Support and strengthening in difficulties

Here's the reflection I shared at St Andrew's Wickford this morning on the Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary:

Mary was an obscure young Jewish girl who became one of the most important figures in the global faith that is Christianity. She and Elizabeth were caught up in events with revolutionary implications and this was far from easy. “Behind Elizabeth and Zechariah's joy at the birth of their son John was the knowledge that they had lost an inconsolably long number of years to enjoy watching him grow up.” “At the edge of Gabriel's annunciation was the social stress that Mary would endure in a society where it was all about your embedded role in the community.” She was not believed, either by those closest to her and those who didn’t really know her. Engaged to Joseph when the annunciation occurred, as she was found to be with child before they lived together, Joseph planned to dismiss her quietly. He had his own meeting with Gabriel which changed that decision but, if the man to whom she was betrothed, could not believe her without angelic intervention, then it would be no surprise if disbelief and misunderstanding characterised the response to Mary wherever she went. And “lurking over Joseph's shoulder was the gossip that would nag him all his life, that he is merely the putative father of Jesus.” (W. David O. Taylor - http://artspastor.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/the-annunciation-really-weird-story.html)

The anthropologist Daniel Miller was quoted in ‘The Big Issue’ as saying that “Christmas is a festival that aims to make the family not just sacred but an idiom for society more generally, including the local community or neighbourhood but also the national family.” In Britain, he suggests, “we place considerable emphasis on re-establishing a version of the domestic at Christmas time, rediscovering a certain sentimentality for this idealised version of family life.” The article then notes that, of course, “this rose-tinted vision is a world away from the reality many people live through at Christmas” because we do not enjoy “such an idealised family festival.”

However, if we were to grasp the unconventional and non-idealised relationships which God chose to reveal himself and be incarnated through the birth of Jesus – a conception outside of marriage, a relationship on the brink of divorce, a foster-father, a birth in cramped and crowded circumstances, an immediate threat to life followed by refugee status – we might then understand the reality of incarnation; of God with us in the reality, not the ideality, of our lives.

Bearing all this in mind, we can imagine how much Mary needed the moment of empathy and inspiration described in today’s Gospel reading (Luke 1.39-56) because the experience of being the God-bearer involved such difficulty. We can imagine how important it was to her to be with a relative who not only believed her but was also partway through her own miraculous pregnancy. The relief that she would have felt at being believed and understood would have been immense and then there is the shared moment of divine inspiration when the Holy Spirit comes on them, the babe in Elizabeth’s womb leaps for joy, and as Elizabeth blesses Mary, Mary is inspired to sing the Magnificat. In the face of so much disbelief and lack of support, this confirmation that they were both following God’s will, would have been overwhelming.

We can learn much from Mary’s faith, trust and persistence in the face of disbelief, misunderstanding and probable insult. We can also learn from this moment when God gives her both human empathy through Elizabeth and divine inspiration through the Holy Spirit to be a support and strengthening in the difficulties which she faced as God-bearer. Our own experience in times of trouble and difficulty will be similar as, on the one hand, God asks to trust and preserve while, on the other, he will provide us with moments of support and strengthening.

Malcolm Guite, in his sonnet for the Feast of the Visitation, captures well the miraculous reversal of expectations that occurred in the story of Mary and Elizabeth:

Here is a meeting made of hidden joys
Of lightenings cloistered in a narrow place
From quiet hearts the sudden flame of praise
And in the womb the quickening kick of grace.
Two women on the very edge of things
Unnoticed and unknown to men of power
But in their flesh the hidden Spirit sings
And in their lives the buds of blessing flower.
And Mary stands with all we call ‘too young’,
Elizabeth with all called ‘past their prime’
They sing today for all the great unsung
Women who turned eternity to time
Favoured of heaven, outcast on the earth
Prophets who bring the best in us to birth.

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Malcolm Guite and Steve Bell - The Singing Bowl.

I come alive

Samuel Beckett’s great play, Waiting for Godot, features two tramps who spend the whole play doing nothing except waiting for Godot, who of course never arrives. For Beckett, to wait for Godot is the equivalent of believing in God, both are a waste of time. So Beckett in his plays is describing a world without God and what an unremittingly harsh and despairing place it is. In another of his plays, Endgame, two of his characters spend the whole play living in rubbish bins and the last speech in the play sums up Beckett’s sense of what a world without God is like in these words: “all he knows is hunger, and cold, and death to crown it all.”

The philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote: “That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end that they were achieving; that his origin, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy that rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation be safely built.”

“Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation be safely built.” Russell, like Beckett, is saying that life without God is despair. If we are here by accident, if we are shortly  going to die without there being an afterlife and if whatever we achieve in our short life will also be destroyed soon after our death, then a life without God offers us no hope just unyielding despair. Life without God is the equivalent of living in a rubbish bin or of spending everyday pointlessly waiting for someone who does not arrive.

Jesus said to Nicodemus that no one can see the Kingdom of God unless he is born again (John 3. 1 - 21). He went on to explain that a person is first born physically of human parents. In our physical, material existence we do not have to believe in God. We have a genuine choice, we can grow up choosing to believe only in the material world around us and in our own powers or we can encounter God and grow in relationship with him. The world in which we live can point us to God but it does not provide us with absolute proof of his existence. Therefore, we are free to choose. Although, as we have just seen, to believe only in material existence is not all that it is often cracked up to be!

For us to believe in God, to believe that both the material and the spiritual exist and are intertwined, involves us in coming alive to the spiritual. It therefore involves a second birth, an awakening to the reality of the spiritual as well as to the reality of the physical. The physical things around us are easy to believe in because we can see and touch them. The spiritual, though, is like the wind - it can’t be seen, although it can be experienced and felt. It is not immediately apparent in the way that physical realities are and so we have a free choice about whether or not we respond to the signs of the Spirit in our world and when we do we are coming alive, being born again, to the spiritual in our world.

Here are some of the things in my life that have made me come alive to the spiritual:

When I stand in snow on a mountain slope viewing a cobalt lake,

I come alive.

When the morning mist forms a white sea on the Somerset levels, islanding trees,

I come alive.

When my daughter nestles up and hugs me tight,

I come alive.

When my wife and I lie, skin touching, sweat mingling in the heat of summer and passion,

I come alive.

When a friend listens with understanding and without advising,

I come alive.

When I sing and dance in the echoes of an empty Church,

I come alive.

When words cannot express Your praise and I sing in tongues,

I come alive.

When I hear the rustle of angel’s wings above me in the eaves,

I come alive.

I come alive to endurance

when I see a hesitant smile form on the face of the Big Issue seller.

I come alive to pain

when I hear a friend’s story of depression and unanswered pleading.

I come alive to patience

when I see a husband answer again the question from his alzheimered wife.

I come alive to injustice

when the Metro contrasts Big Mac obesity lawsuits with African famine victims.

I come alive to suffering

when I see Sutherland’s Crucifixion and read Endo’s Silence.

I come alive to grief

when I remember the aircraft shattered and scattered across Kosovan heights.

I come alive

when I am touched and see and hear

the beautiful or broken, the passionate or poor.

The mystery or madness

of the Other in which God

meets and greets me

and calls forth the response

that is love.

I wonder what it is that makes you come alive to the spiritual in life. Jesus comes into our world to bring us to life. To wake us up from the despair of living only in the physical and material. He does this, firstly by showing us what life is like when it is lived as God intended and secondly, by the threatened response that we as human beings make to him. To see someone genuinely living by the Spirit is scary, it turns our understanding of life upside down. We often respond to people who live life differently to us by attacking them and that is what we did with Jesus. We focused on the physical, we nailed his hands and feet to a cross of wood. As Moses lifted up the bronze snake in the wilderness, just so was the Son of Man lifted up. We thought that by killing him physically we were doing away with the threat he posed to our material way of life.

But God is greater than our materialism and he loves us too much for that to be the end and so he raised his Son from death that we might be saved from material existence and come alive to the Spirit of God himself.

We have a choice - the unyielding despair of a rubbish bin existence or the freedom of life in the Spirit. Which will it be for you? Have you come alive to the spiritual in life? And, if you have, have you gone on coming alive to the spiritual on a day by day basis by looking out for all that God’s Spirit is doing in our world and getting involved?

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Peter, Paul & Mary - Light One Candle.

Born again: material and spiritual

Here’s a poem about our first birth:

These are your first lessons in living.

To begin we drag you head-first from your shelter,

away from your food, from your warmth.

We cut you apart from your only known friend.

We take you and beat you until strange gases

rush your lungs and pain jerks your frame.

These are your first lessons in living.

They will stand you in good stead. (Steve Turner)

In this poem life is portrayed as something hard and painful. It says that we are being born into a world where, if we don’t look out for ourselves, we will dragged from everything we enjoy and beaten up. And it says that our first lessons in living when we emerge from our mother’s womb, the placenta is cut and the nurse strikes us on the back to get us breathing are important lessons for us in survival. The lesson to learn is that in a world like this we need to put ourselves first, we need to look after No. 1, otherwise someone else will take what we have and hurt us in the process. It is what scientists describe when they talk about us having selfish genes which get us ready to live in a world that is about the survival of the fittest.

Jesus said to Nicodemus that no one can see the Kingdom of God unless he is born again (John 3. 1 - 17). He went on to explain that a person is first born physically of human parents. In our physical, material existence we do not have to believe in God. We have a genuine choice, we can grow up choosing to believe only in the material world around us and in our own powers or we can encounter God and grow in relationship with him. The world in which we live can point us to God but it does not provide us with absolute proof of his existence. Therefore, we are free to choose.

Samuel Beckett’s great play, Waiting for Godot, features two tramps who spend the whole play doing nothing except waiting for Godot, who of course never arrives. For Beckett, to wait for Godot is the equivalent of believing in God, both are a waste of time. So Beckett in his plays is describing a world without God and what an unremittingly harsh and despairing place it is. In another of his plays, Endgame, two of his characters spend the whole play living in rubbish bins and the last speech in the play sums up Beckett’s sense of what a world without God is like in these words: “all he knows is hunger, and cold, and death to crown it all.” Life without God is the equivalent of living in a rubbish bin or of spending everyday pointlessly waiting for someone who does not arrive.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote that: “Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation be safely built.” Russell, like Beckett, is saying that life without God is despair. If we are here by accident, if we are shortly going to die without there being an afterlife and if whatever we achieve in our short life will also be destroyed soon after our death, then a life without God offers us no hope just unyielding despair.

So, for us to believe in God, to believe that both the material and the spiritual exist and are intertwined, involves us in coming alive to the spiritual. It therefore involves a second birth, an awakening to the reality of the spiritual as well as to the reality of the physical. The physical things around us are easy to believe in because we can see and touch them. The spiritual, though, is like the wind - it can’t be seen, although it can be experienced and felt. It is not immediately apparent in the way that physical realities are and so we have a free choice about whether or not we respond to the signs of the Spirit in our world and when we do we are coming alive, being born again, to the spiritual in our world.

Here are some of the things in my life that have made me come alive to the spiritual:

When I stand in snow on a mountain slope viewing a cobalt lake,

I come alive.

When the morning mist forms a white sea on the Somerset levels, islanding trees,

I come alive.

When my daughter nestles up and hugs me tight,

I come alive.

When my wife and I lie, skin touching, sweat mingling in the heat of summer and passion,

I come alive.

When a friend listens with understanding and without advising,

I come alive.

When I sing and dance in the echoes of an empty Church,

I come alive.

When words cannot express Your praise and I sing in tongues,

I come alive.

When I hear the rustle of angel’s wings above me in the eaves,

I come alive.

I come alive to endurance

when I see a hesitant smile form on the face of the Big Issue seller.

I come alive to pain

when I hear a friend’s story of depression and unanswered pleading.

I come alive to patience

when I see a husband answer again the question from his alzheimered wife.

I come alive to injustice

when the Metro contrasts Big Mac obesity lawsuits with African famine victims.

I come alive to suffering

when I see Sutherland’s Crucifixion and read Endo’s Silence.

I come alive to grief

when I remember the aircraft shattered and scattered across Kosovan heights.

I come alive

when I am touched and see and hear

the beautiful or broken, the passionate or poor.

The mystery or madness

of the Other in which God

meets and greets me

and calls forth the response

that is love.

I wonder what it is that makes you come alive to the spiritual in life. Jesus came into our world to bring us to life; to wake us up from the despair of living only in the physical and material. He does this, firstly by showing us what life is like when it is lived as God intended and secondly, by the threatened response that we as human beings make to him. To see someone genuinely living by the Spirit is scary, it turns our understanding of life upside down. We often respond to people who live life differently to us by attacking them and that is what we did with Jesus. We focused on the physical, we nailed his hands and feet to a cross of wood. We thought that by killing him physically we were doing away with the threat he posed to our material way of life.

But God is greater than our materialism and he loves us too much for that to be the end and so he raised his Son from death that we might be saved from material existence and come alive to the Spirit of God himself.

We have a choice - the unyielding despair of a rubbish bin existence or the freedom of life in the Spirit. Which will it be for you? Have you come alive to the spiritual in life? And, if you have, have you gone on coming alive to the spiritual on a day by day basis by looking out for all that God’s Spirit is doing in our world and getting involved?

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David Grant - Life.