Epiphany

by Sharon Marr

(Based on Matt 3:13-17)
With thanks to Debie Thomas.

Last week we were encouraged to think of a word that has been on our heart this Advent season, and the word I thought of was relationship.  That it had been at the foremost of my mind was unsurprising because I was about to meet a half brother I never knew I had, that afternoon. But … it was even more than that.  I have been considering for some time, as part of my mind wanderings, the importance of Relationship, the belonging to, being part of a whole. Then I personally witnessed just how important relationship is, when my new 66 year old brother broke down and wept at our father’s grave here in Tairua.  Relationship.  And then again when he and his family met my brother and sister and son and families.  Relationship.  We need to belong. We need to know who we belong too.  And then I read today’s Gospel – all about the restoring of relationship.  How wonderful.  Is that not a true Epiphany moment? 

Epiphany: meaning ‘appearing’ or ‘revealing’.  During this brief Epiphany season, between Advent and Lent, we leave mangers and swaddling clothes behind and turn to stories of shimmering revelation.  Kings and stars.  Doves and voices.  Water.  Wine.  Transfiguration.

In Celtic Christianity, Epiphany stories are stories of “thin places”, places where the boundary between the mundane and the eternal is very porous. God parts the curtain, and we catch glimpses of his love, majesty, and power.  Epiphany calls us to look beneath and beyond the ordinary surfaces of our lives and discover the extraordinary.  To look deeply at Jesus … and see God.

Christian historian John Dominic Crossan says Jesus’s baptism story was an “acute embarrassment” for the early Church. What scandalized the Gospel writers was not the miraculous, but the ordinary.  Doves and voices?  All well and good. But the Messiah placing himself under the tutelage of a rabble-rouser like John?  God’s incarnate Son receiving a baptism of repentance?  Perfect, untouchable Jesus?  What was he doing in that murky water, aligning himself with the great unwashed?  And why did God the Father choose that sordid moment to part the clouds and call his Son ‘beloved’?

I suppose every age has its signature difficulties with faith.  When we’re not busy flattening miracle into mirage, we’re busy instead turning sacrament into scandal.  After all, what’s most incredible about this story?  That the Holy Spirit became a bird?  That Jesus threw his reputation aside to get dunked alongside sinners?  Or that God looked down at the very start of his son’s ministry and called him Beloved — before Jesus had accomplished a thing worth praising?

Let me ask the question differently:  what do we find most impossible to believe for our own lives?  That God appears by means so familiar, we often miss him?  That our baptisms bind us to all of humanity — not in theory, but in the flesh — such that you and I are kin, responsible for each other in ways we fail too often to honour? Or that we are God’s beloved — not because we’ve done anything to earn it, but because our Father insists on blessing us with his approval?

Here’s my real problem with Epiphany:  I always, always have a choice — and most of the time, I don’t want it.  I want God’s revelations to bowl me over.  I want the thin places to dominate my landscape, such that I am left choice-less, powerless, sinless.  Freed of all doubts, and spilling over with faith.

But, no.  God has not insulted humanity with so little charity. We get to choose.  No matter how many times God shows up in my life, I’m free to ignore him.  No matter how often he calls me Beloved, I can choose self-loathing instead.  No matter how many times I remember my baptism, I’m free to dredge out of the water the very sludge I first threw in.  No matter how often I reaffirm my vow to seek and serve Christ, I’m at liberty to reject him and walk away.

The stories of Epiphany are stories of light; and yet, quite often, they end in shadow.  Jesus’s baptism drives him directly into the wilderness of temptation and testing.  Soon after he’s transfigured, he dies.  There is no indication, anywhere in Scripture, that revelation leads to happily ever after.  It is quite possible to stand in the hot white centre of a thin place, and see nothing but our own ego.

We speak so glibly of faith, revelation and baptism.  As if it’s all easy.  As if what matters most is whether we sprinkle or immerse, dunk babies or adults.  As if lives aren’t on the line.
Until Christianity became a state-sanctioned religion in the fourth century, no convert received the sacrament of baptism lightly; one knew the stakes too well.  To align oneself publicly with a despised and illegal religion was to court persecution, torture, and death.

I don’t know about you, but I find so much of this maddening.  How much nicer it would be if the font were self-evidently holy.  But no — the font is just tap water, river water, chlorine.  The thin place is a neighbourhood, a forest, a hilltop.  The voice that might be God might also be wind, thunder … indigestion. Or delusion.

What I mean to say is that there is no magic — we practice Epiphany.  The challenge is always before us.  Look again.  Look harder.  See freshly.  Stand in the place that might possibly be thin, and regardless of how jaded you feel, cling to the possibility of surprise.  Epiphany is deep water — you can’t stand on the shore and dip your toes in.  You must take a breath and plunge.
I remember our grandson Steffan … when he jumped off the Tairua bridge for the first time, aged about seven, and nearly drowned.  When asked why he had jumped when he couldn’t swim, his answer was, “I didn’t know I couldn’t.”  Let us, beloved family, have that same trust to plunge forward.  Regardless.

New Testament scholar Marcus Borg suggests that Jesus himself is our thin place.  He’s the one who opens the barrier, and shows us the God we long for.  He’s the one who stands in line with us at the water’s edge, willing to immerse himself in shame, scandal, repentance and pain — all so we might hear the only Voice that can tell us who we are and whose we are …  Drawing us into relationship. Listen:  We are God’s own.  God’s children.  God’s pleasure.  Even in the deepest water, we are Beloved.

Surprises

by Bruce Gilberd

(Based on John 1:1-14)

Some of you know I sometimes just walk around town here in Tairua, to see if anyone wants to talk, to share a general or personal matter.  Conversation often starts with the weather or the news.  Then it may be health.  Then family.  Then how fortunate we are to live in this natural, and supportive, environment.
But it often stops there.  Usually – not always.  For many it is a high step up to further the conversation, from delighting in creation, and a possible creator, to considering whether that same creator has disclosed himself in history.
Which is why we are here tonight – to celebrate a surprising and wondrous birth.

And what a surprise it was – not least to Joseph and Mary.

But there were more surprises to come.  A catalogue of them.
– the questioning, wise twelve-year-old child;
– the hectic three years of ministry punctuated with solitude and prayer;
– the inclusion of all kinds of outsiders – those on the fringe;
– the frequent searing challenges to those on power, both religious and political leaders;
– the surprised, anguished disciples as their leader embraced the cross;
– the supreme surprise of the resurrection, and all that means for all humanity.

Surprises, and threaded into them: wonder!

But as I chat with my friends around town, these surprises can be difficult to introduce into the conversation as we celebrate the beauty and wildness of creation, and how this same creator became one of us in history; in Jesus of Nazareth.  That is not so easy for me.  This disclosure that God is Christ-like, that Christ is both creator and reconciling liberator, is a big step for many of us.

I hope we are all working on how to respectfully deepen our conversations!

Back to tonight’s Gospel reading:
St John, writing about the identity and significance of Jesus, the Christ:  “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.  What came into being in him was life and the life was the light of all people,”

Jesus – the Christ, the Messiah, the Word, the Creator – was birthed amongst what he had made, this world, so he was at home here, and acted to liberate humanity from all that spoils life here.

Creator and reconciler:  Christ is both.  He became flesh and lived amongst us, and still does.

What a joy!

Love came down at Christmas

by Sharon Marr

(Based on Matt 1:18-25)

Our way into the Nativity story on this fourth Sunday of Advent, when we light the candle for Love, is not Mary or Elizabeth or John the fiery Baptiser.  It is Joseph, a quiet carpenter who upends his good life for a dream.  Every third year our lectionary turns its spotlight away from Mary and gives us the perspective of her would-be husband – a quiet, unassuming descendant of the House of David.  

So, today we reflect on Joseph’s part in the world’s greatest love story.  A love story enacted by God, whose love for us was so outrageously extraordinary … overwhelmingly unreasonable … that into this very troubled world, in His fullness of time, he sent his Son, as a babe … to reconcile us to himself.  To restore us.  To make us whole.  To bring us eternal life.  To show us how to love, this costly love.

So when did you last feel truly loved?  When did someone do something for you that made you feel truly cherished?  My moment was just the other day.  Albie and I were having the yearly conversation about “what do you want for Christmas?”.  And my very dear husband … who when doing the lawn mowing really prefers neat straight lines, no overhangs or obstacles, said, “Would you like another tree for our front lawn?”  Now I suppose that doesn’t sound like a love declaration to you: certainly songs won’t be written about it. But to me it was a most loving and generous gift … offered because he knows I would love it, even though the gift will eventually cost him his equilibrium on lawn mowing days.  An insignificant example, I know, but it is an everyday-ish example of love, the love we are commanded to give, the giving of self, costly love. When we think of costly love, names like Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Bonhoeffer usually spring to our mind along with the Saints, but the reading today reminds us that this love can come in the smallest most insignificant of packages, a babe, and change a world!

Don’t you find it surprising that, of all the ways in which God could have reached us – of all the ways in which God could have saved humanity – he chose, in his infinite wisdom, to send his son as a baby? Not a man. Not an obvious Messiah. Not a solider or a king. But an infant, helpless as any infant, vulnerable to all of the harms of the world.

How like God.  To do the exact opposite to how we would do things.  No victorious warrior, no vibrant CEO,  no charismatic leader, just a fragile teenage girl and a lowly carpenter … and God needs them to agree to be part of his planned love story.

So if we are tempted to think of Joseph as a minor character in the Christmas narrative, the Gospel of Matthew reminds us that, in fact, Joseph’s role in Jesus’s arrival is crucial, even though  he is only given a couple of mentions in the whole of the New Testament! It is his willingness to lean into the impossible, to embrace the scandalous, to abandon his notions of holiness in favour of God’s plan of salvation, that allows the miracle of Christmas to unfold.  What a gift of costly love Joseph gives. 

As Matthew tells the story, the God-fearing carpenter wakes up one morning to find that his world has shattered.  His fiancée is pregnant, and he knows for sure that he is not the father. Suddenly, he has no good options to choose from.  If he calls attention to Mary’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy, she might be stoned to death, as Levitical law proscribes.  If he divorces her quietly, she’ll be reduced to begging or prostitution to support herself and the child.  If, on the other hand, he marries her, her son will be Joseph’s heir, instead of his own biological child.  Moreover, Joseph will be tainted forever by the scandal of Mary’s illicit pregnancy, and by her ridiculous (blasphemous?) claim that the baby’s dad is somehow God.

The fact is, Joseph didn’t believe Mary’s story until the angel Gabriel told him to.  Why would he?  Why would anyone?
We make a grave mistake, I think, when we sanitize Joseph’s consent.  We distort his humanity when we assume that his acceptance of God’s plan came easily, without cost; when we hold at arm’s length his humiliation and doubt. In choosing Joseph to be Jesus’s earthly father, God led a “righteous” man with an impeccable reputation straight into doubt, shame, scandal, and controversy.  

God’s call required Joseph to reorder everything he thought he knew about fairness, justice, goodness and purity.  He would become the talk of the town — and not in a good way.  He would have to love a woman whose story he didn’t understand, to protect a baby he didn’t father, to accept an heir who was not his son.  In other words, God’s plan of salvation required Joseph — a quiet, cautious, status quo kind of guy — to choose precisely what he feared and dreaded most.  The fraught, the complicated, the suspicious, and the inexplicable.  So much for living a well-ordered life.  

No wonder that Gabriel’s first words to Joseph were, “Do not be afraid.”  If we want to enter into God’s story then perhaps these are the first words we need to hear too.  Do not be afraid.  Do not be afraid when God’s work in your life looks alarmingly different than what you thought it would. Do not be afraid when God asks you to love something or someone … more than your own spotless reputation … or your need for straight mowing lines.  Do not be afraid of the precarious, the fragile, the vulnerable, the impossible! 

Dear family, may our lives mirror that of Joseph, may we too be willing to say yes when we hear a call from God, and join with him in being part of the great love story, the story of costly love, the story in which God calls us to be bearers of the Good News to our broken world today.
We are reconciled, we are restored, and we are loved.

The Ugly Game

Look, this blog is about football, so apologies to any sportophobes. But there’s a big competition going on in Qatar between 32 teams who’ve won the right (out of 120 countries) to fight play for the Football World Cup.

There’s a lot not to like about football, eh.  (‘Soccer’ in our enlightened land.)  (And this from one who couldn’t be a bigger sports fan.)  This blog rarely spotlights sport, but for once sport must be spotted.

Because, how can it be called the ‘beautiful game’ when

  • every few moments a player goes down clutching an ankle, grimacing and writhing in pain?
  • referees regularly award free kicks and (worse) penalties to players who have dived to the ground without having been touched?
  • players gang-bush a ref who’s made a decision they don’t like (or hasn’t made a decision they think he should have made)?
  • a player who scores a goal then careers around like a child, shirt off, claiming wild acclaim?
  • after a goal, players mob by the corner flag and do a childish, inflammatory, unsporting little hornpipe?
  • penalty goals scored are lauded with all the same over-reaction, even though it was only a point-blank shot which the goalie had no chance saving?
  • commentators use epithets like “sumptuous” and “miraculous” and “glorious” to describe unremarkable goals?
  • players like Messi and Kane and Beckham and Maradona are lionised as miracle players when most of the time they’re ordinary and even anonymous?

And don’t let me start on penalty shoot-outs to decide a drawn match after extra time.  Why should one team, having played to an exhausting, heroic impasse, end up a random loser?  (Sorry, I did start.)

Football players – even the nice ones – become cheats, hollywoods and prima donnas on the pitch; referees become random and easily deceived officials; VAR takes up so much time, to produce wrong decisions, and disrupt any flow the game had; Harry Kane is lauded as top goal scorer of all time when half his goals were from penalties, and only about three players on any given pitch at any given time get chances to shoot at goal anyway.  It’s so unlaudable a record.

And then there’s the whole corrupt politics behind the game … and not the least by the current World Cup hosts.

“Beautiful” game?  I don’t think so.  That’s like calling Chinese gooseberries “kiwifruit”, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea “democratic”, or New Zealand “Godzone”.

Yet … what a comp!  What a Cup.  What a spectacle it’s been!

Despite the ugliness of it all, it’s been beautiful to watch.  The drama!  The exquisitely crafted goals.  The competitiveness.  The melting pot of peoples.  The commentaries.  (“Morocco have the wind in their sails!”  “Destiny lies at the feet of Luka Modric!”  “A wave of Dutch orange rose to meet him!”)
I hate the cheating and the unsportingness, despise the pretentious antics, scorn the gasconade.  But damned if the drama don’t just trump it all.

Give us more of the ugly game.