Responsive

Text: Mark 1:14-20

I began today by commending those who had found time, or made time, to take an hour for worship. I assured newcomers that if they think everybody else is here every week, it is not so. At a seminar this Tuesday in Newmarket, church development guru Anthony B. Robinson told us that in the US, active churchgoers now average 1.7 Sundays a month, out of 4.3 weeks in a month.

I know, and God knows, a lot of you are busy. The retired ones say they don’t know how they found time to work. The working ones say we don’t know to make tie for anything else. We are choosing from among the best things this world has to offer – retirement travel and recreation, and excellent demanding jobs.

I know, and God knows, a lot more are suffering the worst that this world has to offer. They are sick and tired. The money runs out before the next payday, or we age into more days than we have dollars. We’re aging and aching and our horizon draws closer till all we can focus on is our own pain.

Yet today you’ve come, as each week about 150 or more come out of a pool of a thousand affiliates. You’ve found time, and made time, to take an hour today, to spend an hour, to waste an hour. Thank God!

I think you’ll like this year of Mark. The lessons in the church lectionary follow Mark all year. If you’ve missed January, you’ve only missed 13 verses already! Mark is blunt, urgent, to the point, as our world, and God’s world, collide.

There’s no Christmas story in Mark. Bang: John the baptizer says God’s world is coming. Get ready! He baptizes Jesus, who heads out to the desert for 2 verses. Today, the baptizer is in prison, and Jesus shows up preaching God’s world is now near: turn to it. He invites two pairs of brothers, who leave work and follow him.

It’s easy to keep up – and hard to keep up. It’s like an action movie: less elaborate dialogue, but scenes change and stuff happens. Come along for the ride!

We started with the rebel John at Jerusalem and the Jordan: downtown, let’s say. He’s in jail now, and Jesus is off in the hinterland, back from the desert: York region, maybe Thornhill. We’ve moved from God’s world is coming close – to God’s world is now near. We were asked to get ready – now it’s time to go!

I’ve been preaching this Mark cycle every 3 years for a long time now. Mostly I rely on the old Marxist materialist liberation theology circles, Fernando Belo and others. For the past decade I’ve included more from the Jesus Seminar scholars like Dom Crossan digging into the political and economic context of Jesus.

I’m leaving today for a week of study in Calgary, to generate a daily, weekly Lenten blog, and weekly sessions from late February to early April. I’m taking 4 new studies of Mark from the 21st century. But for today, you got the old stuff.

Remember, I know you’re busy. God knows. The retired ones say they don’t know how they found time to work. The working ones say we don’t know how to make time for anything else. We are blessed with these choices from the best our world has to offer. And I know you’re suffering. God knows. We’re sick and tired and the money won’t stretch – all the worst things our world has to offer.

Mark may be the gospel to reach us this year. There’s so little descriptive flowery stuff, the elaborations of Matthew and Luke, the poetry and symbolism of John. Here, we catch more by the setting: Galilee, fishing, in the hinterland. I know you’re busy, and I know you’re suffering. You think the fishing brothers weren’t?

This world will take all we got, whether choosing the best it has got to offer, or suffering the worst it has to offer. But what if there’s a whole other world, that we risk missing: God’s world, the reign of God, as if God were running things?

Last week we were talking of epiphany and calling: God in and through any or all people, any and all moments, for those with eyes, ears, and hearts open. We have to unlearn and relearn: what are you going to be if and when you grow up?

God forbid Christianity just gets us busier, as if we were human doings, not human beings. God forbid we reduce our faith to another hobby, interest, class, leisure activity, or a cause, recognizing another need, saving the world.

Mark’s good news is that God’s world is near now. Walk away from some of this world, and it’s right there. But you have to notice Jesus passing by and inviting.

You think fishermen weren’t busy in Galilee? Scholars say prices were down for Galilean fishermen. They worked more, earned less – and then had to pay more taxes to pay for the big new Roman city nearby. They had to work with old technology, nets weighted with rocks. Haul the fish, sell the fish, pay the tax, mend the nets – and do it again. Who had time for anything else? Who had no arthritis?

Some guy comes out of nowhere, after John was arrested downtown for saying God’s world was coming, and get ready. Here comes Jesus, out in this hinterland
proclaiming God’s world, near, now. Fish for people! We are human beings, not human doings.

Simon and Andrew, James and John, were called from something, and freed to something. Simon and Andrew abandoned their boat. James and John left Zebedee behind. There’s no reference to women and kids, or other dependants. Maybe these men never saw them anyhow, given all theirvworking hours….

These first 4 disciples in Mark are called from ‘man’s world’ – in the worst sense of that old sexist term. They were invited to share God’s world – in the best sense. They left their resource industry labour, to join a creative class.

We’d be horrified at something similar today. We’d be terrified if it happened in our family, wouldn’t we? Last week I confessed that our middling classes, in our middling ages risk reducing our gospel to something too small.

See, we’re all responsible. We respond to the choices and demands of our world. We take care of ourselves and of others. We’re se busy responding to every call our world makes on us that we risk forgetting what once moved us.

God knows, and we agreed last week, that God calls through people and moments, the sublime reaching us through the mundane But we get stuck in the mundane, and lose track of the sublime.

Marriage forgets romance, careers forget passion, and sickness forgets life. Tyranny thrives when good people do nothing. I quoted Yeats’ poem from January 1919, ‘The Second Coming’:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tied is loosed, and everywhere
He ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand’
Surely the Second Coming is at hand…

I know you’re busy. God knows. You can’t respond to everything, and if you squander energy on each fleeting fish of the best the world has to offer, you might miss the call as Jesus goes by. You can’t respond to every pain and injustice, and if you live as a victim of the worst this world has to offer, you might also miss the call, as Jesus goes by. What if he’s right, and God’s world is near, now?

You may have to be called from something to be freed for something. Like Simon and Andrew leaving the boat, like James and John leaving Zebedee. This is not about time management or balancing or rounding out your life. It’s about risk and loss. You had to leave the womb, leave your parents, go to work, then retire, to open each new gift in your life.

This is about saving your life, or finding your life, that sublime life through and beyond our mundane world. This is about finding who you are, whose you are as a citizen of God’s world, not simply busyness person of this world, or victims of it.

Good news. It’s near, now. That’s call: God’s world is near, now. Follow me.

What word do you have for our hearts, O God, give us ears to hear. Amen.


Break in on us now, God.
Interrupt the chattering classes
Silence the constant clamour we call news
Put a stumble in the march of troops
Put a smile on the weeping face
For you know we need it.

Our world is running us hard
Keeping us so busy
We may have forgotten
What moved us before
Like punch drunk fighters
We may be dazed and confused
Faced with all the bet that this world can offer.

Our lives are running us down.
Sickness and suffering
Pain and injustice
Not enough money to get to the next payday
Not enough dollars for our days
Our lives extended for years we didn’t fund well
We are scared and our horizons narrowed
By the worst the world can offer.

Relieve us now of burdens you never laid
Release us from false responsibilities
‘Renew in us a right spirit’ says the psalm
‘Reclothe us in our rightful mind’ sings the hymn

‘The world is too much with us, late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!’
Writes the poet…


God bless us busy ones,
Who dare not stop, less we face the abyss

God bless us suffering ones
Who forget to look beyond our pain and anger

Give us grace, to glimpse and imagine better
Your world, near, now.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen

We closed as we have all 5 Sundays this January, with words from Martin Buber and an alternative commissioning and blessing:

We cannot avoid.
Using power,
Cannot escape the compulsion.
To afflict the world,
So let us, cautious in diction,
And mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully

May you see the face of Christ
In everyone you meet
And may everyone you meet
See the face of Christ in you

Go in peace,
and may you find peace

Go in love,
and may you share love

Go with God,
for God will surely go with you!
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VOCATION and CALLING

Text: Mark 1:4-11

I started by asking you all this day: “What are you going to be when you grow up? What are you going to be if you grow up?” You have to keep listening and watching. You have to unlearn what didn’t work. You have to relearn what used to work. You have to remember what you forgot, and hope and imagine what you might yet be, and might yet do.

As I visit with our teenaged confirmation class I am reminded of my own. We spent the first ten weeks, in the fall, learning ‘Achievement Orientation’ from Professor Dick Hodgson of the UWO business school. Then from January to Maundy Thursday, we learned the catechism. The message was clear – we were to achieve, to succeed, and by the way, check off the religion box.

I had to unlearn my elders’ culture-bound 60’s message to us. We used to have a rude joke in those days of Henry Morgenthaler’s trials, about a Roman Catholic and a United Church mother discussing when viable human life began. The Catholic mother said: conception makes a sacred human life. The United Church mother said: as soon as he graduates from professional school and gets a job!

God forbid that in our suburban middling class suburban community and church, we convey that same message about vocation and calling to our children. Three years ago I pointed to a respect elder, Sam Gilmore, and a research scientist Samuel Chao, sitting in our pews, and bearing the name from the story. Today, I saw another visiting professor, and lots of successful professionals. I also saw a lot of beloved human beings, and remembered lots not present, seen or heard.

Not all of us, and not all our kids and parents, are middling aged, middling class successes, economically thriving and respected by our culture. We are also those devalued by our economy and culture, wee children of varying abilities, and aging seniors with less mobility, cognitive strength, and cash flow. But give me a child who can give or evoke a smile, or a beaming dementia sufferer, over any six-pack of lawyers in suits, to remind me of being human, being beloved, being called.

Part of the beginning of our Protestant Reformation movement, 500 years ago, was summed up by the slogan ‘priesthood of all believers’. Priests were not the only ones called by God. We all were. Max Weber in the 19th century wrote ‘Religion and the Spirit of Capitalism’. He accused our Calvinist subculture of confusing achievement and success and progress with signs of calling and providence. We narrowed ‘vocation’ to the jobs of bourgeois professions.

I encouraged you to watch, or watch again, Jack Nicholson in ‘About Schmidt’. He retires from his insurance company job in the Midwestern USA, with the rituals of retirement. He leaves a bankers’ box of files in the corner office, and offers to drop in to help if they need his wisdom. Then we watch him, bereft of his job vocation, trying to unlearn and relearn, to rediscover his human vocation. When he drops in to the office, his box is unopened, ignored, and unnecessary.

I confessed that for the first week that I had my ‘smarter-than-me’ phone, I couldn’t answer an incoming call. Picking it up wasn’t enough, like the old phones. Poking a button didn’t work, like my old cell phone. The kid at the kiosk explained to me that it was a heat-sensitive screen, and you slide your finger across it to answer a call, or stop an alarm. I had to unlearn, and relearn, how to receive a call. So do we all, eh?

With Ruth in California, I staffed ‘Our Tube’ sessions at 9am and 4pm this day. Again I confess that I’m slow to get the hang of this use of new media, of video clips and audio soundtracks. I like words and books and pages, and understand how God can call and communicate through print media. But I recognize that lots of folks are called by God, and hear and see and feel better through new media. I’m trying to unlearn a bit and relearn a bit, to imagine and hope – and remember.

You heard today’s story in Alydia’s focus time with children. You heard it in the choir’s singing of ‘Here I Am, Lord’. You heard it again as Lucina read the lesson. I just reminded you of a couple of elements that I connected with all this reflection on our vocations and calling, and the ways we unlearn and relearn, imagine and remember. Do you think a microphone would have picked up the ‘Samuel, Samuel’ call? Would a camera have filmed ‘God standing there?’ No!

Eli was old. He was so old his kids were grown-ups. They had left the temple, and traded on the status and power of being children of a successful man. But they used that privilege and power for themselves, not for other people or good ends. They reaped the benefits of what Eli in his prime had done for them. Imagine such a degenerate selfish generation, if you can!

Hannah wanted a baby, but could not conceive. She prayed to God, and visited Eli at the temple, to ask for help with her vocation and calling to be a mother. She promises if she is given a chance, she will dedicate that child to good and godly purposes, and offer him in service not to her but to God and others. When Samuel is born, she renews the promise, and when he is still a child, she delivers him to the temple the way other mothers deliver children to residential or day schools.

Samuel is sleeping in the holy of holies, by the altar. It’s early in the evening, and the oil lamps on the altar have not yet gone out. What a night light for a child! Something wakes him up, so he goes to Eli, saying ‘did you call me’? Eli, like any adult with a child waking up at night, tells Samuel to go back to sleep. Again Samuel wakes, again, Eli sends him back to bed. Many of you know that this can go on all night, repeating the same exchange hoping for a different outcome.

Finally, the elder has an epiphany, and helps the child enjoy his own epiphany. ‘Go back to bed, and if you wake again, assume an attitude of receptiveness, watching, listening: “Speak, Lord, for your servant listens.” It’s time again to unlearn, and relearn, to imagine and to remember how we open ourselves to all that communicates God to us. How do you watch, listen, and open yourself?

Can you recognize any of the characters in the story? Eli, or his sons? Hannah, or her baby? Can you resonate with the back and forth of a waking child and a care giver in the night? What does it mean to learn and to teach about the calling of God, and the vocation of being fully human, and fully alive?

Let’s not narrow vocation and calling to lawyers, doctors, or MBA’s. Our calling and vocation is to be human, in relation to other humans and God. A child offers or evokes a smile, and that’s a calling and a vocation that doesn’t need to wait. Remember, it beats a six-pack of lawyers in suits! Visiting an aged person can offer that exchange of smiles too, if a bit more rueful. It’s about opening your heart, and your eyes and ears, to much and many that our culture does not value.

Our dominant political economy claims a principle of meritocracy. It purports to base our system on what we earn or deserve. My bible doesn’t sell the same stuff. God forbid that we become culturally captive again, as we were warned by Weber in the 19th century, and as we unlearned in the 1960’s. God grant the we open our eyes and ears and hearts to celebrate the gifts of human vocations all around us, persons of every age who are beloved, called and calling, from infants to aged.

I started by asking you all this day: “What are you going to be when you grow up? What are you going to be if you grow up?” You have to keep listening and watching. You have to unlearn what didn’t work. You have to relearn what used to work. You have to remember what you forgot, and hope and imagine what you might yet be, and might yet do. I ended my remarks with the same challenge to a crowd that skews demographically toward seniors:

“What are you going to be when you grow up?
What are you going to be if you grow up?”
I’ve been closing services each week in this New Year or Epiphany season with the same quote from Martin Buber, and a closing affirmation of recognizing Christ in faces around us. There’s a great U2 video of there song “If God Sent His Angels”, with Bono sitting in a diner as regular customers come and go in fast forward. God does send angels to do the calling and to hear the call – you’re one – and so is the next person you meet, if you learn how to recognize it.

So I said, again, to send you out:

We cannot avoid.
Using power,
Cannot escape the compulsion.
To afflict the world,
So let us, cautious in diction,
And mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully

May you see the face of Christ
In everyone you meet
And may everyone you meet
See the face of Christ in you.

What word do you have for our hearts,
O God, give us ears to hear
Amen
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Hussein Day 2012

I was humbled to share a lectern this evening with Dr. Aman Haji, Shaikh Habib Ally, and Professor Liyakat Takim, and poets and Quran recitation, as representatives of Shia, Sunni, Ismaili and other Muslim movements in Toronto joined in the annual Islamic Ahlul Bayt Assembly of Canada event celebrating Hussein Day. Don’t miss next year!

For regular visitors to this website, you will find a longer introduction to the story of Imam Hussein in my notes from February 8, 2010. If you follow the media, you’ll be aware of tragic deaths again this year in Pakistan on this holiday, but imagine the wider good news story I shared with Canadian Muslims reaching across historic divisions!

As I commented this evening, I cannot speak for two billion Christians in our generation, let alone for the generations past. Mine is a marginal sect in Christianity, the first of a series of postcolonial unions across ethnic lines and ‘old country’ historic differences in the Church of North India, Church of South India, Australia, the UK, and Africa. There are only about 150 million of us ‘united’ churches. The much larger Roman Catholic, Orthodox – and newer Pentecostal and fundamentalist movements- might not call us ‘united’ in view of our views on gender, sexuality, or church order.

I did refer Ghulam Sajan again this year to various Christian speakers more in the league of the Islamic speakers. Apparently the various ‘Reverend Doctors’ were unavailable, and I filled in. I hope for a better gesture from my official elders in the next year. Each generation, sadly, creates new divisions, and each generation, hopefully, mends with new relations. For which would you rather be remembered?

Each speaker this year was given the same them question for response: Is the message of Imam Hussein applicable for our current generation? My answer, and that of the other speakers, was ‘of course’! Freedom is never outdated. Freedom has never fully arrived. Freedom from a new tyranny, and freedom for a greater vision, faces every generation, including ours. As Jesuit Daniel Berrigan puts it, and I quoted this morning:

The real effort, never really done with, is to discern what God is saying to us
from within the real world. All else is a mortician’s job, or a child’s game.”

I reflected a bit on generations. Imam Hussein was the son of Fatima, who was the daughter of the Prophet Mohamed, and enjoyed a good name and a good position. Who are your parents and grandparents, from whom you inherit a name? The American president, Barack Hussein Obama, claims that name. Fewer are called Yazid. It’s not much different in my movement of diversity and generations of change.

My ancestors were Irish Methodists, disenfranchised by English rule, refugees from the Great Hunger, the potato famine. Each generation including mine gives the name ‘William’ or ‘Bill’ to one or several sons. In some generations we have William James and William Robert – that’s right, ‘Billy Jim’ and ‘Billy Bob’.

We are ‘hillbillies’ who remember William of Orange, a Protestant Dutchman who invaded England to oppose a Roman Catholic monarchy – which angered most of our Irish neighbours. Orangemen, at worst anti-Catholic, we provided every mayor of Toronto till Jewish Nathan Phillips – and had a parade in July downtown, with ‘King Billy’ on a white horse. At best, it was about religious freedom: at worst, sectarianism.

In a couple of generations in Canada, our accents changed, our children married Scots and even English. In my turn, I married a woman of French Catholic heritage. As one of our hymns sings, ‘time made ancient goods uncouth.’ Each generation rues parents’ errors, then make our own. My parents’ generation supported a racist assimilationist Canada, with residential schools for aboriginal children, and limited immigration.

I claim my name, ‘United’ though most Christians would call us divisive, and ‘Bill’, with all its baggage. I aspire to conserve and honour the best of those names, partly by repenting and redeeming those names in my generation. Surely those who bear the name of Islam, of Muslim, of Shia, Sunni, Ismaili, Bohra and other groups, and the related personal names, starting with Hussein, share my aspirations.

Yesterday was the 83rd anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther King Jr. He was a Baptist, like my mother. He was named after a German reformer and early ‘Protestant’ resisting the tyrannies of his day. He was also named after his father, also a pastor. Well educated in the northern states, he became an advocate for civil rights for black Americans, desegregation and equal rights and freedom.

By 1963, in his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, King’s cooperation with the Nation of Islam and black Muslims like one of tonight’s poets had grown, and if you see the video we played at our church today, most of those surrounding him on the podium were Muslim.

Martin Luther King Jr. learned nonviolence by studying Ghandi, and made common cause with many. He clung to his roots, though, and demanded of marchers like my pastor in the early 60s that when they came to Alabama to march, they signed a pledge of a new set of ’10 commandments’:
I HEREBY PLEDGE MYSELF--MY PERSON AND MY BODY--TO THE NONVIOLENT MOVEMENT. THEREFORE I WILL KEEP THE FOLLOWING “TEN COMMANDMENTS”:
1. MEDITATE daily on the teachings and life of Jesus.
2. REMEMBER always that the nonviolent movement in Birmingham seeks justice and reconciliation-not victory.
3. WALK and TALK in the manner of love, for God is love.
4. PRAY daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free.
5. SACRIFICE personal wishes in order that all men might be free.
6. OBSERVE with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy.
7. SEEK to perform regular service for others and for the world.
8. REFRAIN from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.
9. STRIVE to be in good spiritual and bodily health.
10. FOLLOW the directions of the movement and of the captain on a demonstration.
My United Church of Canada pastor, 49 years ago, marched in Alabama, and signed the pledge, and took time off work, over the objections of his elders, to do so. My Thornhill clergy colleague’s father picketed the American consulate in Toronto, and his phone was tapped by the RCMP. Have I in my time, kept the honour of my name and of my elders? Have I been as militant in what I resist, and with whom and what I cooperate?

Does this sound like anyone you know, and honour today, as Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Hussein Days coincide? ‘Every place is Karbala, and every day Ashura.’ Toronto, in 2012, who resists Yazid, stands with Hussein? It is hard work to discern ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom for’ in each generation. God will reveal to those who honour the spirit, and conserve the value of the name, in each generation. The rest, as Berrigan said, is ‘mortician work’ or a ‘child’s game’.


The Library of Congress website cites the great Christian Realist, Reinhold Niebuhr, and applies his wisdom to Martin Luther King Jr, and I dare say it applies to Imam Hussein:

The discovery of elements of common human frailty in the foe and, concomitantly, the appreciation of all human life as possessing transcendent worth, creates attitudes which transcend social conflict and thus mitigate its cruelties.

It binds human beings together by reminding them of the common roots and similar character of both their vices and their virtues. These attitudes of repentance which recognize that the evil in the foe is also in the self, and these impulses of love which claim kinship with all men in spite of social conflict, are the peculiar gifts of religion to the human spirit.

Secular imagination is not capable of producing them; for they require a sublime madness which disregards immediate appearances and emphasizes profound and ultimate unities.”

Where many counseled patience and others armed resistance, King saw nonviolent protest as the only practical tool for achieving equality and dignity for blacks, and more importantly, as the only moral answer to the problem of racism.

It took a rare temperament to grasp the possibilities of nonviolence, especially in an era that tended to favor extreme solutions. But in his person King combined, to borrow from Niebuhr's terminology, "the realistic wisdom of the statesman" with "the foolishness of the moral seer." This quixotic mix of religious idealism and political realism enabled King to succeed where others before him had failed.

Is the message of Imam Hussein applicable for our current generation? My answer, and that of the other speakers, was ‘of course’! Freedom is never outdated. Freedom has never fully arrived. Freedom from a new tyranny, and freedom for a greater vision, faces every generation, including ours.

We will need some militant discipline to discern together what to resist, and what to cooperate toward and to ask and to offer mercy to one another. I closed at the Imam Ali Centre with the words of Jewish philosopher Martin Buber again:

We cannot avoid / Using power / Cannot except the compulsion / To afflict the world
So let us / Cautious in diction / And mighty in contradiction / Love powerfully.

As did Imam Hussein, and as did Martin Luther King Jr.
Amen. So be it.

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Baptizing Jesus

Text: Mark 1:4-11

Confirmation classes began this Friday. You’ve raised another bunch of independent thinkers. We asked about their faith, and they said they could select what they believe, based on what worked for them. ‘How dare you?’ I thought, as ‘designated old fogey’ in the room. Surely, are children meant to be seen, not heard, and to accept what they are told and taught. Surely we don’t want a ‘pliable biable’, loose-leaf highlights only.

But I began to remember my own youth, and our preacher George Goth, with whom you could never agree since he contradicted himself in the course of every sermon, saying ‘consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.’ We’d go home and argue about his opinions, even in our early teens, knowing we could, and should, think for ourselves. Perhaps things have not changed that much since the late ‘60’s after all.

Peter C Newman wrote a popular book a while ago, here in York Region. It was called The Canadian Revolution: From Deference to Defiance and he may have overstated his case that our colonial submissiveness has been replaced by an Americanized aggression. We were never submissive, just respectful, and we knew how to resist what didn’t work for us, and how to cooperate with whoever and whatever might.

Barrie Wilson, down the road at York University, wrote another favorite in our church library: How Jesus Became a Christian. He muses at how a good Jewish boy, a mystic maybe, and not a self-believer, got remade into the key figure of a whole religion called Christian. He points out that we started ‘baptizing Jesus’, restating Jesus’ life and teaching in terms of our Christianity, from the earliest scripture writing, and since.

Sure enough, as we start the ‘year of Mark’ in the lectionary, and a study of Mark in Lent, we get hints of the earliest process of baptizing Jesus. Mark has no Christmas story. Bang, it begins with John the Baptist, preaching a baptism of repentance for forgiveness of sin, and promising someone greater soon, who would over a baptism of the Spirit. He meets Jesus, a thirty year old still living at home with his parents, and the rest is history, and a tale of hope for all you with young adults still in the basement.

Scholars tell us that the stories and traditions of ‘John the baptizer’ reflect one movement that centred on repentance. They shared the title of Snoopy’s book of theology in Peanuts: “Has It Ever Occurred to You That You Might Be Wrong?” That’s not a great guilt trip. It’s an admission that we might not yet do and say all that we were made to do and say – we might yet change for the better – improve.

Another movement in the merger we call now call Christianity was a Spirit-filled one of the courage to be. En-couraged, inspired, filled with God-stuff, this was a positive energy to complement what might have gone negative in repentance circles, or legalistic in early circumcision movements. These’ ‘Jesus people’ are mentioned in Paul’s early letters – and are the audience that ‘wrote’ other parts of this ‘baptism of Jesus’.

We have shaped and re-shaped how we construe and make sense of Jesus from the very beginning. God knows he did not do it all! We learned together with what to resist, and with whom and what to cooperate, and told it as Jesus stories, gospels. Repentance alone was not enough, even for John the baptizer. We needed baptism of the Spirit, and Jesus gets associated with it. In Mark, only Jesus sees the heavens open, and the voice affirm him as the ‘beloved.’ He gets it – the crowds don’t yet.

How dare those kids presume to pick and choose and tailor their beliefs by what works for them and makes sense to them? How dare they not! They will baptize Jesus in their turn, as every generation from the beginning has done, more or less consciously. As Daniel Berrigan, the American Jesuit anti-war and civil rights leader of the 60’s said:

The real effort, never really done with, is to discern what Christ is saying to us from within the real world. All else is a mortician’s job, or a child’s game.

Yesterday would have been the 83rd birthday of Martin Luther King, had he not been assassinated in April 1963. Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day in the US, as they remember his nonviolent campaign in Birmingham and Selma Alabama, and across the southern states, to end racial segregation.

We had a great afternoon session at the church today with speakers from Sikh, Zorastrian and Jewish communities and our own Ruth Noble speaking on prophets and visionaries like Martin Luther King. I spoke in the evening at an Islamic event and drew on the same stories. I used one version of the ’10 Commandments’ of the Birmingham pledge signed by civil rights marchers in the morning, and another in the evening:

1. As you prepare to march meditate on the life and teachings of Jesus
2. Remember the nonviolent movement seeks justice and reconciliation – not victory.
3. Walk and talk in the manner of love; for God is love.
4. Pray daily to be used by God that all men and women might be free.
5. Sacrifice personal wishes that all might be free.
6. Observe with friend and foes the ordinary rules of courtesy.
7. Perform regular service for others and the world.
8. Refrain from violence of fist, tongue and heart.
9. Strive to be in good spiritual and bodily health.
10. Follow the directions of movement leaders and of captains on demonstrations.

I told you this morning that our pastor Dr. George Goth took time off work and went to march in Alabama with his classmates from Union Theological Seminary in New York. (Not all things American are bad!) Ruth Noble told us this afternoon that her father the United Church minister picketed the American embassy and had his phone tapped and an RCMP file opened with congregants’ help. We remember how they baptized Jesus.

How dare we baptize Jesus? How dare we pick and choose and restate how we talk about him and construe and make sense of him? How dare we not! We’ve been ‘baptizing Jesus’ from the beginning, and each generation has the challenge of discerning what we resist and with whom and what we cooperate. Thank God!

I closed the service again with the words of Jewish philosopher Martin Buber:

We cannot avoid.
Using power,
Cannot escape the compulsion.
To afflict the world,
So let us, cautious in diction,
And mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully

Go on, baptize Jesus! It’s up to you, up to us. It always has been, and always will be. And that is, as the confirmation class already knows, his irresistible appeal!
Prayer for Grace

God, bless us busy ones,
Who dare not slow down
Like the Roadrunner in the cartoon
Already past the precipice and in space
Spinning legs in midair futility
Before looking down, and beginning the awful fall….

God, bless us passive ones
Who dare not move a muscle
Like a wild animal scared of predators
Trembling, unable even to run away
Living with fear and threat….
Before even identifying the scary Other…

For we busy ones, and we passive ones,
Have gathered here, now, to listen
What word do you have for our hearts
O God, give us ears to hear.

Not simply a word of knowing or believing
But also a word of hope and encouragement
Of grace and of mercy
A word to address our frantic busyness,
Shift the burdens you never laid,
A word to comfort our paralyzed passivity,
to give heart to our resistance and to our cooperation

Relieve our fears, en-courage us
And bless us here –
That we might in turn bless your world,
As you did, and do, and will,
In Jesus Christ, whom we baptize in turn…
Amen

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Recognizing and Representing Magi

Text: Matthew 2:1-12

It felt like a long holiday season this year, eh? Some took the week before Christmas off, and many the first week of the New Year. Commuter gridlock has been eased on the roads for nearly 3 weeks, and many offices and business ran at a softer pace. Media first-stringers took holiday, and their back-ups gave the impression that there was less news, and wrote it badly: on CBC radio, 3 stories in a row repeated the same phrases:


Eyewitnesses say…. … authorities are investigating.

As I recall all the Epiphany sermons I’ve offered over the years, I fear I’ve often sounded like a third-string news presenter. We hear the too-familiar tale of Magi. Sometimes we dwell on the gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Other years we speculate on their origins in Persia, Babylon, Arabia, India, or China. Perhaps we wonder at the astrology and astronomy of the star, or Herod’s political tyranny.

So I asked: how will we re-cognize and re-present the story of the Magi this year? How will our cognitive abilities construe the characters this time? How will we find context, meaning and purpose in the story? Will it seem to be a ‘slow news day’ just because we are lazy in hearing and in presenting the gospel again? You can blame the preacher – but we do all share the responsibility of what we make of the word we are given.

A century ago, we were imperial in our Protestant movement. We had launched the ‘Twentieth Century Fund’ to ‘win the world to Christ in this century’ through great new missionary organizations. We knew how to preach the Magi: those kings of the Orient would come to Jesus and submit, offering their material and spiritual gifts to our cause.

Half a century ago, we liberal Protestants were cautious, in a climate of secularization, to win the approval of the new elites of the enlightened social welfare state. We would ‘live love’, and ‘anonymous gospel’, ‘the mystery of the rock’, the ‘courage to be’. Our Magi were the scientists, the experts, who through reason could validate our Jesus.

Today, how will we re-cognize and re-present the Magi – and pay homage to Jesus? There is a new ‘turn to religion’ in philosophy and politics, but we are in a pluralistic world with other religions, cultures and ideology. What will we make of the story, construe it again, and bear witness to it with our children and with our neighbours?

I do not think that 3 wise guys showed up in Bethlehem in fact. I read the story, and see that the magi are not necessarily 3, not necessarily wise, not necessarily men. I learn that their names of Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthazar were invented 500 years after Jesus as Babylonian, Persian and Arabian scholars, according to Alexandrian priests. There is no surveillance video of the manger, and investigative journalists can prove nothing.

However, I know that the story is true and meaningful. Even as I am mocking our imperialism of a century ago, and deriding our attempts to be rational 50 years ago, ruefully I anticipate how posterity will judge us. And yet, the power and influence of this mythic story has always reached beyond parochial contemporary limits. People in every age find something in it about the wider significance of a baby Jesus. Thank God.

Before he became Pope Benedict, Joseph Ratzinger engaged in a forum with Jurgen Habermas on “The Dialectics of Secularization”. As Germans looking back a century and a half century, the prelate and the political philosopher acknowledged the work that they have to do in recognition and representation, to maintain discourse and civil society lest we pay the price again of losing common norms, for lack of common sources.

Ratzinger appealed in that January 2004 debate to ‘that which holds the world together’. Habermas warned that in pluralistic society, religion risks reduction to the therapeutic. Neither bought the American Rawls’ criterion that religious folks have to translate our faith into the language of a melting-pot of rational enlightened secularism. Both knew that we nevertheless have to make sense to our neighbours, even in our own terms.

Think of the challenge of recognizing and representing the Magi in terms of a spotlight, or of a camera. A century ago, imperialists grabbed control of the spotlight and the camera, pointed it at ourselves. Half a century ago, secular elites controlled the spotlight and camera, and we begged to be noticed, even if they aimed and framed the light. Now, we recognize many spotlights and cameras, offering many angles on reality.

The United Church study on ‘whole world ecumenism’ was called ‘Mending the World’ from a Hasidic rabbi who said that every morning God gets up, and says to Godself, ‘where does my world need mending today’. It’s up to us to wake up and as how we can help today with mending the world. Our creed says the Spirit ‘works in us and others’. We are invited into conversations and partnerships, with other spotlights and cameras.


I’ve reminded you before of the power of ‘reaction shots’ in film. Close-ups of the look of terror on a face in reaction to a villain or disaster can be far more powerful than the best special effects direct shot of that villain or disaster. That’s the power of witness – of being an eyewitness, of directing others’ recognition by your reaction to the thing that matters, that you are trying to represent or communicate.

I reminded you of the 1977 movie “Close Encounters of Third Kind” and the little boy who was not afraid, but delighted to go off with the new alien friends – and came back safe and sound! I should also have mentioned “ET”, the 1982 film that built on the befriending of aliens by kids. Some of the grownups were curious – but more were scared or angry in the face of the unknown. Which character would you rather be?

I don’t think that ‘Close Encounters’ or ‘ET’ are factual. But I know that they are true and meaningful. They presented us with a cast of characters with whom we could identify, and from whom we could distinguish ourselves. They were exploring the boundaries and limits of mid-20th century rational scientism, and new pluralism. They equipped us with a way of recognizing and representing a changing world. Thank God.

Who are the Magi for us, here, now? We live in a world of the Other. Everybody around us is different, by ethnicity, race, and religion. Faces and languages and customs vary in our own neighbourhood. How will they react to us – or we to them?

We could act like Herod, and the chief leaders in Jerusalem. They liked the status quo and had a lot to lose by any alternative spotlight or camera. When they heard of the Magi, they were scared. They were mad. They could recognize some truth in the location of Bethlehem – but not the meaning of the event.

We could act like the Magi, the Other – or we could received the wisdom of the Magi. They had great gifts to offer. Mary accepted them. Children are open to it, like the children in Close Encounters and ET. Why would be act like Herod and the leaders, or the scared and angry adults, zenophobes confronted with the Other?

The word ‘homage’ survives in our modern bible NRSV translation. What is homage? A century ago, we would say it was submission – the Magi become Christians. Half a century ago, we would say it was validation – the Magi legitimated Jesus. Now, I’d say it was relationship of sharing, mutuality, respect. An artist will cover another’s song, or reference their style, in an ‘homage’ to the other artist. Homage to Jesus? It’s up to you!

Where will you point your spotlight and camera this year? Where will we together shine our light and frame our pictures of the world? Is it all about us? God forbid! Who else is shining light on issues of ecological disaster, or of poverty? What kinds of partnerships are possible with others to get on with mending the world? After a decade of homeless shelter at the church with Mosaic interfaith out of the Cold – what’s next?

What will your reaction shots look like this year? As a witness, how will you convey to others a sense of how you recognize and represent the Other, the Magi? How will you offer homage to Jesus? If we’re just a bunch of grumpy scared grownups, that will not be out best choice. How about acting like children, open to good news? God forbid we end up once again, like the third stringers on holiday newscasts:

Eyewitnesses say…. … authorities are investigating.

Don’t leave it up to those blessed as eyewitnesses with extraordinary religious experience, or to the ‘authorities’. It’s up to you to recognize and represent the Magi, and to offer homage to Jesus. I’m looking forward to where you aim your spotlights and cameras, and to your reaction shots, looking like people who believe in a good God and a good creation, and approach their day and their neighbours that way!

I closed, again, with a bit of Martin Buber, and a familiar commissioning:

We cannot avoid
Using power
Cannot escape the compulsion
To afflict the world
So let us,
cautious in diction
And mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully

May you see the face of Christ
In everyone you meet
And may everyone you meet
See the face of Christ in you

Go in peace, and may you find peace
Go in love, and may you share love
Go with God, for God will surely go with you!
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Regenerate or Degenerate

Texts: Ecclesiastes 3, Revelation 1

Congratulations, survivors of 2011! Welcome, citizens of 2012!

Some of you look even better than you did a year ago. I know I am more mobile on two legs and two feet than I was this time last year. Some of you, like my partner Mary Jane, took on new things, got outside your comfort zone, learned, grew, and thrived. Thank God!

Gabrielle Gifford, the US congresswoman shot in the head a year ago this week, can sing and speak again –and our own Joanne Miller is making more modest progress. It’s a tribute to brain plasticity, that neural pathways can be built and developed - or atrophy. Thank God!

Others of us feel older but no wiser, more aware of our losses than of our gains. Dementia overtakes the best of us, including my own father who isn’t sure who I am any more. If God is what counters entropy, it may only resist but not reverse those deteriorations. Thank God.

Our Puritan, Calvinist tradition had words for all this, that are no longer current or popular: regeneration and degeneration. Regeneration was the saving sanctifying work of god still creating, redeeming, and renewing. Degeneration was about the processes of sin and death. Each of us aspired to be regenerate, and risked being degenerate.

Those words have only survived as parodies of the original terms. ‘Moral degenerate’ is a pejorative term for a few particular transgressive behaviours, substance abuse or sexuality. ‘Regeneration’ is used by neuroscientists and about gene therapy. These semantic fields are narrower and shallower than our earlier constructions. I invite you today to a wider, deeper use.

I asked you on this New Year Sunday to subvocalize the two words, and consider how they might help you name the past year, and the coming one: regenerate or degenerate. Which have you been in 2011 and which name will you claim in 2012? With what dynamics might you cooperate, and what processes might you resist?

Regeneration and degeneration are not limited to individual physiology or morality – but extend to all our growing, learning, thriving, maturing – and to all our dis-ease and deterioration. Organisms need environment, and the terms apply to our social and political world – and to our ecological and environmental context. What is regenerative and what is degenerative?

As survivors of 2011, and as citizens of 2012, what’s thriving, developing, growing, and what’s deteriorating and suffering? How are we contributing to or resisting either? What do we imagine as our future, this year – and ultimately? That’s all that I was inviting you to consider!

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones,
and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

People choose this text for funerals – perhaps too often. It’s partly because of the musical cover by Pete Seeger and the Byrds in 1965, which lodged it in pop culture. It’s also a diplomatic compromise for families ambivalent about the God and Jesus words. It has an air of fatalism, or at best a strong doctrine of providence, as we review a person’s life at the moment of death.

Fewer people are familiar with the verses that follow:

What gain have the workers from their toil?
I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with.
He has made everything suitable for its time;
moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds,
yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
I know that there is nothing better for them
than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live;
moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil.
(‘Eat, drink, and be merry’, as the older translations render it)

We have a sense of past and future, yet can never figure it all out. Thank God! We can name our times, in the terms of the linked pairs of Ecclesiastes. We can also distinguish our labour and busyness from what is truly regenerative – or degenerative. It’s a more powerful language than our culture’s fixation with progress, evolution, productivity and profits.

Some folks appear to work for 30 years in my trade – but in fact they really just learn in the first year, then repeat ‘year 2’ for another 28 times. We toil and appear busy, but our bookshelves reveal that we have not learned or grown much, and the lines in our faces reveal that we haven’t had much fun along the way. Is it the same in your profession or business?

I encouraged you today to try the exercise of drafting your obituary as of today. How is it different from what you would have written a year ago? How will it change this year? I told of my friend who invited 300 of her closest friends to her 95th birthday. Many play bridge with her – a game she only learned in retirement. Others, of all ages, have met her even more recently.

How are you regenerate – and how do you cooperate with regenerative forces, of divinity and Spirit defying entropy? How are you degenerate – and how do you resist the degenerative processes of sin and death, dis-ease and deterioration? How’s your guest list for your 95th birthday building? How does your bookshelf reflect your mind’s ongoing adventures?

Our culture adulates and fixates on progress, understood as numerical quantifiable growth. Similarly, our culture demonizes and avoids aging, understood only as deterioration. What if true progress was about qualitative development, and aging about regeneration as well? Imagine a vision greater than the next quarterly report or dividend:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth;
for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.
And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God,
prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
‘See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.’
And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’
Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’
Then he said to me, ‘It is done!
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

Of course, we recite this text a lot as well. I usually just impose it on folks at committals, graveside, unlike the popular choice of Ecclesiastes. But if they have never imagined it in routine Sunday worship like this, it hardly resonates as it should at that moment. Once every few years, we get to celebrate the text on a New Year Sunday – with a new year ahead of us and opportunities to change our responses, and ourselves.

Where’s it all going, ultimately, and where do we fit in it all? Revelation is not an account of a three-story universe, where each one leaves this earth for that heaven (or hell) as reward (or punishment) for our response to the immutable world, ‘as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever more shall be’. Revelation assures us of a new heaven and a new earth, fulfillment of regeneration and degeneration, as some stuff passes away, and other stuff comes clear.

If you were to measure our heaven and earth now, against the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, what would be regenerated and revealed more clearly? What would simply waste away and fall away, demonstrated as degenerate? What about your city, measured against the vision of a new city? What justice and equity would be fulfilled – what mayors and councilors – or prime ministers and ministers - would be revealed as degenerate, and fall away?

If you were to measure yourself as a citizen of this commonwealth, are you ready to claim your citizenship in the new Jerusalem, in the new heaven and earth? Neither am I! But that will give us some orientation for the coming year – how to let the degenerate fall away, and claim the regenerate. Thank God for another year to grow and learn! Thank God that we are survivors of 2011, and citizens of 2012! Now, what will we make of this regenerative opportunity?

God who creates a new day, who promises a new year, there are some people here who would like a word with you, who have a word for you, who need a word from you, so we pause now to find words, to hear words…

For we are survivors of 2011, and we have words of thanks for where we went and who we shared our year with and what we accomplished. Remind us now of our regeneration last year, your creating, redeeming, sustaining - strengthen our cooperation with it…

Yet as survivors of 2011, we have words of asking, for our regrets, our ‘not yet’s, for who and what we lost, and what went wrong. Remind us of that degeneration last year, the working of sin and death - strengthen our resistance to it…

And we are citizens of 2012, and we have thanks to say for life and breath and company to share it, for the opportunities you set before us, choices to grow and learn, to become more of what we might yet be, to do more of what we might yet accomplish, to celebrate your presence, to live with respect in creation… your regeneration – with our cooperation…

And as citizens of 2012, we have prayers of asking about all that’s not yet right, about what is getting worse, and how we might resist that degeneration. Some of that is deeply personal…. God you know it. Some of that is pretty political. God you see it. So we pray to seek justice, and to resist evil…

Each one brings particular prayers, of thanks – and of asking, after a holiday season, before a new year, for those known to us, and those known only to you…

What word do you have for our hearts, O God – give us ears to hear. Amen.
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What Are You Waiting For? Christmas?

Our website and the big banner on side of our church this year laid out our worship times through December, and then asked “What are you waiting for – Christmas? So are we!” That might seem a bit cheeky, but sure enough half the people at our 11pm service were strangers to me, a sort of ‘Nicodemus at night’ crowd.

I congratulated those first-time visitors for taking the risk of crossing the threshold into the unknown. We have one active participant these days who lives in a building across the street, and admits that she looked at this place for years before crossing the road and crossing the threshold – and she was baptized in this church!

When are you ever ready? When is it ever time? Lots of us are frantic and busy till this evening, and others wait till the last minute, or even beyond to Boxing Day to prepare. Perfectionists, we are never ready, and work expands to fill the time allotted, or just expands, if there is no deadline.

We pause here at 11pm for a ‘quiet communion’, about 75 people, mostly strangers, many remembering traditions of ‘midnight mass’. Did you wait to eat till after worship? Did you wait to open gifts till you got home, or till the next morning? We ended with a benediction at midnight – and left to face Christmas.

It’s not just preparations for meals and presents and parties and worship that we push or defer to the limit. Do you reach out to people annually only at Christmas? Do you give to charity more in response to all those appeals? Is that a bad thing? Better late than never! Are there still loose ends, missing faces at your gathering?

Is religion all about deferred gratification (or punishment)? Is it all ‘pie in the sky when you die’, ‘in the sweet by and by’? I think it is about here and now with us, Emmanuel, word made flesh, for a scared girl, or for cold shepherds. It’s never too soon to show your best intentions, to shape your best self, and our commonwealth.

What are you waiting for – Christmas? So are we! Now is the time!

Cam Watts, of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America gave us a great image, and a better tag line this season:

In the somewhat frenzied aspects of the season, and wars and rumours of war, and pestilence and hope and despair, and engaging the powers, I keep a supporting image of God coming to us as individuals or stepping into the midst of conflict, holding out a swaddled infant to us and saying:

“Here, hold this for me, will you?”
What are you waiting for? God knows. No, really, God knows why you don’t reach out at other times like you do in this season, show your best self in gestures of good intentions to others. God keeps giving you freedom to postpone, to choose, even at the risk that you won’t care for the vulnerable.

It’s up to you. As Dorothee Soelle puts it, ‘he can’t do it without you. Couldn’t then, can’t now, won’t ever… and that is his irresistible appeal.' As we passed the plates, then shared communion, I invited you to imagine not a demand for money, or an imposition of institutional religion and order, but an invitation to you, putting holy things into your hands, trusting you won’t drop them or hoard them.

I read aloud “In the Middle of the Night” by Dom Helder Camara, the Brazilian ‘bishop of the slums’ who died in 1999:

Then you chose to come.
God’s resplendent first-born sent to make us one.

The voices of doom protest:
“All these words about justice, love and peace—
All these naïve words will buckle beneath the weight
of a reality which is brutal and bitter, ever more bitter.”

It is true, Lord, it is midnight upon the earth,
moonless night and starved of stars.

But can we forget that You,
the son of God,
chose to be born
precisely at midnight?


I also read ‘First Coming’ by Madeleine L’Engle, better known for her young adult fiction writing than for her Christian faith and writing:

God did not wait till the world was ready,
till...the nations were at peace.

God came when the heavens were unsteady,
and prisoners cried out for release.

God did not wait for the perfect time.
God came when the need was deep and great.

God dined with sinners in all their grime,
turned water into wine.

God did not wait
Till hearts were pure.

In joy God came
to a tarnished world of sin and doubt.

To a world like ours of anguished shame God came,
and God's light would not go out.

God came to a world which did not mesh,
to heal its tangles, shield its scorn.

In the mystery of Word made Flesh
the Maker of the stars was born.
We cannot wait til the world is sane
to raise our songs with joyful voice,
for to share our grief, to touch our pain,
God came with Love:
Rejoice! Rejoice!




God knows if I’ll ever see most of this late night crowd again at worship at this church. No, really, God knows! Here’s hoping that I will, but in any event that each one will find the threshold lower now to get on with it: not only with worship, but also with all those good things we put off till… Christmas?


Perhaps it is time, this night, this year – or whenever, wherever you read this note – to recognize Emmanuel, God with us, here, now, given into our hands:

“Here, hold this for me, will you?”

What are you waiting for – Christmas again?
So we prayed as we arrived at 11pm, and as we prepared to hear the word:

We’ve come in from the dark, out of the cold,
to find a bit of light, to share a bit of warmth.
It’s a sacred thing, a quiet gift of God,
Emmanuel, God with us.
Sometimes it seems as if you’re all about somewhere else,
with some other people, at some other time.
Give us a sense now, of your presence with us, here, now.
We’ve come in from the dark, out of the cold,
to find a bit of light, to share a bit of warmth.
It’s not so much to ask, is it?
It’s not so much to offer, is it?
Help us now, to try a bit of show and tell ourselves
And not wait till Christmas again!
Amen

God of Christmas, it’s about time. What are we waiting for?
If you start each day asking ‘where does my world need mending today?’
Then we might start now to ask ‘how can we help?’
You hand us a vulnerable infant and say:
‘Here, hold this for me, will you?’
Open our eyes, and ears, and hearts
to this moment of grace and opportunity.
Amen.
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