First Sunday of Christmas 2024

 

Luke 2.41-52

Back when I was at theological college, Susie and Noah were in primary school and Elijah was a baby. Once, when Jo was away, I put Elijah in the pushchair and went to collect the other two from school, along with two of their friends, whose dad was also at the college. By the time we got home, it had started to rain. The house we rented had a covered car port that sheltered the side door, so we went in that way. I sorted out drinks for the kids. They disappeared upstairs to play. Some time later, I realised that I didn’t know where Elijah was. I searched the house, every room, without finding him. I went through the house again, even looking in places that, logically, I knew it was impossible that he would be. I asked the others if they knew where Elijah was, and they said “No.” Frustrated, I said, sarcastically, “Well, thanks a lot for helping me look for him.” It was later reported back to the other college family that Susie’s dad had thanked them all for helping look, but that they didn’t think I really meant it. After I had searched the house from top to bottom three times over, I heard a sound from outside the door to the car port. And there I found Elijah, still strapped in the pushchair, exactly where I had left him.

The biographer Luke records a story of Jesus accompanying his parents, Mary and Joseph, on pilgrimage from Nazareth to Jerusalem to take part in the festival of the Passover at the temple, when he was twelve years old. It is a journey that might take three days, possibly more, followed by the seven days of the festival itself. Then everyone sets off for home. At the end of the first day walking home, Mary and Joseph can’t find Jesus. They ask among their relatives, who have made the pilgrimage with them, but no one has seen him: “No, sorry, I thought he was with you.” They ask among the wider group of pilgrims. No one has seen him. No one can recall seeing him all day. By now, mum and dad are more than a little anxious.

There is probably nothing they can do until morning – which doesn’t help – but then they head back to Jerusalem. And then, for three more days they search the city, high and low. They do not find Jesus anywhere. By now, they are besides themselves with worry.

They say the thing you are looking for is always in the last place you look. At one level, that is obvious: once you have found the thing, you stop looking. But there is a sense in which the thing is found in the one place you are most anxious about looking, the place you do not want to go. This is especially true for a missing person.

Eventually, Mary and Joseph find Jesus. He is in the temple. He has been there all along. And Luke tells us:

‘When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he said to them.’

But here is the thing. The Greek text does not say “in my Father’s house.” The word ‘house’ is not there. The Greek says, ‘in the of the Father of me.’ Duplicating the ‘the’ is how they highlight something – we might use bold or italics or underline – and the thing being highlighted is determined by the context. The translators have decided that the context is where Jesus is – the temple – and have given us “my Father’s house.” Because “my Father’s house” is what Jesus calls the temple.

Except that this is a very odd choice. The phrase “my father’s house” is found many times in what we call the Old Testament, and a couple of times in the Apocrypha, and it always means ‘my immediate family or relatives’ and/or what we would call ‘my family tree.’ That is what the phrase means. It would be very strange for Jesus to use it in an entirely different way. In John’s account of the life of Jesus, Jesus is recorded using the phrase on two occasions. Once, he says, “in my Father’s house there are many mansions.” Now, whatever he is speaking of – whether the life to come, or the family of God – he certainly isn’t speaking about the temple here. The other occasion is when he says, “Stop making my Father’s house [or family] a house [or family] of commerce.” This could possibly be the one place where “my Father’s house” could refer to the temple; but even here Jesus could be referring to his family tree, the people of God, and how they were supposed to relate to one another and the surrounding nations.

In any case, ‘house’ is an odd choice to supply as context. There is another word that makes more sense, in context. Mary has just told Jesus, “your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” That is the context. Surely Jesus’ response should be read, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my father’s anxiety?” In the anxiety of my father. Or, in other words, didn’t you realise that I would be found in the place where my father was most anxious about finding me?

I don’t know why the temple was the place where Joseph was most anxious about finding Jesus. Perhaps he was worried that he would lose his son, that the apprentice builder of Nazareth would follow a different calling. Perhaps he was worried about where that might lead, where it might end up. Perhaps he was right to worry. Perhaps he couldn’t help it – after all, isn’t that what parents do, even after their children have grown up?

What I do know is that Jesus is to be found in the place where we are most anxious. Wherever that place might be. Whatever those circumstances may be. That is where Jesus is, already, waiting for us to face the fear. For in that place, he is a non-anxious presence. In that place he is listening attentively and asking pertinent questions, desiring to know peace and to draw others into that peace.

So, what are you most anxious about today, right now, in this threshold between 2024 and 2025? Be honest with yourself, as honest as you dare. For that is where Jesus is to be found. In the last place you are prepared to look.

 

Fourth Sunday of Advent 2024

Lectionary readings: Hebrews 10.5-10 and Luke 1.39-55

Christmas is the Season of the Incarnation. The season of learning how to inhabit a body. The season of coming home to your body.

Perhaps you are uncomfortable at the prospect. Perhaps you feel that your body is too tall, too fat, too frail, too plain, too awkwardly clumsy to be loved. At puberty, our bodies can run ahead of us, demanding that we expand, to lofty elevation or ample bosom, before our peers, leaving us exposed to cruel name-calling. Whoever said ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me’ was deluded or misguided at best. And in old age, our bodies demure to do the things we have been so long used to doing together, call on us to downsize our lives – but how can you downsize, when your body has accumulated so much baggage over the years?

This Sunday, Advent 4, the Church reflects on the visit of Mary, in her first trimester, to Elizabeth, in her third trimester. When their bodies were experiencing changes and where two new bodies are first formed.

In their world, children were seen as the fruit of the womb, a woman’s fruitfulness in life determined by her ability to bear sons and daughters. Elizabeth is barren, ground from which no tree has sprung. And this is a source of great shame, the belief that you are not worthy of love, not worthy of connection. That awareness (distorted, but no less real for that) that you are not enough, not good enough. ‘Poor Elizabeth,’ her fruitful neighbours say, ‘She has always followed God’s laws so diligently and yet he does not reward her’ (have they forgotten how many childless women have played such key parts in their people’s past?) and their condescending pity adds to the slick of shame.

When Elizabeth realises that she is pregnant, she keeps it a secret for five long months. The only people in her community who possibly understand her existence are other barren women, and she cannot risk losing them also, to envy. Not to mention the very real risk of miscarriage. And so, for five months, Elizabeth is hyper-vigilant, not to let slip her condition. Do nothing out of the ordinary.

For five months, she is utterly alone in the world. Unable to converse with anyone (even her husband has lost his voice). This is enforced solitude, even in the midst of everyday life. Perhaps the solitude is not much different from how she felt before, alone among the other women drawing water from the village well. But the need for hyper-vigilance is new.

First trimester: hiding morning sickness, back ache, stomach cramps. Second trimester: don’t respond to the joy of feeling that first flutter of your unborn child moving within; don’t respond to the discomfort when, bigger, stronger, they kick against the womb. No one can know.

As Elizabeth reaches the third trimester, as it becomes too hard to keep her changing body hidden, news of her pregnancy breaks. Now, at last, she can breathe. Now, at last, the community holds space for her, to focus on her coming child, and once she has delivered her son, to bond with him. Now someone else will go to the well. Now her relative Mary comes, quickly and purposefully, to be with Elizabeth. Now she has company, for solitude – so essential to the driven life – is dangerous for the soul that is in recovery from shame.

And even now, Elizabeth wrestles with the shame that God has moved to remove. ‘Who am I,’ she asks, ‘that the mother of my Lord should come to me?’ I am not worthy.

Even so, Mary comes; and with her, joy. With her, deep connection, woman to woman, womb-to-womb, unborn-son-to-son. This is the antidote to shame.

And Mary sings a song of revolution. A song of God raising up and honouring those who are nobody in their own eyes, honouring them and establishing them in community, with others like them. Connection, with shared experience. You are not alone. You are worthy of love and connection, you and those like you who have known shame, who have felt yourself unworthy. And those who have looked down on you, they will be humbled. Brought low, sent away empty.

Elizabeth is the first person who Mary sings her song over.

But her song has echoed down the centuries. And Mary sings her song today, over all who live with shame – as all live with shame. Sings over you, and over me. Over the emptiness inside, the belief that we are not and cannot be worthy of being filled, with love.

Sing, Mother of God. Sing over your relatives. Sing, and may your song be poison to our shame, burning it away.

 

Third Sunday of Advent 2024

 

Third Sunday of Advent: Philippians 4.4-7 and Luke 3.7-18

I wonder if there is a smell that evokes this time of year for you? Perhaps it is a bowl of clementine oranges. Or the smell of wet wool, transporting you back to childhood mittens and rolling snowballs in your hands. Perhaps it is the clinical smell of the room in which a loved one died, at this time of year. More than any of our other senses, smell takes hold of memory and can transport us through time to some distant moment.

One of the big themes in our Gospel passage today is wrath. Wrath is the settled and ultimately victorious opposition to rebellion. And the root of the idea is connected to smell, to the drawing-in of air through the nostrils, before acting decisively.

As John calls the people to repent and return to God, he is amazed at who responds. Many in the crowd have sided with Rome against their own people, grasping opportunity as tax farmers or soldiers serving a local client king backed by Rome. John calls them vipers, a reference to the Garden of Eden, where the serpent deceived our first parents. God had created the human in God's own likeness, and declared us to be, like God, very good. Yet now sin had come to afflict us.

This did not, and does not, change our nature. Sin afflicts us, as does cancer. If you had tests and went to the doctor for the results, they might say, “The bad news is that you have cancer. The good news is, we have caught it in time and are confident in our therapy.” A doctor would not say, “You are a cancerous person!” Likewise, God comes in compassion to deal with sin. God promises Eve that her seed will crush the serpent’s head, even as its seed bites her seed’s heel.

John observes that God has taught even the vipers, those who sided with Rome, to flee to God from the coming wrath. That wrath is the wrath of Rome, and it is a bitter smell in the nostrils, evoking other bitter memories of national disaster. For wrath is always historical, not abstract.

Jesus also calls certain groups vipers, and asks how they will escape hell? The hell he refers to is the coming wrath of Rome, whose legions will burn Jerusalem to the ground.

There is a tradition in scripture of seeing something of the wrath of God being exercised through the wrath of empires. And Jesus asks the Father, if there is anything of your judgement falling on your rebellious people in the coming wrath of Rome, let that wrath fall on me instead, and let that be enough. In this Jesus is standing in the tradition of the martyrs of the time of Greek invasion and occupation of the Temple.

The Father accepts Jesus’ prayer. And so, when the Jewish people rebel against Rome in 66 CE, and, midway through an eight-year war, the Romans burn Jerusalem, this is not the wrath of God falling on a nation that rejected his Son. It is solely the overreaching wrath of Rome. And for this, Rome will experience the wrath of God.

But the wrath of God is quite unlike the wrath of Rome. It is not military. It is not violent. Instead, it looks, and smells, like this:

gentiles are embraced within the people of the God previously of the Jews;

women, slaves, and children are given equal status to free men;

Christians serve their neighbours in times of plague and disaster;

Christians refuse to recant their declaration that Jesus is Lord, even in the face of the lions.

What kind of lives are these? It takes a couple of hundred years, but Christ will topple Caesar, not by might but by the aroma of joy, of peace, of non-anxious people in the midst of an anxious world.

This is what the wrath of God looks like. And with Rome judged, in love, the age of wrath with which the New Testament is concerned comes to an end.

John takes up a different image for Jesus, that of removing the protective outer husks from the kernel of wheat. Jesus comes, not to transform some unacceptable husk into acceptable grain, nor to separate out inedible husks from edible wheat, but to remove the husk from every grain. He comes to remove that which keeps us from our neighbour, the hard shell. He comes to deal with our sin, and we are still called to repent and believe the good news.

Of course, we still live in a world where we see the bitter wrath of nation states and would-be emperors falling on men, women and children. In such a world, we are not to be vipers, siding with power, but instead, like the early church, might also be joyful, gentle, non-anxious, prayerful, thankful, peaceful.

May that be, increasingly, your experience. And if it is not your experience today, may you be transported to a time when it was. May this Season evoke the memory of the One who came to us, who comes to us still, and who will come to us again. Amen.