Words and The Word

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#Christmasmeans #Word

In the beginning was the Word. 

 

Our lives are full of words.  We are surrounded by words.  Words everywhere. 

• Today you will be greeting people: Merry Christmas!  Words of gladness and sharing in the festival and offering your best wishes, full of hope and happiness.
• There have been days and weeks of words of instruction: get this, do that, don’t forget the other.  Getting everyone organised.
• Lots of words about transactions, practical arrangements at the check out tills. Unexpected item in the bagging area. 
• And if you haven’t already, there’s a chance that at some time over the festivities you may have words with someone, a falling out.  It can be a tense time, with families spending more time in each other’s company.  Someone says something and someone else is aggrieved.  I don’t wish you any of those kind of words!
• And if you do have a falling out, I hope you can find the words of reconciliation, the words that mend relationships.

 

Words are powerful.  They make things happen.  They make and break relationships. 

 

But God’s Word is different from all these words. 

 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.

 

God’s Word is active and creative.  Right in the beginning when God created the world, God spoke, and it was done.  God spoke the Word.  It was the Word that made things happen.  And it is the Word that goes on creating, because God’s creation continues, it never stops.  And the Word sustains creation, keeping it going, holding everything together.  So the Word gives us physical life. 

 

God then gave us the Word in books of words, inspiring the people of God to write down their stories, their experiences of the living God, their poems and songs, their hopes and dreams.  Over hundreds and thousands of years, the words were gathered together.  People read them and heard them.  They found their own stories resonating in the stories of ancient people.  These were words that inspired them and filled them with awe.  They didn’t just hear words, but within the many words they heard the Word.  And the Word gives us spiritual life.

 

So, all the time, God was communicating with his people.  God loves all the creation. God loves the people he made and goes on making.  God wants to be in relationship with the whole world, and has reached out to us in many different ways.  God saw how people were suffering and the scrapes they got into, hurting themselves and each other.  Because we do, you know.  Given the slightest opportunity, we mess up big time.  And God treats us like adults, choosing what we are going to do and how we are going to do it.  And then, when we get hurt, as we inevitably do, God cares for every wound and every agony. 

 

So because he loved us, God gave us the Word born as a little child into a humble human family.  God’s greatest work, to give up the glories of heaven for a time to become a baby.  God comes alongside us, to share our lives, the good bits and the tough bits.  God comes to show us how much God cares.  God comes to teach us and guide us and help us.  God comes to open our eyes and ears and hearts and minds, so that we can see Him and recognise Him and rejoice in Him.  God gives us True life.

 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

 

When the Word became human, Mary and Joseph, his human parents, called him Jesus, and we call him God’s Son.  The angels in heaven rejoiced to see him born.  Most people, however, didn’t even notice.

 

But we rejoice again tonight.  Year on year, we come together to remember and to relive that glorious moment when the Word became flesh.  It wasn’t something that just happened 2,000 years ago, far away in the middle east in the iron age, but it matters for now.  Because God still loves us, and goes on loving us, in spite of everything we do.

 

The story we relive tonight is not just words.  In this service, everything we say and sing and do is pointing to the Word, God’s Word come among us, God come to be with us.  Most of the words we say in this service come from the Bible, and we read three portions of the Bible, God’s Word.  Our carols give glory to God, the living Word. And we break bread and bless wine, as Jesus told us to, to share his body and blood, so that the Word is here, present among us. 

 

And the Word is with you when you go to your homes and open your presents in the morning and eat turkey and Brussels sprouts. And the Word is with you when you put the decorations away and take the tree down and get back to normal life. 

 

I wish you a happy Christmas full of gracious words, with lots of celebration and feasting.  And I wish you room for the true and living Word to grow in your heart and in your life, feeding and nurturing your relationship with God who loves you.

 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

 

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Joseph’s Song

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#Joseph #Reflection

Come, Mary, come with me, beloved,

Come with me to Bethlehem.

Come to the house of bread

The home of my ancestors.

I want to take you home

To the place of belonging.

You are heavy with child

And we will take the journey steadily

Walking mile upon mile,

Stopping whenever you are weary.

You are young and fit and well;

I know you can make it.

I shall be counted among my own people

To satisfy the enumerators.

And maybe your child will be born there

And that will be a bond between us –

You child will be born in my home-town.

I know he is not my son, strictly speaking,

But to all intents and purposes,

To the friends and neighbours who look on us,

I shall be the father

And he the son.

Poor substitute that I am.

I will teach him the ways of my family

Of living kindly and generously.

I will teach him skills and crafts.

He will not want for anything I can provide.

Come, Mary, come with me, beloved.

Let us go to Bethlehem.

You will be safe with me.

We have been given a task, you and I,

And it begins in Bethlehem. 

When Angels Dream

Tags

#Advent4 #Joseph

 

There was a moment, just before he went to sleep, when he thought of rejecting her.  She came with her mother in the early afternoon, full of tears, a young girl, uncertain of the future, afraid of what was coming. She just blurted it out.

 

 “I’m pregnant!”, she said.

 

“How?”  he asked.  “Who?”

 

“Don’t know”, she said.

 

But there was no doubting the pregnancy.  The bump was beginning to show in her slight figure.

 

“But I thought you weren’t ready yet!” he said.

 

They were betrothed, engaged to be married, and waiting for the time when her body was mature enough for marriage.  He was still waiting for her mother’s go-ahead. 

 

She had some story about seeing an angel who told her she was going to bear a child. Humph!  He was a devout man, but he wasn’t gullible.  He knew she was young and innocent, but she couldn’t tell him who the man who looked like an angel was.  He just wanted to know who it was, who had taken her. He was angry that someone had forced himself on her or tricked her into it.  But there was nothing could be done about it now. 

 

He had spent all afternoon thinking it through, the ins, the outs, the whys, the wherefores.  It was a long time before he got to sleep, but by then it was clear in his mind.  She would have to go.  Quietly though, because he didn’t wish her any harm, poor thing.  Send her away to a distant relative.  Cancel the engagement.  Cancel the wedding.  Move on. 

 

Sleep was fitful.  His unconscious mind still sifting through the dilemma, not quite wanting to let go of the bonny girl who had been promised to him.  Lots of troubling dreams.

 

His name was Joseph.  He was a dreamer, like that Joseph so many years ago, Joseph who was the son of Israel and saved his brothers and all the family from starvation.  The family often joked about Joseph’s dreams.

 

And then in amongst the confused and fleeting images, there was a different kind of dream.  An angel.  She, Mary, had mentioned an angel.  He, Joseph, had discounted it.  But this angel was looking straight at him.  And his voice was clear in his head.

 

“Don’t send her away, Joseph Davidson.  Don’t be afraid.  Go ahead with the marriage and take care of her.  This child is the work of God’s Holy Spirit.  Don’t fret about the hows and the whos.  What matters is that God is behind this.  It is all part of God’s plan.  This child has work to do for God.”

 

The angel finished his speech.  Joseph woke up, straight away, alert and alive, every word echoing in his mind.  It was only then that he felt the impact of his dream.  This was more than a dream, this was a direct message.  It wasn’t something he could ignore.  And it felt right. 

 

He didn’t get back to sleep again that night.  In the morning, as soon as it was respectable to go calling, he went to visit Mary and his parents and told them his plan.  He would marry Mary straight away, and everyone would think that he was the father of the baby.  That would be OK. 

 

They were so relieved, Anna and Joachim and Mary herself, and so grateful. 

 

There was the odd moment, however, when Mary wondered whether her happiness and her desire to serve God really depended on a man’s willingness to protect her and not to put her to shame, but she liked Joseph and knew she would come to love him in time.  He was gentle and kind, and he meant well.  And for the moment, she needed him.

 

And there was the odd moment for Joseph too when he felt the odd pang looking at the little child in Mary’s arms, knowing that he wasn’t actually the biological father, but whether he liked it or not, he had to be this child’s earthly father.  It wasn’t a perfect situation by any means. But mostly, Joseph just got on with it.   Real life is full of compromise. 

 

“This is what you get”, thought Joseph, as he looked down at the sleeping child that first night, “when you listen to angels, when you let God’s Holy Spirit work. Things don’t happen the way you want or expect, but that’s OK.”

Going Home

Tags

#Advent3 #HolyWay

A short reflection for Advent 3:

 

My nephew Philip lives and works in Luanda, the capital of Angola.  Getting about is difficult to say the least.  In the city itself, there are roads, but not enough roads for the volume of traffic, so it takes ages to get anywhere.  If he takes the 5.15 company bus, he gets to work by 6.00am.  If he waited for the 5.30 bus, he wouldn’t get to work till 7.00am – that’s 1½ hours, and if he slept in and got the 7.00am bus, he wouldn’t get to work till 10.00am.  Three hours.

 

The company arranges transport by uniformed drivers.  If he drove himself, he would likely be stopped regularly for inspection of documents, because the locals know that the white workers would rather pay a bit here and there to speed things up.  That’s not so much a hazard as a nuisance.

 

For the Angolans travelling in their blue and white public transport, life can be more difficult, because the people carriers are not kept in good nick and are often overloaded, so there are accidents, and Phil sees a lot of smashed up vehicles.  Meanwhile the trucks are veering across the roads while the drivers drink their beer.  By the time they get out of town, the roads are in a worse state.  Heavy rains often wash away the road surface.  You need a 4×4 to travel that way.

 

Walking is not a good idea.  The white workers are fair game, because they are rich compared to the locals.  Muggings happen regularly. If you resist, you are likely to be killed, simple as that.  It is much safer to hand over your money and your I-phone and put it down to experience.

 

The Old Testament reading we heard just now comes from the book of Isaiah, but is probably an added extra, written by another prophet.  When he was imagining the return of God’s people to Zion over hundreds of miles of desert roads, he didn’t have quite those hazards in mind, but travelling was just as dangerous in the middle east 2,500 years ago as it is in parts of Africa today. The people of Israel and Judah had been exiled, and Isaiah is thinking about the time when God would bring them home.  The journey was not going to be dangerous and terrifying, as people might expect, but would be smooth and straightforward.  The road would be straight and flat so that no one could get lost.  There would be springs of water in the desert which would mean that food and flowers would grow along the way.  There would be no dangerous animals, nor muggers, nor sub-standard vehicles or drunk truck-drivers or traffic police looking for a bribe. 

 

It is a wonderful poem about coming home, about returning with joy and confidence, in safety and without fear. 

 

Advent is a time for returning home to God.  We live in exile when we drift away from God, when we put ourselves first, when we discount the needs of others, when we steadfastly refuse to forgive.  Yeah, that’s what humans do.  We are stubborn and self-centred, and we don’t care enough. It’s the reason God chose to come and live among us as a little child in iron age Judah.

 

God wants us to come home.  He has made the road safe and easy.  You just have to take the walk along God’s highway, the Holy Way.  Are you coming?

Durham Lumiere, 2011

Pleasures in Print 2013

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#KNorris #FSpufford #NNTaleb

 These are the books I have most enjoyed in  2013:

Kathleen Norris, The Noonday Demon, 2009, Lion Hudson

 I bought this because I love Kathleen Norris’ writing.  And it came at just the right time for me, as all the best books do – in the Sufi experience that when the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear.

 It came when I was anxious about the depletion of energy and the diminution of enthusiasm.  It was not depression, but something more spiritual, the acedia that Norris describes so beautifully.  Her insights are deep and wise as she traces the grip of accedie in her life.  And her solution – prayer and psalms – was just right.

 By accident, I bought two copies as the American version has a different title.  I gave it to someone who came round for a chat.  I hope it opens eyes and gates in that heart too.

 

Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense, 2012, Faber & Faber

 This is the book that got me most excited in 2013, the book that made sense of it.  Spufford tells the story of faith with wit and insight and truth.  He calls sin the Human Potential to Fuck Things Up or HPtFtU.  Yeshua comes to mend the HPtFtU.  I love Spufford’s telling of the Prodigal Son at this point, which illustrates what Yeshua is all about. And then comes the crucifixion –

 ‘The doors of his heart are wedged open wide, and in rushes the whole pestilential flood, the vile and roiling tide of cruelties and failures and secrets. Let me take that from you, he is saying. Give that to me instead. Let me carry it. Let me be to blame instead. I am big enough. …. I am the father who longs for every last one of his children. I am the friend who will never leave you.  I am the light behind the darkness. I am the shining your shame cannot extinguish.  I am the ghost of love in the torture chamber: I am change and hope. … I am the gift without cost.  I am.  I am. I am. Before the foundations of the world, I am.’

 And what we do with that is “the impossible experiment of trying to see each other the way God sees us” and doing forgiveness. 

 Francis Spufford came to the Diocese of Durham Clergy Summer Gathering in July and meeting him was great fun.  I spent a happy evening sitting in the bar between him and Andrew Brown, the journalist.

 

Nicholas Nasim Taleb, Antifragility: Things that Gain from Disorder, 2012, Penguin Books

 Institutions respond to change in different ways: fragile organisations find it threatening and risky to the point of extinction; robust organisations are strong enough to survive; antifragile (a term coined by Taleb) organisations grow and thrive with change.  Taleb’s focus is principally the financial world, though he throws his net wider.

 I read the book wanting to learn about the place of the church in a changing world.  For Taleb, the church – and in his case, this means the Greek Orthodox Church of his Lebanese homeland – is antifragile.  I am not sure that this is true of the Church of England in deprived urban Gateshead.  Antifragile means valuing what is good and enduring about tradition as well as embracing the best of the new

Twigs on the Tree

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#Advent2 #JesseTree

 

Do you watch “Who do you think you are?” – the programme about exploring the family trees of celebrities.  I watch it when I can, when its on, and I have enjoyed all kinds of stories about peoples’ ancestors.  They can be full of meaning, and sometimes full of insight.  It is particularly interesting to see how people are affected by discovering their ancestors and the trials and tribulations they went through. 

 

In the last series, series 10, Sarah Millican discovered that an ancestor was one of the world’s first divers and Marianne Faithful found out about her mother’s life as a dancer in 1920s Berlin. 

 

When I was in Stockton, my next door neighbour spent most of his time working on the family history and finding out about his family tree.  It is fascinating, finding out where you come from because maybe it says something about who you are.  You might discover something really interesting about an ancestor and make a connection with one of the descendants, and it seems to explain everything about them.  I was talking to someone the other day who was making a connection between a great great aunt and one of his grandchildren, who looked just so alike. 

 

One of the themes of Advent is the Tree of Jesse.  And we get it in the Old Testament reading this morning, in Isaiah’s prophecy that a new king would arise in David’s line who would bring political peace and spiritual maturity to the whole nation.  Jesse was King David’s father, so he is regarded as the one who started the whole line, the base of the tree.   Out of that root, eventually, grows the king who is to come, the one who will change everything and make things right.

 

In medieval times, the Tree of Jesse was often depicted in art, a sort of pictorial family tree, with Jesse at the bottom of the trunk, David above him, and then Solomon (David’s son) and eventually Jesus.  Some of the images show other family members along the branches.  A complete Tree would show all 43 generations (according to Luke), but mostly, they would pick out the key characters in the story of the origins of the Messiah.  But whereas a family tree usually starts at the top and works down through the generations, the Jesse Tree starts from the base and works up through the branches. 

 

The tree of Jesse is saying something about where Jesus comes from, in terms of his earthly lineage, that he comes from a line which starts with an ordinary man, whose son was picked out by God to be king of Israel and Judah, who was remembered as the best king ever, because he led the people and brought peace.  It is saying that Jesus comes from royal blood.  But the Tree of Jesse also points to who the Messiah, will be and what he will do.  It looks backward and it looks forward. 

 

We saw the passing of another great leader this week, with the death of Nelson Mandela.  People spoke of him as the father of the nation, and you could hear the affection in their voices on the radio and television of all the people who were interviewed.  He was more than just a politician.  To begin with, he was a voice crying in the wilderness.  He led South Africa out of apartheid, and brought the whole nation to freedom, where people could work together.  There was no bitterness in him about the 27 years of imprisonment.  He forgave, and he taught the country to forgive.  He was not perfect, nobody is, but for South Africa, for the whole of the African continent, for the whole world, he has become the ideal of a leader who stood up for justice and what is right and good. 

 

Nelson Mandela is at the base of the tree for South Africa.  And now the leaders, the politicians, and the people need to grow strong and true to continue in his line.  It is not just about individual families, but the family of the nation.  And then it is part of the family of the world.  What happens in South Africa matters for Britain and for Bensham.  The victory over apartheid, over institutionalised hate and racism, matters for us.  We too have been liberated from the sin that was apartheid.  We too have a hero, an example of what it means to stand up for what is right.  In the end, we are all brothers and sisters across the world, twigs on the same tree.  What happens in Africa and India and the Americas affects us.  When the Philippine islands were devastated by the typhoon, that is part of us.

 

And the Tree of Jesse is also part of who we are, part of our story.  Spiritually, we are descended from a line of kings, of great leaders, which started with an ordinary man who had eight sons.  And then, eventually, came the Messiah, Jesus.  And now we have been made twigs on his tree by our baptism and by turning to him again and again.  And that gives us hope –

• hope for the future, because the tree continues to grow, and we are part of it. 
• And hope that the Holy Spirit will give us the power to continue the work, to make a stand against evil, whatever way it pops up in our community, and to go on living faithfully in God’s light, so that we make a difference here, in this place. 
• And hope that it will bring us inner joy and peace, even when life is difficult. 

 

It’s not just about where Mandela came from, but about what we did and where he took South Africa and the whole world.  It’s not just about where Jesus came from – it’s about what we did when he was here and what he goes on doing.  It’s not just about where we are coming from – it’s about what we are doing while we here, and where we are going, where we are taking our church, our community, our country.  That’s how we will prepare the way of the Lord.