nobody instead of a queen or some other high-born aristocrat.  And when the babe has grown up and is ready to begin his public ministry, some slightly-crazed weirdo comes out of the desert to warm up the crowds.  Not a PR guru anywhere to be seen or heard!

 I thought of Shirley Murray's song while watching the TV News the other night.  I'm always on the look out for a new illustration or image for a sermon, and here before my very eyes was a wonderful Advent image.  The three top bananas in the American car- manufacturing industry – representing Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors – had come to the US Congress in Washington to beg for a few billion dollars to rescue their companies.  It was their second trip for this purpose.  On the first occasion, each of these three very rich and powerful industry leaders had come to Washington in their own private jets, and simply demanded economic aid from the US taxpayers, warning of dire economic consequences if they were refused.  They were refused; they were firmly told to go back, work out a realistic plan for reshaping their companies to fit the realities of the 21^st century, AND to come back with a little more humility.  The politicians were not impressed by the private jets.

So there they were back in Congress on their second attempt.  This time, as they were at pains to point out, they had driven to Washington – in small, efficient hybrid cars, and they had even car-pooled!  They assured the politicians that they had learned their lesson; they had returned with proposals for modernising their companies, to stop producing cars for which there was no longer a market, and to start producing cars that were kinder to the environment.  AND, each of them was prepared to waive his own salary while his company was in receipt of taxpayers' funds!  Each of these rich and powerful men was now going to have an annual salary of $1 – before tax!

There's a wonderful illustration of the Advent message.  Help is coming – for the poor.  Those who exalt themselves shall be humbled; those who humble themselves shall be exalted.  Everything is turned upside-down: with Advent everything is the opposite of what might be expected.  Advent is the Season of stark contrasts.

We see that in our readings this morning.  Isaiah has a whole string of contrasts as he looks ahead to the Advent: healing for the broken-hearted; freedom for captives, and release from darkness for prisoners; comfort for those who mourn; a crown of beauty instead of ashes; the oil of gladness instead of mourning; and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.  And, as he surveys the state of Judah after national defeat and exile, he sees a time of rebuilding ancient ruins, and the restoration of places long devastated.  In short, a great reversal of national fortunes is to take place.  Everything is to be turned on its head; everything is to be turned upside-down.  The proud shall be humbled; the oppressed shall be raised up.

And we see all this in the Advent drama around John the Baptist.  It is now time for Jesus to come out of obscurity and carry out his mission.  And the first sign of this is the emergence from the wilderness of this strange man called John.  And there's the first contrast.  He comes out of the wilderness, the place of death and nothingness, to the Jordan, the river of life in that country.  And he calls people out of their own wilderness, their own places of death and nothingness, their own spiritual dryness, to join him in the life-giving waters of the Jordan, the waters that each one of us enters in our baptism.  Why should people take any notice of him – who does he think he is?

He thinks he's no one, no one of any importance.  He makes only two claims about himself, one sort of positive and the other very clearly negative.  When asked who he is he says he is a voice (not a whole person) crying in the wilderness.  In other words, he is nothing but the message he has been given to proclaim.  He has no agenda of his own, and no other purpose to exist.  He is the most humble of men.  So much so that he is at pains to draw attention away from himself: he is not the One to whom they should pay attention, the One long promised by God through Isaiah and the other prophets.

And there's another contrast.  Can you imagine any of our leaders playing down their own importance – "Don't vote fore me, there is one far greater than I?"

In his great gospel, St John gives us another famous Advent image to reflect on, the image of light and darkness.  He says that Jesus was the light coming into the world's darkness, and stresses that John the Baptist was not himself the light, but only a witness to it.  Some time during the Advent Season a good exercise is to sit in a truly darkened room for some time, and perhaps attempt to find some small object there.  To enter into the darkness, to experience the blindness of such a situation; and imagine the whole world in that state of darkness.  Then light a candle or put on a torch, and reflect again on this image of Christ as the light coming into our darkness.  Recall the words of our liturgy: You said, 'Let there be light'; there was light.  Your light shines on in our darkness.  They are wonderful words, and their full weight, perhaps, needs a period of darkness for us to feel it.

Which gets us back to Shirley Murray's carol in a way.  There is a sense in which the Northern Hemisphere has a distinct advantage over us at Christmas: with our long daylight hours, it is very difficult to symbolise the Christ-light coming into our darkened world at Christmas.  But perhaps Advent is rightly a Season of growing light, rather than increasing darkness as it is in the north.  As the light draws ever nearer, as the light comes more and more into our world, so the darkness slowly gives way.

Upside-down or right way up, should make no difference to us.  St Paul sums it up this way: Be joyful always; pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; and Shirley Murray ends her carol with this verse:

            Right side up Christmas belongs to the universe

            made in the moment a woman gives birth;

Hope is the Jesus gift, love is the offering,

            everywhere, anywhere here on this earth.

Even Isaiah couldn't have put it better!

A God of Strange Choices

Texts:  2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38

On Friday Trish and I attended the service of celebration in St Johns, Waikouaiti to mark the 150^th anniversary of the dedication of the church.  Not surprisingly, the first lesson read at the service was a short passage from the eighth chapter of the First Book of Kings, in which we find King Solomon's prayer of dedication of the first great Temple.  Solomon was, of course, famous for his wisdom; and I wonder if an example of that is shown in his prayer of dedication.

Our first lesson this morning finds Solomon's father, David, reflecting on the need to build a Temple.  In a way, our passage seems to reflect well on David.  He is now firmly ensconced as the all-powerful King of Israel; he is living in great luxury as befits such a king in a palace.  But where is God, the great God of Israel?  For the Jews at the time God's presence with them was symbolised by the Ark of the Covenant, which they had carried with them on their travels.  And during those nomadic years it had been housed in a tent, known as the Tent of Meeting.  We remember how Moses used to go to the Tent of Meeting to confer with God.  But the people were nomadic no longer; they had their own land.  Their King was in his own palace in their capital city.  Surely, if he could be housed in such splendour, it was only right that God should be "housed" in corresponding splendour?  To our human ears, such thoughts by David have the sound of humility.

But they seem to have a different sound in God's ears.  God tells David through the prophet Nathan that he doesn't want David to build a house for him; rather, he will build a house – a royal line – from David.  Besides, God has made do with a tent up until then, so what does he need a house for?  It is David's son, Solomon, who builds the temple; and here we see Solomon's greater wisdom.  He produces a magnificent building, but in his prayer he acknowledges the absurdity of thinking that God will live in it, will be confined to it.  He says this: But will God really dwell on earth?   The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you.  How much less this temple I have built!  And so his plea is not that God will come and inhabit the Temple, but that God will pay attention to the prayers offered in the temple.  And there is the root of the idea that the temple is to be a house of prayer for all the nations.

In his sermon on Friday, Bishop George referred to his experience of visiting the ancient churches of Canterbury when he attended the Lambeth Conference in Kent.  He talked of three in particular; a chapel that dated back to the wife of King Ethelbert of Kent, towards the end of the sixth century.  The queen was a Christian, and the king allowed her to have a place of prayer built, so long as it was not within his citadel.  Then in 630 Augustine arrived from Rome as a missionary to convert the Kentish people.  He was allowed to build a small monastery, but again, not within the walls of the citadel.  Only when the King was finally convinced that these Christians were good for his kingdom and not a threat to it, did he allow a church within the protective walls, and what is now Canterbury Cathedral was built.  Three houses of prayer, dating from 1400 years ago, but part of our history through the common bond of our faith, and the special bond that all Anglicans have with Canterbury's archbishop.

Then Bishop George turned our attention to the church in which we were sitting.  A much shorter history, of course, but a similar one.  For 150 years people had been coming into this building and praying to the God addressed by Solomon all those centuries ago; May your eyes be open towards this temple night and day, this place of which you said, 'My Name shall be there,' so that you will hear the prayer your servant prays  towards this place.  And as I looked up at some of the magnificent timbers in St Johns I remembered a line from a John Betjeman poem, "The beams burnished with the prayers of a thousand years".

And I think all this captures the tension we sometimes feel between proclaiming that God is everywhere, and yet we want our special places, our churches, where we often feel closer to God than we might elsewhere.  Solomon could see the absurdity of thinking that God was confined in the Temple, but he could not see the even more astonishing truth of God's presence among us that we are now preparing to celebrate.  Solomon assumed that God's true dwelling-place was not a temple, however magnificent, but heaven itself.  What would he have made of it if he had known that God would choose a very different dwelling-place when the time came to live among his people on earth?  And I'm not referring to a stable; I'm referring to a young woman called Mary, and through her to the whole human race.

This Fourth Sunday in Advent is the one on which we are invited to think about Mary.  So what do we think about her?  Do we think about her?  Perhaps we've been a bit put off her by what may seem to us excessive adoration in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, where she seems sometimes almost to share top billing with Jesus.  And certainly she has not been helped by some of the legends that have been attached to her name, and to her death.  There is no biblical warrant for describing her as sinless, or denying that she had other children after Jesus, or for the doctrine that she did not die but was taken up to heaven.

And as much as I value icons as aids to prayer and worship, most of the iconography around Mary does not do her much credit either.  There is one wonderful exception; an icon of Mother and Child done in Papua New Guinea shows Mother and Child laughing happily together.  But most icons show Mary as stern, if not downright depressed.  On the other hand, she is sometimes pictured as a stunning beauty, a poster girl for L'Oreal or Max Factor!  I don't think that's helpful either.

Feminist theologians have never known what to do with Mary, either.  We might have expected that they would embrace her as bringing something feminine into the rather masculine images of divinity that Judaism and Christianity are often accused of.  But they assign that role to the Holy Spirit (again without biblical warrant!): they seem to dislike the fact that Mary's chief role is that of mother, and she is first introduced to us as some guy's fiancée.

For me it is exactly Mary's ordinariness that makes her so important.  She isn't chosen because she is lovely – she might not have been – or even because she was especially well-behaved, much less sinless.  She was chosen because she was chosen; in the same way that God chose Israel because he chose them.  It was (as her great song of praise makes clear) yet another example of God choosing the least, the poorest, the most humble.  The God who told David that he preferred a tent to a temple, and who came to Bethlehem in a stable instead of a palace, chose an unknown peasant girl rather than a queen to be the mother of his Son.

In doing so, God sanctified women and men.  God sanctified not only the birth process, but the sexual side of our nature as well.  There is no escaping the fact that St Luke's account of how Mary became pregnant is couched in sexual terms.  According to St Luke, when Mary asks the angel how she can give birth as she is a virgin, the angel says this: The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.  So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.  I am told that in one of the modern translations of Scripture the phrase used is "the Holy Spirit will mount you".  That's too much for my sensitivities, but it's not inaccurate.

In Mary, sexuality is sanctified.  In Mary, the human womb becomes a fit dwelling-place for God.  In Mary the divine and the human become united just as surely as the male and the female become united in ordinary conception.  And it happens only with Mary's consent.  She had no real idea what Gabriel was saying, but in faith she said 'Yes".

And that's all that any of us are ever asked to say to God.  Christmas is a time for saying "Yes" to God; "Yes" to a God who wishes to dwell among us, with us, and within us.  Yes to a God who makes strange choices, because we ourselves are among the strange choices God has made!