Thought for the Week: Bringing new life to birth

Here's the Thought for the Week that I prepared for the community at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

Bringing new life to birth

Sam Wells has helpfully been encouraging us in his recent prayers to note synergies between the waiting which Advent entails and our current experiences in the pandemic. When I shared this in a recent HeartEdge gathering, one of those present suggested that our current experience may equate more closely to the experience of pregnancy. That experience is, of course, in the Advent frame of reference, especially on the fourth Sunday of Advent when the Gospel reading is the story of the Annunciation.

Some years ago Victoria Emily Jones, who writes on art and theology, prepared an Advent Art Devotional that focused on what it meant for Jesus to be born of woman by using a meditation that I had written. She writes that, in Advent, we await with aching intensity the fulfilled promise of a messiah alongside Mary, whose pregnancy made the expectation all the more palpable. She ponders the amazing truth of the Incarnation through Jesus coming as seed and foetus and birthed son; as well as how we are called to bear God into the world today.

One of the artworks she shares is by Janet McKenzie, who imagines a quiet moment of inner preparation that Mary might have shared with her two midwives on the night of Jesus’s coming. In Mary with the Midwives, Mary touches her belly and prays to God for calmness and strength—qualities she draws from the Spirit above and her helpers beside. She exhales, steadying herself for the adventure of motherhood. A shared womanhood, a shared faith, and a shared desire to welcome new life unite these three women in this most spectacular assignment: bringing God into the world.

How might we share in bringing God into the world anew at this time? What might it mean to view ourselves as midwives bringing new life into the world at this time?

Come, Lord Jesus, Come: Visual Devotions for Advent - https://victoriaemilyjones.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/advent-art-devotional.pdf.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ven Señor Jesús, Maranathá.

The Word himself was waiting on her word

Here is my sermon for the 10.00am Eucharist at St Martin-in-the-Fields this morning:

My grandson Joshua is two today. It is fascinating being part of the growth and development of a young child, particularly as a grandparent when you can remember what happened with your own children and also see the way in which, in this case, my daughter and son-in-law approach their role as parents. For several months now Joshua has been able to say ‘no’, often repeatedly and with much shaking of his head. He cannot yet say ‘yes’. Both are words of one syllable which one would expect that a child should find easy to learn, yet one is learnt early and the other much later. It may be, of course, that he has heard the word ‘no’ being said to him much more than he has yet heard the word ‘yes’!

‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord,’ said Mary, ‘let it be with me according to your word.’ Mary said ‘Yes’ to God. As we have already begun to reflect, there is much more to saying that simple one syllable word ‘yes’ than we might at first imagine.

The poet-priest Malcolm Guite describes the Annunciation as follows:

‘a young girl stopped to see
With open eyes and heart. She heard the voice;
The promise of His glory yet to be,
As time stood still for her to make a choice;
Gabriel knelt and not a feather stirred,
The Word himself was waiting on her word.’

Victoria Emily Jones has reflected that ‘When Gabriel came to Mary to tell her she would bear a son, she was at first troubled, afraid, guarded. How was it possible that she, being a virgin, could become pregnant? But with the angel’s words of reassurance and promise, she yielded to the divine plan …” This is known as Mary’s fiat (Latin for “let it be”)—her consent to become the mother of God—and it’s celebrated by the church as the moment at which God became flesh, setting salvation in motion.

Theologians have debated the nature of Mary’s fiat—whether she really had a choice in the matter. After all, Gabriel comes speaking in terms of what will happen, without mentioning any conditions. However, most believe in the criticality of Mary’s “yes,” of her willing bodily and spiritual surrender. Between the angel’s ‘Hail’ and Mary’s ‘Let it be’ was a moment of supreme tension, one that Luci Shaw explores in her poem ‘The Annunciatory Angel’:

‘… We worry that she might faint.
Weep. Turn away, perplexed and fearful
about opening herself. Refuse to let the wind
fill her, to buffet its nine-month seed into her earth.
She is so small and intact. Turmoil will wrench her.
She might say no.’’

Why might Mary have said ‘No’? In the same poem Luci Shaw suggests there was a ‘weight of apprehension’ at the Annunciation because what had to be announced would ‘not be entirely easy news.’ As a result, Alan Stewart, in an Annunciation monologue, has Mary say ‘I said yes to my God / And I have come to question those words / For I did not know where they would lead.’ Where they led was to an immediate future of gossip, rumours and insult from those who thought of Jesus as illegitimate and in the longer term to a life of gathering gloom, ultimately one of sorrowing and sighing before a stone-cold tomb after the experience of viewing her son’s torture and cruel death; which was like a sword piercing her heart.

And yet, although she did not know it and could not have articulated it, there is a sense that she accepted all this when she accepted the challenge that the angel Gabriel brought from God. It may also have been that for having Jesus as her son she was, like many parents, more than glad that she had said yes, accepting the trauma, the gossip, the exile, the insults that she might bear her child, the promised Saviour.

Mary could have said ‘No’ but her ‘Yes’ was a ‘Yes’ to new life, to growth, to new birth. Matthew Askey says that: ‘Mary ultimately said ‘yes!’ to life, and gave herself into the hands of God’s love, and this was something that resulted in the life of the most inspiring person who has ever lived, Jesus, and then the birth of the world-wide Church that followed. The Incarnation was predicated on the willingness of the teenage Mary to respond to God’s call.’ So, the Annunciation is the moment when the creator of everything finds a way into flesh and blood. And in doing that, the meaning of all life enters into full humanity.

That is what we celebrate at Christmas and continue to experience as we say ‘Yes’ to God, as ‘the meaning of life enters humanity still. The meaning of life desires us. Watches our movements and listens to our hopes. The meaning of life is a lover whose gentle fingers occasionally touch and startle us, asking if we can love back, but never using force on us ... waiting to be invited to love. The meaning of life is love. Something intangible by nature. Something that cannot be possessed, bought, or sold.

And at Christmas we celebrate the fact that God, the source of all love and meaning, has so desired humanity that He has taken the risk of becoming vulnerable to what we might do if His life is left in our hands. God, the meaning of life, desires you and me in a way that one of us would desire our partner.’ (The Late, Late Service)

The poet Noel Rowe captures something of this in his Annunciation poem when he writes:

‘The angel did not draw attention to himself.
He came in. So quietly I could hear
my blood beating on the shore of absolute
beauty …

my heart, my heart, was wanting him,
reaching out, and taking hold of smooth-muscled fire.
And it was done.’

He says, ‘I used a slightly eroticised image not to suggest their encounter was sexual, but to reimagine spirituality as passionate and creative, a poetic of desire.’ This has been the experience of Christian mystics throughout Church history; God as the incomprehensible mystery that embraces everything making the goal of human life that of losing oneself in this divine mystery in love. As Karl Rahner wrote: ‘When I abandon myself in love, then you are my very life, and your incomprehensibility is swallowed up in love’s unity. When I am allowed to love you, the grasp of our very mystery becomes a positive source of bliss.’

‘Love and desire are about creative union. About being open and receptive to the other, letting them be fully themselves, working for their pleasure, receiving their gifts to you. And when we're open to being God's partner, we find the mystery of meaning ...

You and I have this choice. A chance to respond to the touch of our lover and receive this union in our souls ... the centre of who we are. A choice to live life for the meaning of the moment, not just the thrill, and to turn from anything that promises a thrill and delivers meaninglessness. God is still in Flesh and Blood. Now God is flesh and blood in partnership and love, and like Mary we must say "Yes" to that partnership and discover the meaning of our own individual (and communal) lives.’

Malcolm Guite writes that in her ’open ‘yes’’, as she heard God’s call, Mary ‘spoke aloud for every living soul.’ So ‘every Christian after her seeks to become in some small way a God-bearer, one whose ‘yes’ to God means that Christ is made alive and fruitful in the world through our flesh and our daily lives, is born and given to another.’ Christ is carried by Mary, both in her womb and in her arms, in order that he can then carry us to God by means of his death of the cross. In turn, we carry him to others by means of our daily life and witness. As Teresa of Avila said:

‘Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.’

Similarly, it is through his actions that little Joshua says ‘yes’ at present, while he is as yet unable to speak the word. He is constantly embracing new experiences and the love of family and friends, but does so through his actions rather than his words.

Mary said, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord, let it be with me according to your word’ and then lived that out despite the challenges she faced. Will you do the same by saying, as the chorus to ‘I, the Lord of sea and sky’ puts it: ‘Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord? / I have heard you calling in the night / I will go, Lord, if you lead me / I will hold your people in my heart’?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Luci Shaw - The Cosmos.

Come, Lord Jesus, Come: Visual Devotions for Advent

'Come, Lord Jesus, Come' is an Advent devotional (booklet & slideshow) by Victoria Emily Jones and based on an Advent meditation written by myself. Each line of the meditation focuses on one aspect of Christ’s coming. To promote deeper reflection on all these aspects, Victoria has selected twenty-four art images to lead the way in stoking our imaginations and to provide entry points into prayer. She has taken special care to present art from around the world and, where possible, by modern or contemporary artists so that we will be stretched beyond the familiar imagery of the season.

Victoria writes: 'Art is a great way to open yourself up to the mysteries of God, to sit in the pocket of them as you gaze and ponder. “Blessed are your eyes because they see,” Jesus said. Theologians in their own right, artists are committed to helping us see what was and what is and what could be. Here I’ve taken special care to select images by artists from around the world, not just the West, and ones that go beyond the familiar fare. You’ll see, for example, the Holy Spirit depositing the divine seed into Mary’s womb; Mary with a baby bump, and then with midwives; an outback birth with kangaroos, emus, and lizards in attendance; Jesus as a Filipino slum dweller; and Quaker history married to Isaiah’s vision of the Peaceable Kingdom.'

Through 'Come, Lord Jesus, Come' you are invited to consider what it meant for Jesus to be born of woman—coming as seed and fetus and birthed son; the poverty Jesus shared with children around the world; culturally specific bodies of Christ, like a dancing body and a yogic body; how we are called to bear God into the world today; and more.

Victoria writes: 'Advent takes us back and brings us forward. In preparing us to celebrate Christ’s first coming, it places us alongside the ancient prophets, who awaited with aching intensity the fulfilled promise of a messiah, and Joseph and Mary, whose pregnancy made the expectation all the more palpable; it also strengthens our longing for Christ’s second coming, when he will return to fully and finally establish his kingdom on earth ... May God bless you this Advent season as you ponder the amazing truth of the Incarnation.'

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Malcolm Guite - O Emmanuel.

The Upside-Down Kingdom of God

Here is my sermon from today's Eucharist at St Stephen Walbrook:

At my first training weekend as a curate the then Bishop of Barking, David Hawkins, performed a handstand to demonstrate the way in which Jesus, through his teaching in the beatitudes, turns our understanding of life upside down. His action turned our expectations of Bishops and their behaviour upside-down at the same time as it perfectly illustrated his point.

Jesus is depicted upside-down in the painting Jesus Striped and Stripped created by Cedric Baxter for a set of Australian Stations of the Cross. Victoria Emily Jones has written that “Baxter's tenth station captures Jesus mid-tumble, naked and abused and down on his way to death, but what Christians know and glory in, especially during the Easter season, is that he's circling back. He's turning a cartwheel! The upside downness of Jesus in this image challenges us to look at Passion Week with the right perspective: as a journey that brings Christ low only to raise him up.”

G. K. Chesterton used a similar image in writing about St Francis of Assisi: “[Saint] Francis, at the time … when he disappeared into the prison or the dark cavern, underwent a reversal of a certain psychological kind … The man who went into the cave was not the man who came out again … He looked at the world as differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole walking on his hands … If a man saw the world hanging upside down, with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasise the idea of dependence … It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hanged the world upon nothing.”

In what ways do these images and Jesus’ teaching in the beatitudes turn our understanding of life upside down? Donald Kraybill writes in The Upside-Down Kingdom that Jesus startles us as paradox, irony and surprise permeate his teachings flipping our expectations upside down: the least are the greatest; adults become like children; the religious miss the heavenly banquet; the immoral receive forgiveness and blessing. Things aren’t like we think they should be. We’re baffled and perplexed; uncertain whether to laugh or cry. Again and again, turning our world upside down, Jesus’ kingdom surprises us.

It is the humble poor who know their need of God and those who have nothing who know they need everything. So we should pray for those moments when we and others become poor in spirit, bereaved, meek, hungry, thirsty, as they are moments when we are more likely to turn our faces to God looking for salvation. We need to pray for the opening of doors in us and others that gain and comfort have locked tight.

The Gospel announcement, our salvation, is truly comprehensive, is truly for all, because it is offered to losers, by circumstance or choice. The poor have no means of becoming rich but the rich have within themselves the possibility of becoming poor. There is nothing that we don’t have that will bar our entry to this upside-down kingdom and so we can pray to be rid of what we do have that God’s kingdom may truly come to all.

In this way, as the Beatitudes state, our lives are turned upside down and we are blessed with poverty, with grief, with meekness, with hunger, with mercy, with purity, with peacemaking, and with persecution (Gerard Kelly, Humanifesto).

As opposed to the survival of the fittest or looking after No. 1, the kingdom of God, as it is described in the Beatitudes, is a place of happiness for those who know they are spiritually poor, a place of comfort for those who mourn, a place of receptivity for those who are humble, a place of satisfaction for those whose greatest desire is to do what God requires, a place of mercy for those who are merciful, a place in which God is seen by the pure in heart, a place in which those who work for peace are called God’s children, and a place which belongs to those who are persecuted because they do what God requires.

This is what those, like St Francis, that we call saints came to realise. It is what we must seek through prayer as we too respond to our calling to be saints.

May God forgive our attempts to be loved, our pride, our pleasure-seeking and our leisure-seeking and instead turn our lives upside down and bless us with poverty, with grief, with meekness, with hunger, with mercy, with purity, with peacemaking, with persecution and with his upside down kingdom. Amen.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

T. Bone Burnett - Shut It Tight.