I have decided to blog my way through Advent, this may or may not turn out to be an every day discipline. Advent marks a new beginning and invites us to enter into God's story afresh, we all need new beginnings for different reasons and new beginnings often start with baby steps, so I am not going to beat myself up if I miss a day or two, but for those who are willing I invite you to take a part of this journey with me...
Today I went for a walk on the beach, I needed to get out, to find space simply to be, I wanted to hear the waves and to experience the liminality of the shore, I wasn't really expecting to receive a blessing but I experienced one anyway...
New beginnings always come after an ending, tomorrow is the start of the new Church Year, that means that these last few hours of today mark the end of this one, outside it is dark and sunrise is hours away, and yet tomorrow as the sun rises the new day will have already begun...
I like that image because it reminds me that God often works in the dark, the human life of Jesus began in the dark of Mary's womb, his resurrection life also began in the dark, this time the darkness of the tomb. Both of these were hidden and unexpected places, places where the Holy and the ordinary are mixed together in a deep mystery that is impossible to explain or unravel.
This evening as I walked on the beach I experienced a touch of joy, I realised that I was surrounded by heavens kiss as the sunset literally surrounded me, it reflected from sky to sky and in sea and sand, and it touched my heart. It caused me to ponder Mary's response to the Angels message, her simple yet profound "Let it be..." changed the course of history forever. The truth here is, so can ours...
When we dare to be open to receive God's message/ presence we begin to change, we let go of what we were to become something more, something larger, God can enter into our smallness and our darkness and transform it, releasing potential and possibilities in an incarnate resurrection moment, a beginning that will become a transformation...
This is what new days are all about, and they almost always begin quietly in the darkness where heaven kisses earth and earth responds...
Heaven kisses earth, sunset at St Anne's Beach this evening
It is the day before Advent Sunday and I am pondering the reports of shoppers gone mad in "Black Friday Sales" all over the country. Black Friday is an import from America, a day, the day after Thanksgiving, when stores discount goods and sales are "traditional", those longing for a bargin go shopping, very often they are marked by crowds and certain amounts of pushing and shoving. It is not surprising that Asda had the brain-wave of importing Black Friday, they are owned by the American Wal-Mart Company, and it is not surprising that shoppers are hungry for bargins for our consumer driven society runs on an impossible dream, encouraging all of us to build castles in the air, hopes that will never be satisfied.
As I think on this I am concious that I have spent far too much energy and effort, and wasted far too much of my life in pursuing that impossible dream. It is a dream that tells us that we need to define ourselves by what we have and how we look, a dream that can never be fulfilled because there will always be one more thing, a dream that creates an insatiable hunger within us because it feeds on our insecurities. Too many of us have bought the lie that we are not enough, and that we need to prove ourselves in some way in order to be considered worthy and acceptable, we fail to see our value, and even when we hear them we all too often block out messages that tell us we are loved.
We should have learned that we are precious and cherished and loved from our very first days, and even before that, but our parents and their parents before them have also been infected by the "not enough" virus, they too have been pursuing their own castles in the air, they may have bought the lie that to show love is to give things and to provide more rather than to spend time, they may simply have been struggling to survive in a world gone mad. I believe this is largely a Western virus, but it is one that effects the whole world as we "sell" our aspirations and insatiable longings, and we are rendered unable to see a common humanity because our castles are costly and consume our energy and resources.
I have to admit that some of my own time and energy is taken up these days in wondering how I will "provide" Christmas...
That thought pulls me up short, what am I talking about, how on earth is it that I am missing the point, could it be that within me is the same spirit that became apparent in the man in Liverpool;
"..... eyewitnesses reporting in the latter (Liverpool) store that a man had to be restrained by security guards after becoming annoyed that he could only buy a single TV."
I have to conceed that the answer is yes! I don't want to buy multiple TV's, but I do want to provide...
What I am forgetting of course is that Christmas is God's initiative, we may have covered it with tinsel and surrounded it with demands and strange customs, we may have pushed it to the edge of madness until it has become one of the most stressful times of year, but at its heart it is Gods gift to us. At its heart lies the story of a life given, a tiny baby as the greatest symbol of love possible. God is with us! God has come among us, and is still with us....
God has come wrapped as a gift in human flesh to show us another way, a way of simplicity and love, and yet with our "Castle building mentality" even the church which is supposed to be the herald of this message has so often got it wrong. Somehow we have been consumed by a desire to be right, to get it right for God and to show the world how it is done. Our "Castle" becomes harsh and hard in the hope that somehow we will overcome the world. Somehow we forget that God loved the world so much that he came into it, he does not call us to seperate ourselves from it but to love it, to live within it and towards ourselves with an attitude of grace, humility and compassion. I love these words from Pope Francis:
“In ideologies there is not Jesus: in his tenderness, his love, his meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. Of every sign: rigid. And when a Christian becomes a disciple of the ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought… For this reason Jesus said to them: ‘You have taken away the key of knowledge.’ The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge, because these close the door with many requirements. The faith becomes ideology and ideology frightens, ideology chases away the people, distances, distances the people and distances of the Church of the people. But it is a serious illness, this of ideological Christians. It is an illness, but it is not new, eh? "
And there it is, we are not called to follow Jesus by putting the world right, we are called to follow him with love and compassion and into love and compassion, we are called to share that love and compassion with the world arround us, to break through the consumer frenzy, and even to break out of our own consumer frenzy and allow him to break in.
We are called to follow Jesus with love and compassion, to break through our harsh and hard ideologies and to break into the harsh and hard ideologies that make so many demands upon the lives of too many to receive and to give love...
We are not called to an impossible "castle building project", neither one made of posessions and status or one that sets us apart from others by somehow making us "good", we are called to see the one who loves and receives us, who tells us that we are the apple of his eye, that we are valued and precious, and then to share that message, to be heralds of the good news. That might mean that we need to let go of the building project that we have been engaged in, to allow its walls to crumble and fall around us, and that might mean letting go of what makes us feel safe or good, or at the very least vindicated.
Letting go is not easy for it requires a deep honesty from us that we might not be ready to face, it is in a sense an act of repentance, a turning towards God or back towards God, it might even be something we fear. But the whiper of Advent is a whisper of hope, a whisper strong enough to blow away the "castle" walls if we dare to hear it, and a whisper in which the open arms of God are revealed...
I won't apologise for ending with my favourite quote from Matthews Gospel, I simply pray that you and I will be able to embrace the invitation within it:
"Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out ...? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” (Matthew 11: 28-30 The Message)
As I write this I am conscious that we are almost at the end of the church year, this Sunday is Advent Sunday and stands as a pointer in time to a new beginning a new possibility, and highlights a longing for God to come and for all things to be made new. Advent for me is all about longings, and I find particularly this year which has been a very painful year for me in all sorts of ways that I am entering into the groaning of all creation in a fuller way. There is something deep with in me that cries out "this is not right" and that relates to the state of my own heart and mind as much as it relates to the state of the world.
As I stand on the edge of Advent this year I sense an urgency to let go and to begin a new walk of radical faith, a faith that acknowledges that I do not grasp the vastness of God, and do not have a grip on his ways or the infinite compassion of his heart. A faith that does not rely upon its own answers or experiences, knowledge or wisdom, but rather one that dares to throw itself into the everlasting arms and to trust in a new way. I am not talking about being irresponsible and waltzing through life as if God is some sort of insurance policy but rather a simple acknowledgement that his ways are truly higher than my ways and that I am very likely to find him in surprising places.
As I reflect I on letting go I find that I am challenged by Richard Rhor's meditation from today through which he calls us to embrace a larger vision and to embrace the paradoxical nature of life and to alter our view of failure, death and pain, to see them as transformative and even creative ( or re-creative).
Neither expelling nor excluding (conservative temptation), nor perfect explaining (liberal temptation) is our task. True participation in God liberates us each from our control towers and for the compelling and overarching vision of the Reign of God—where there are no liberals or conservatives. Here, the paradoxes—life and death, success and failure, loyalty to what is and risk for what needs to be—do not fight with one another, but lie in an endless embrace. We must penetrate behind them both—into the Mystery that bears them both. This is contemplation in action.
Advent's call to look forward is a call to take the brokenness of the past and not to deny it, but rather to let it go, to allow it to fall to the ground and die in order that something new might be allowed to grow. As I ponder this I am aware that I have spent much of life defending and even hiding my vulnerabilities rather than drawing them into the light and allowing God to transform them. We don't like being vulnerable, and so much Christian teaching tells us that we must have all of our "ducks in a row" in order to be accepted, we have excluded rather than included, and I suspect we have quaked underneath our thin disguises in case somebody exposes us for the frauds that we are.
The bottom line is that in the stakes of looking good, getting it right, saying and doing and maintaining correct behaviour I am a fraud, my heart is torn and I get it wrong quite often. I can't and don't even want to be "good" in the "nice " way that churchiness expects. BUT I am God's creation and he calls me beloved, and he sees possibilities within me that far exceed any I can manufacture in myself, so on the edge of Advent I am deciding to let go, to be different by being me, flawed, vulnerable and broken but loved and embraced by the God who wants to establish his recreative work in and through me... Incarnation, death and resurrection all active and present at once in the mystery that is God...
It has been one of those weeks, incredibly busy and very challenging, a week where I have felt overwhelmed and inadequate, and yet a week where I have been given fresh glimpses of God that have surprised and challenged me. Last night after a long day on a course I returned home to find phone calls regarding a member who needed immediate attention for a very real issue. When I got home again I decided that putting together a powerpoint was the last thing I needed to be doing so I went to bed early and we ran without video projection in the service this morning! It struck me as I thought of how to explain the problem that it is easy to put emphasis on the wrong things, to get our priorities in a muddle and to miss God in doing so because we are so busy trying to prove something.
I was pondering the churches collective desire to appear to be strong and capable as I prepared to preach this week, I was pondering the text of Luke 21, Jesus speaking about the destruction of the temple and pointing towards the signs to come, of wars, disasters and persecution, it is a fearful picture and it is easy to miss the underlying invitation to trust in God that is woven through the text. His encouragement to us is not to focus the problems but to trust in him, to let go of the whys and wherefores and to listen for the voice of the Spirit. I am learning more and more that God comes to us and speaks to us in surprising ways when we are open to the possibility of his presence.
I have found that to be true this week for God has spoken to me through surprising encounters and in surprising places. My heart was touched as I watched a teacher from the Philippines speaking about the devastation that had hit his country, as he spoke he pleaded for help, and although he was trying to hold himself together his voice broke, in that break I heard the heart of God, the God who was calling me to respond, speaking to my heart "these are my people and I love them." It was as if Jesus stood in front of me and showed me the wounds in his hands, and asked me to take hold of them, to be one with him.
The second awakening was to a deeper appreciation of the depth of vulnerability of what incarnation means, it came through Artrue a lovely Polish man who comes to our Comfort Zone drop in. He comes almost every week and is friendly and often chatty, this week he came in and fell asleep, at the end of the session the volunteers were unable to wake him, and when I arrived at church after another meeting he had been carried into the church where cushions and blankets had been found. The Paramedic who had been called out told us he was simply exhausted and that the hospital would be unlikely to help. My wonderful volunteers looked after him and finally after a bit of a fight and an initial refusal (echoes of Bethlehem) we got him into a shelter for the night.
Artrue came among us in total vulnerability, and as he slept on the floor he opened our eyes to the depth of the plight he and others like him are in, the local council has tightened up the criteria that provides funding for an overnight stay in a shelter. As a church we have prayed for people, and God has brought them among us, and again he comes to us in them and reveals himself and asks us to open our hearts to receive him. God came among us and slept on our floor, and we feel completely inadequate to respond, and yet in the wonderful mystery that is God he calls us to let go of our excuses and questions and to trust him.
Finally I came across a picture posted onto facebook and it stirred my heart, the picture was of Jesus embracing a prostitute, a young girl caught in a vicious sextrade, as he held her they wept together. I asked God for a word about that picture, and the word that was given was "wanted", God wants and cherishes all of the broken and hurting ones, and his call to us is to not only do the same but to recognise that he receives us in our weaknessess and vulnerabilities, in the bits of ourselves that we would rather hide, and the tears he sheds are for us too, and somehow they become a healing stream if we dare to enter into it and listen to what is on his heart.
The truth is that we are not strong or capable, the truth is that we don't have all of the answers, but when we let the walls down and let God in almost anything is possible!
28-30 “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” (Matthew 11)
This was written in response to viewing Carlos Alfonso's work "Where tears can't stop" You can view a larger copy of the image and read about ithere. While he had a specific subject I believe this work is open to all of those of us who shed tears for pain and injustice, who have been pierced in some way or another and a call to weep with those who weep.
PS 56:8You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your record?
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