Third Sunday of Epiphany 2022

 

I am a lover of stories. More than that, I am a lover of storytelling. Not only stories themselves, but how they are told, whether in novels or cinema or in our own everyday lives.

This week, the vicarage-dwellers watched Encanto, Disney’s 60th feature-length animation. Set in Columbia and inspired by the magical realism of much Latin American storytelling, Encanto tells the story of the family Madrigal, three generations who live together in a sentient house at the heart of a hidden village, presided over by their matriarch Abuela, Grandmother. For two generations, each member of the family has been bestowed a magical gift as a child. One has precognition; another, the ability to endow food with healing power; another can control the weather, to an extent, though her strong emotions can create unwanted downpours. One has enhanced hearing; another can shape-shift their form; another can converse with animals. One has super-human strength; another can summon flowers into being. And one, Mirabel Madrigal, did not receive any magical gift. However, it is Mirabel who sees their home cracking apart, the magic dying; and it is Mirabel who must save them all, by helping them to confront those things that they have tried to suppress for many years.

As Mirabel persists, the family secrets are brought into the light. Her older sister, Luisa, the one with superhuman strength, carries an enormous burden of anxiety, that her value is only in her talent, and should it fail, who then would she be? And Mirabel and Luisa’s older sister, Isabela, the one who makes everything pretty with flowers, resents the burden of beauty and perceived perfection, secretly wishing to be able to express all her emotions in a diversity of plant forms, resentful of Mirabel who is free from the burden of expectation, unaware of Mirabel’s burden of expectation to serve the village without a gift of her own. In the Madrigal’s world, image, how we are perceived, is everything; uncertainty and ambiguity are dangerous, to be pushed away. Abuela Alma is so frightened of losing the miracle that has been given her family that she controls everything. She is admired by the villagers and loved by her family, but over time she has become a toxic presence, her actions, however well-intentioned, threatening the very thing she is fighting to preserve: the future for her family, in their enchanted home.

I must confess that I did not enjoy this film. It was far too close to the bone. It told the story of many a local church congregation, where love blinds us to controlling behaviour, where duty becomes weaponised, and where we struggle with giftedness and identity.

This Sunday in our churches we hear again the words that Paul wrote to a household in Corinth (1 Corinthians 12:12-31a). He speaks of bodies and of gifts. Our bodies are interconnected, inter-dependent, and, in the case of a Christian community, express the body of Christ in our neighbourhood. Each has a role to play, each is worthy of honour and respect, if one suffers then all suffer. And Paul will continue, describing how love holds this household together, building and where necessary repairing a roof to shelter all, a house where the whole extended multigenerational family can live together (1 Corinthians 12:31b-13:13).

It is easy to see the body in 1 Corinthians 12 as a metaphor, but it is more than that. We are bodily creatures, bodies (and not just disembodied lives) entwined together, and that is why there are limits to Covid isolating, and to relating to one another virtually, through a screen. Both of those things are good gifts—indeed, life-saving—but beyond a certain point they shape us in unhelpful ways. We are bodily creatures, and Jesus is both our model and our life. Jesus, who experienced hunger and thirst, the need to sleep, to rest; Jesus, whose body was wiped by his mother in infancy and in death, whose body touched and was touched by others in healing ways, whose body was tortured, whose body experienced dying and death and whose body was raised from the dead in bodily form.

Our bodies carry our biography, from the face of our mother or father that looks out at us when we look in the mirror thanks to the genes they passed on, to the scars and burns and liver spots on our hands, to the tension we feel when the present moment pulls us without warning into the past. And our bodies need to know the healing power of love in the past, where we can return through accompanied memory (for memory is a shared construction) as well as in the present, through forgiveness and reconciliation. Our bodies can also experience future-healing, faith giving certainty to what we hope for, and the foretaste now of what will be one day.

By the end of Mirabel’s quest, her gift is made manifest to her family, the gift of reconciliation. Family members reconciled in their relationship with themselves—I can be weak as well as strong; cacti are as wonderful as roses—and to one another where they had become estranged. And the family are reconciled to the village, who come to help, possessing no magical gifts but being many, and knowing what it is to work together to bless others. One body, many parts. May we, as a local church, discover afresh what it is to be embodied, to be touched as well as to touch, to be healed and to heal, to discover Christ in our midst. Amen.

 

Second Sunday of Epiphany 2022

 

The Gospel set for this Second Sunday of Epiphany is John 2:1-11, the account of Jesus turning water into wine at a wedding in Cana in Galilee.

 

The water in question is contained in stone water-jars used for Jewish rites of purification. Broadly speaking there are two kinds of purification rite involving water. Some involve submerging the whole body in ‘living’ water, that is, in a public pool or a stone bath fed by a stream (cf. the baptism of Jesus in the river Jordan). For example, pilgrims would undertake such a rite in public pools before entering the Temple, and this is how and where 3,000 people were baptised at the first Pentecost festival after Jesus had been raised from the dead.

 

The other kind of purification rite involved pouring water from a cup dipped into a larger vessel, and it is these vessels that play a role in the Gospel story today. As it happens, in this home the jars were made of (non-porous) stone, which, according to ritual practice—and unlike more readily available (porous) clay jars—is not contaminated by contact with ritual impurity. These large stone jars were an expensive outlay, the choice of a family to whom purity observance was not only desirable but essential, and it is likely that this was a priestly home, possibly even relatives of Jesus on his mother’s side.

 

These rites are not about washing for hygiene purposes, and, crucially, neither are they about making us (or an attempt to make us) acceptable before God: that is the error of legalism, which Jesus confronted; not the failure of Law, which Jesus came to fulfil not abolish. These rites are gifts given by God to God’s ancient chosen people, gifts for enabling life to be experienced fully, in all its fullness. Indeed, they are life-giving. They are given as moments of pausing, within the course of the natural rhythms of life, to rediscover that, “Huh, I have a body!” This is incredibly important for those of us shaped by the so-called ‘Enlightenment’ and the Cartesian idea, “I think, therefore I am.”

 

There are Jewish water-purification rites relating to the menstrual cycle, not because women are a contaminating presence but because they have a body that experiences cycles to be attended to, not only on a practical level; cycles that connect them deeply to all creation. There are Jewish water-purification rites relating to eating bread, inviting us to pause and wonder at our hand, and the intimate connection between labour and food. There are rites of cleansing when laying out the dead, to remind us of the gift of a living, breathing body, for we bring nothing into the world and will take nothing with us when we leave it; and rites of cleansing before a priest declares a blessing, to remind us that a blessing is not merely words but a physical thing, a hand stretched out, air passing through a voice-box, matter connecting with matter in ways that matter.

 

It is this water in these stone jars that Jesus transforms into wine. The jars and the water and the wine are all gifts. Every part of this episode is gift. It isn’t that the wine is better than the water (though it is better than the wine already consumed). It isn’t that Jesus is superseding anything here.

 

This episode ties in with the collect for this Sunday, that declares:

Almighty God,
in Christ you make all things new:
transform the poverty of our nature by the riches of your grace
and in the renewal of our lives
make known your heavenly glory ...

 

The phrase ‘the poverty of our nature’ is a recognition that we do not make ourselves—do not summon ourselves into being by our own power and authority—but receive our life as a contingent gift, wondrous, deeply connected to others. Yet, as if this were not wondrous enough, what is already gift is transformed into another—a different—gift ‘by the riches of [God’s] grace’—that is, through the act of another gift-giving. This is grace upon grace.

 

You are a gift, and that gift is embodied. That body will age, and experience limitations, and is intended to become thoroughly inter-dependent with others, who are themselves also gifts who enjoy the gift of life. The gift you are is a gift that will undergo transformation, many times over, as your personal story is woven into the big story God is co-authoring with humanity. Like the servants and the steward, we will both know and not know what it is that has happened, for it is a mystery, not to be explained but to be entered. Like the disciples, we will be given a glimpse of Jesus’ glory, and are encouraged to respond by affirming our belief in him. The occasion of our transformation may be a running out of some resource, as the wine ran out; or the abundance of a resource, as the water filled the jars to the brim. The ebb and flow of our lives is full of endings and beginnings. In all things, may Jesus be glorified.

 

We need regular, recurring moments that bring us back to this truth, to the gifted nature of life, not as an intellectual idea but as a lived experience. Today, we hold the One whose presence graces us in our outstretched palm; we place him on our tongue; and as we go from here our bodies—our stomachs and our bloodstream—assimilate him in us, as we are in him. We come, in these Covid times, receiving the body and blood of Christ in one kind, the bread; looking for the day when we shall drink the new wine of the kingdom together again; and the day when we shall eat and drink at the heavenly banquet, the marriage feast of the Lamb and the Bride, the consummated union of Christ and the Church. And today, as every time we participate in this moment, in the Dismissal our transformed lives are drawn out and carried and served to the world, to be found good, declared good, revealing Jesus. Amen.

 

Baptism of Christ 2022

 

Lectionary readings Isaiah 43:1-7 and Luke 3.15–17, 21–22

First, a few notes on the readings. Then, a few thoughts on what it might mean for us today.

From the Old Testament reading, ‘But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.’ (Isaiah 43.1–2)

There are two obvious places where the descendants of Jacob pass through water without even getting wet. First, they pass through the parted waters of the Sea of Reeds, pursued by the chariots of the army of Egypt. And the LORD is with them. Then, a generation later, they pass through the temporarily held back river Jordan into the Promised Land, where they will face the soldier-giants who are garrisoned at Jericho. And they are not overwhelmed.

Our Gospel reading is the account of Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan, passing through the waters, submerged perhaps, but not overwhelmed. ‘And’ we are told, ‘a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”’ This verse, and this voice, is repeating Psalm 2:7, ‘I will tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to me, “You are my son; today I have begotten you.’ Jesus’ baptism is explicitly his coronation, the restoration of the throne the LORD had given to David and sworn to uphold for ever. Even should David’s sons prove unfaithful and so be removed, the LORD would restore the throne to one of his descendants. This is that.

Psalm 2 is a coronation psalm. It opens with the nations surrounding Jerusalem plotting against her. In response, the LORD sets His chosen king on the throne on His holy hill, to sit in judgement over the surrounding nations, to rule over them as a heritage and to crush all rebellion. Therefore, the kings of those nations are advised to submit themselves as vassals, to serve the LORD’s appointed king and not conspire against him. The psalm concludes, ‘Happy are all who take refuge in him.’ So we have the reading from Isaiah 43, with its water and indirect but clear reference to the Egyptians and the Canaanites, and the reading from Luke 3, with its coronation declaration (and John the baptizer’s reference to the threshing floor which is also a symbol for judgement over nations), and Psalm 2 tying them together.

The implication is a direct challenge to the emperor in Rome and to his proxy rulers in Judea and Samaria and Galilee. It is a challenge that will bring Jesus from passing through the waters of baptism to passing through the waters of death—and out the other side, in his resurrection, neither abandoned by God (though it will look that way for a moment) nor overwhelmed by death. It is a proclamation that will be fulfilled when a Roman emperor, Constantine, embraces Christianity (thoroughly imperfectly, as do we all; and guaranteeing religious freedom for other faiths, as embracing Christianity always does). It is a proclamation that will also be fulfilled by a Church made up of men, women and children drawn from every nation under heaven.

What, then, has this to do with us? I want to begin where Psalm 2 ends, with ‘Happy are all who take refuge in him.’ Experiencing happiness is an essential part of wellbeing, and it tends to be circumstantial. We aren’t happy all the time, and neither should we be, for we are made to experience all the emotions, and to grow to emotional maturity. Happiness is circumstantial, has to do with recognising those moments when we have all that we need for this moment. Gratitude helps us appreciate what we have been given, that brings meaning to our lives and connects us to other people. And happy are those who take refuge in Jesus, the king in the middle of the waters.

It is often said, by those who reject faith, including prominent and influential humanists in the culture around us, that a god who could spare us from suffering and does not do so is not a god before whom we should prostrate ourselves. And it is true that God does not promise to spare us from suffering. Instead, God has promised to be with us in our suffering—in those experiences that open us to empathy and compassion and to justice and commitment to others—and, in time, to redeem us, to rescue and restore us.

Emotions are not, for the most part, mutually exclusive, and so we can find ourselves experiencing the grief of bereavement or the anger of frustration at our inability to rescue someone we love from the anxiety that grips them and at the same time know the happiness that comes from an awareness of Jesus alongside us. Sometimes our eyes are opened to see that, and to see meaning in that, just as at Jesus’ baptism the heavens were torn open and the Holy Spirit descended in the form of a dove, for those with eyes to see. The questions I want to offer you today are, where do you feel (or fear) the waters rising? And, in those circumstances, what say you of this Jesus?

 

Second Sunday of Christmas 2022

 

Second Sunday of Christmas 2022

Lectionary readings: Jeremiah 31:7-14 and Ephesians 1:3-14 and John 1:10-18

We are still in the Season of Christmas, and Christmas is a time for the telling of wonderful stories. On the last day of 2021, my family and I made a trip to the cinema to see Steven Spielberg’s new version of West Side Story. Given that it was first staged on Broadway in 1957, and first adapted for the big screen in 1961, I am going to assume at least an awareness of this classic tale, based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, translating the action to the mid-1950s turf wars between White and Puerto Rican gangs in New York’s Upper West Side. Theirs is not only a contested territory, but also a condemned one, the working-class slum housing being cleared to make way for gentrification. Everything about West Side Story is wonderful, from Leonard Bernstein’s music to Stephen Sondheim’s words to Jerome Robbins’ choreography, and Spielberg’s retelling successfully walks the line between knowing irony and adoring tribute in pinpointing the location to the very blocks demolished to create the Lincoln Centre, home to the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera, and New York City Ballet, among other resident arts organizations.

The Jets are the last remaining working-class Whites in the neighborhood, and they feel abandoned by their own community, those who have upped and left for a better life elsewhere and by the city authorities who, in the 1950s, were carving up established-but-poor neighborhoods to create landscaped parks and parkways for automobiles. These are the demonized poor, and they know it.

The Sharks are the latest in a long line of immigrants, arrived from Puerto Rico. The Free Associated State—or, Commonwealth—of Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the United States. Her people have been US citizens since 1917, but that doesn’t make them equal in the eyes of the Jets. The Sharks represent yet another community who have upped and left in hope of a better life elsewhere, only to find life hard in different ways, and salt in the wounds of the Jets who refuse to leave their native island behind but who feel it being taken from them. Scapegoats, to be sacrificed.

Within and around the Jets we meet Riff, trying to hold his world together as it falls apart; his best friend and former-Jet Tony, trying to move on from a life that was heading in the wrong direction, but still tied to his community; and Anybody’s, born a girl, identifying as a boy, rejected by her family, desperately wanting to be accepted and find a new home, a new family, within the Jets. When you’re a Jet, | You’re a Jet all the way | From your first cigarette | To your last dyin’ day. | When you’re a Jet, | If the spit hits the fan, | You got brothers around, | You’re a family man. | You’re never alone, | You’re never disconnected. | You’re home with your own— | When company’s expected, | You’re well protected!

Within and around the Sharks we meet Bernardo, a hard-scrabble fighter with a fearsome reputation; his lover Anita, longing for a better life in America and worried that Bernardo will jeopardise that; and Maria, Bernardo’s little sister, stifled by his over-protection and dreaming of her future. When Maria and Tony meet, sparks will fly. And all around them, everything is set up for there to be only losers, and no victors, in a fight for life that cannot be won. And yet, the dream remains. There’s a place for us, | Somewhere a place for us. | Peace and quiet and open air | Wait for us, somewhere. | There’s a time for us, | Some day a time for us, | Time together with time to spare, | Time to learn, time to care. | Some day, | Somewhere, | We’ll find a new way of living, | We’ll find a way of forgiving. | Somewhere, | Somewhere…

The themes and issues explored in West Side Story are timeless. Writing from the rubble of a Jerusalem that had been swallowed up by the Neo-Babylonian Empire, most of its prominent citizens having been relocated to Babylon, the prophet Jeremiah helps his community imagine a world in which their identity and future are secured, not through their own efforts but through the covenant-loyalty of the Lord. On his account, their mourning will turn to joy: he will comfort them and exchange their deep and complex sorrow for gladness.

Or think of Paul of Tarsus, a first-century Roman citizen of Jewish heritage, writing to a Christian community made up of two distinct ethnic and cultural communities living alongside one another in the city of Ephesus (where ‘Gentile’ is as umbrella a term as ‘White,’ and ‘Jew’ as un/welcome as ‘Puerto Rican’). Paul reframes Jeremiah’s themes of identity and a future in terms of adoption and an inheritance, and adds a new theme, that this is achieved through the shed blood of Jesus, the one caught in the crossfire of our enmity and striving for what we cannot hold on to.

And in our Gospel reading, John pushes the boundaries in his overture to the Life of Jesus, foreshadowing questions of whether this Jesus will be received into community or not accepted; and whether community is formed and sustained by rules (spoken and unspoken) or by grace and truth found in seeing the invisible God made visible in the face of this ‘Other’ whose coming into our world changes everything. Today, the world was just an address, | A place for me to live in, | No better than all right, | But here you are | And what was just a world is a star | Tonight!

It isn’t hard to see the appeal of the Jets. To believe our community to be let down by those in authority, in the Church and in wider society. Even the face of the Church, here in Sunderland, is increasingly Brown or Black, not White. Increasingly immigrant, not native-born. And if the future is presented as shiny, it may be hard to see where we fit in to that picture—even as those whom we imagine we are being moved aside in favour of wonder how long they must wait until they are seen as equals. It is easy to think that we must do whatever it takes to hold on to what is left to us, however far it may have fallen from glory. And yet, as Jesus put it, those who strive to save their lives always end up losing their lives—and not only their own lives, but the lives of those they love. Then, of course, there are those who see their only hope in establishing a rival gang of their own: the Church or the neighbourhood might go down, but we won’t go down with it! And then there are those who long to be a Jet, or a Shark, and are denied…

We are still in the Season of Christmas, and Christmas is a time for the telling of wonderful stories. Stories in which communities struggle with questions of identity—what makes them who they are—and the impossible possibility of a future—what that could look like and how it might be secured. Stories in which these things are, ultimately, given, received, experienced through grace. Stories in which those who find themselves on the margins, pushed out, unwelcome, come to discover family, a place of belonging. (That one is being written all the time and remains to be written.) Stories of tragedy transformed into Somewhere for the Anybody’s. Stories of grace and truth, and the invisible God made visible in the face of Jesus and in the eyes of his sisters and brothers. Stories that point us back to him, again and again, the light that shines in the darkness—of the world, and the Church, and of our hearts—and is not overwhelmed by it but shines all the brighter. Stories that never grow old, and that we never outgrow needing to hear. In God’s mercy, may they help us to walk in Christ’s light and dwell in his love that we may know the fullness of his joy throughout the year ahead. Amen.