Sunday, December 22, 2013

Sunday Podcast

Colouring In

When I was a child I was told by my teacher, that when I was colouring in, to always try to keep the colour inside the lines. I found this incrediblely hard to do. Regularly, the colour would streak out across the thick black line like a solar flare, a lasting reminder that I had failed. I would feel frustrated and ashamed that I couldn’t do it when others could. Why could I not control my hand?

Over time my accuracy increased, my hand/eye coordination improved. Less and less often did I feel ashamed that my pictures were not good enough.  As I grew, I realised that life was about colouring inside the lines whether in mathematics or British Bulldog or with whom I should be friends. Even now as adults, we are still expected to colour in the lines that society draws.

Joseph was not a rule breaker or a dreamer. He coloured inside the lines from an early age. He not only knew how to colour but he knew why. He was a righteous man. He was committed to following the Torah and it’s laws. Where those laws were explicit, following them would have not have been a duty to man like Joseph. It would be a second nature non-negotiable.

Joseph is engaged to Mary. Well it’s more that that. According to the social and religious laws they were as good as married, but had not consummated the marriage. Therefore for your espoused to be pregnant at this stage asked questions of her fidelity. Those colouring within the lines would almost certainly have publicly divorced the unfaithful spouse bringing shame on her and her family.  Joseph was someone who coloured within the lines but something was drawing his hand and his attention elsewhere, even before his angelic visitor arrived.

He resolved to divorce Mary privately, allowing her and her family to maintain some sort of honour. He doesn’t do what was expected by others or by the Law.  In being righteous and yet, even so, unwilling to put Mary to shame, Joseph hears the call of something deeply counter-cultural for a man like him. And what is so remarkable about him is that he has the wisdom and the courage to follow that call.

Is it any accident that God chose dreams to speak to Joseph? It kinda goes with the name doesn’t it. But if you are good at colouring within the lines of life, perhaps the only way that God can speak to someone like that - to challenge you, to allow your crayon to slip, is in that place where you have no control, where you cannot colour within the lines, where you can obey no rules or laws?

God speaking in dreams has a great and nobel scriptural tradition. Yet we all too often dismiss our dreams as some of the quite frankly bizarre stuff that happens as a consequence of sleep. Dreams are an essential part of keeping our brains healthy, yet because anything can happen in a dream anywhere to anyone; because they sit in the hinterland between the real and the imaginary; because they are just not verifiable by our scientific age - they become a fleeting topic of conversation and then are gone.

Our dreams are formed in the deepest and most intimate parts of our lives.  They are the arena in which our hopes and longings are tried and tested; where our values are forged and where different histories are played out.  Where it is not only ok, but we are positively encouraged to allow our crayon to slip of the lines of life.

God’s dream is a picture covered in crayon marks in the wrong places - streaks of red passion, shafts of blue peace all across every line and all surrounded by the yellows and golds of God’s glory.

As we stand with Joseph at the outer edge of Advent, what dreams do you dream and all too easily dismiss?  What hopes do you quash because they seem all too unlikely? Which people do you exclude or ignore because they don’t fit into the picture that you colouring - because they consistently tell a different truth to yours, because tick a different box at the ballot, because they are gay or straight or black or a woman?  Are they as unlikely as a man who coloured in the lines, a righteous man, still taking this pregnant girl as his wife, are they as unreasonable as as that socially unacceptable child being God with us?

Joseph awoke from sleep and allowed these divine dreams to become a shocking and risky reality - but in so doing - God is with us.  Joseph stood up and was counted by those who coloured in the lines with him - but in so doing - God is with us.  Joseph allowed a tender and growing love for his wife to expand and to embrace a child that was not his own as his son - but in so doing - God is with us.

Most of is spend our lives trying to colour in the lines. If we make a mistake and cross a line we bear the shame of personal or social failure.  Or to put it another way, we can be lulled into a dream of life that must be a marriage, a job, a mortgage, a car, a certain number of children.  


Today, God’s encounter with Joseph reminds us that sometimes we will colour outside the lines, and that despite what others may tell us, we have not failed, we are not unacceptable or to be avoided but we are loved and accepted by Him.  If our inmost longings seem unlikely or our hopes unrealisable, His dreams for us, even in our failures or shame, are far bigger that we thought possible.  For in all things we are surrounded by the yellows and golds of His glory. 

Today, even in the midst of all of that we so often are and always long to be, are willing to allow a different dream, the love God has for us always, to become a reality in our lives - for in so doing God is with us.

Sunday, December 08, 2013

Peter Gabriel - In Your Eyes

I've been playing this song pretty much non-stop over the last 12 hours or so. Just such a beautiful song...



"In Your Eyes"

love I get so lost, sometimes
days pass and this emptiness fills my heart
when I want to run away
I drive off in my car
but whichever way I go
I come back to the place you are

all my instincts, they return
and the grand facade, so soon will burn
without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside

in your eyes
the light the heat
in your eyes
I am complete
in your eyes
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
in your eyes
the resolution of all the fruitless searches
in your eyes
I see the light and the heat
in your eyes
oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the light
the heat I see in your eyes

love, I don't like to see so much pain
so much wasted and this moment keeps slipping away
I get so tired of working so hard for our survival
I look to the time with you to keep me awake and alive

and all my instincts, they return
and the grand facade, so soon will burn
without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside

in your eyes
the light the heat
in your eyes
I am complete
in your eyes
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
in your eyes
the resolution of all the fruitless searches
in your eyes
I see the light and the heat
in your eyes
oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the light,
the heat I see in your eyes
in your eyes in your eyes
in your eyes in your eyes
in your eyes in your eyes

Sunday Podcast

Here with audio of this morning's sermon based on Isaiah 11:1-10 and Matthew 3:1-12.

Hopes and Dreams

Humour me for a moment. Close your eyes. I’d like you to dream with me a moment and imagine your ideal Christmas. I wonder what you see… A family gathered, no squabbling, instead a gathering permeated with Christmas good cheer, simple but good food. Perhaps it’s bigger - healing and health for someone you love? Spending time with someone you miss?

As December slides us downhill towards Christmas, it’s very hard to hear John the Baptist’s call to repentance above the Christmas music, the whirr of the food processor and the rustle of wrapping paper. It made me wonder what is Advent for?

At it’s most basic level, Advent is a season of expectation and preparation for the coming of Christ - yes Christmas, His Incarnation. Advent is not Christmas lite though, despite Christmas cards, decorations, carols, foodstuffs all having been available for a number of weeks now.  The shops have got right that we are in a period of preparation, but the focus is on feast not on faith or the future.  Today we are reminded that there is more to this season than we have come to assume.

Advent, takes its name from the latin word Adventus, which was the visitation of the Roman Emperor to a community, city or military outpost. A bit like if the Queen was to make a visit to Mill End, there would no doubt be a certain amount of frenetic activity to ensure that the church, grounds, all of you - were scrubbed up well and everything was in it’s proper place. The difference is that the Roman Emperor was absolute power incarnate and if things weren’t just so, or the welcome wasn’t lavish enough - heads would roll… and often did.  Adventus in that sense conjures up images of power, pomp, judgment and fear.

Our Old Testament reading reminds us that the One who’s Adventus we are preparing for, upend our expectations.  He will not judge where He comes by what he sees or by what he hears.  His coming amongst us isn’t about lavish welcomes, or things being polished and scrubbed, or the quality of our carol singing or the size or juiciness of our turkey. His standards are about righteousness - rightness with each other, rightness with God.  It’s about dreaming the bigger dreams that are God’s.

I invited you to imagine at the beginning of this sermon - to dream what your ideal Christmas would look like. Again humour me.  Close your eyes.  Think the things that lies ahead in the next few weeks that need to get done, if you were to have that ideal Christmas that you thought about before but go further that that - what kind of relationships do you want to be part of? What kind of world do you want tot live in this Christmas and beyond?  We are invited to enlarge those dreams this morning, not just for Christmas morning, but for our world.

The Adventus we are edging into is not just about readying ourselves for Christ’s coming amongst us now, but also about His return.  Advent is both and.

When the One who is to come arrives, the order of things as we know them to be in our world will be upended. Predators and prey will live in harmony with each other and with the children of the earth, because the One who is to come does so with a divine authority that will establish a new knowledge, a new experience of, an awareness of the presence of God the Lord.

Again humour me. So you’ve thought about your ideal Christmas and your hopes and dreams for you, your relationships, your community and the world, this morning we need to recognise that some of those dreams of ours we can begin to deal with, others will be more long term, but that there’s probably a gap between what we want and what we hope for.  As we ready ourselves for the One who is to come, this morning John the Baptist reminds us that’s God’s dreams for us are far larger than we first knew.

John stands in Advent calling us to repentance.  This is nothing short of upending our lives, our drives and motives. Repentance is not just saying ‘sorry.’ Repentance is metanoia, from the Greek metanoein ‘to change one's mind.’  Repentance is about recognising the place one is in because of our actions or words and reorienting ourselves in a new Godward direction - realigning our hopes and dreams with His.

To outwardly show that reorientation of life, John offered to baptise people in the river. Baptism, that was normally reserved for prosalytes - Gentiles showing their conversion to Judasim, became to ultimate sign of someone wanting to live out God’s enlarged dreams in the world and reorienting their lives in accordance with those dreams.

John still calls us to repentance. To outwardly demonstrate our affiliation to Christ, but also to continue to put our house in order, to notice the gap between our longings and the longings of God and to reorientate our lives and our drives and motives according to His enlarged dreams.

In that context, repentance is the daily, positive and active choice of the disciple of Jesus, but choosing to live out the hopes and dreams of God is hard.  We can say the general confession in sorrow in church, but not be repentant in our hearts, and leave the presence of the one who is to come, whose Adventus we await, unchanged and unwilling to live a a new way aligned to the dreams of God. If we do not see the new green growth of the repentance in our lives, then we are ultimately as dead as a fruitless apple tree.

What is Advent for then? It us surely the gift of time - time to get ourselves in order for the One who is to come who will bring about a new reality of God in our lives and in our world.  It is about taking time to prepare our hearts and lives to receive that Royal Guest at His first coming and when He comes again.


But Advent also invites us into the kinds of hopes, dreams that the God of the Bible promises all those who are willing to leave their familiar and well-trod paths - and to actively choose to venture down another way. Each time we do so -- each time we hold up our acquired habits and practices and comparing them with our deepest hopes and dreams - we notice a gap - and in that gap we experience the joy of the Advent repentance that John calls us to, a time still marked by our preparation to receive and share the grace and glory of God in the babe of Bethlehem, but also the chance to daily reorientate our lives, to repent and to actively choose the hopes and dreams for each of us and our world as lived out but the One who is to come, the Word made flesh, God with us, our Emanuel. Amen.