Something for Bastille day

Belated ANZAC day posting

Stirring the waters: a reflection on John 5.1-16

This is the background notes for a reflection on the gospel reading at the communion services at the Brotherhood of St Laurence today. The reflection had to be given at three services, so it had tweaks and adjustments for each group of listeners.

Over the last few weeks we've been hearing from the Gospel of Matthew, but today and for the next couple of weeks we'll be tuning in to the Gospel of John. The message is essentially the same. Last week's gospel reading told of a slave who'd been forgiven a debt of 10,000 talents, who then tried to claim a much smaller debt of 100 denarii from another slave (the equivalent of being excused for defaulting on a multi-million dollar mortgage, keeping the house, and then demanding repayment of fifty dollars from a friend). There is a sharp point here: the slave being forgiven a large debt should have been willing to forgive the much smaller debt owed to him. The message we took from that was how forgiveness needs to be catching – contagious even! – we forgive others because our sins have been forgiven by God. Our prime need is forgiveness and bread, both essential to community.

And so we come to today. The man at the centre of today's reading is a bundle of human contradictions. He sits by the healing waters of Bethesda for 38 years – that's my lifetime! – and never once managed to enter the pool. What it must be like to sit with the expectation of healing but never actually make the leap? I can imagine there would come a point where resignation sets in – you become so occupied with being sick that you loose hope of being healed. You might even begin to wonder if God has forgotten you, because the people around you seem to have stopped noticing your being there.

In the world of the gospel reading to be sick is to be more dead than alive. To be healed means returning to life, to community, and this is what Jesus asks the man sitting by the pool – do you want to be made well? How would you answer that question? Would you say what the man says: 'I have no one to put me in the pool'?

The exchanges in this reading are very strange. What are we to make of Jesus ordering the man to get up, take up his mat, and walk? But after the man has been noticed by the authorities and questioned for carrying his mat on the sabbath (they don't appear to have noticed his being healed!), Jesus then reappears and tells the man to accept his healing, and sin no more so that nothing worse befall him. The man then goes to the authorities and tells them about Jesus.

The key to this is in Jesus' very odd demand of the man – “Look, you are well; do not sin any more, so that nothing worse may happen to you.” This is a call to live in a new way, effectively inviting the man to a new reality where he won't be lying on a mat, resigned to being ignored. What he does is a bit overshadowed by John's commentary on events – that his reporting Jesus to the authorities leads them to persecute Jesus for breaking the sabbath – and this is where our Bible translations let us down. John tells us the man told the authorities that he had been healed by Jesus. But the greek word here is a version of evangelising. He doesn't simply tell the authorities he was healed by Jesus, he proclaims it. He is following through on Jesus' words by spreading the good word.

I think we need to remember that this all happens around water. The pool of Bethesda is at the centre of this story. Whenever I meet water in the gospel there are two things that come to my mind. One is the way John's Gospel in particular is announcing the great cosmic re-set: at the beginning of Genesis the symbol of chaos is the unformed quality of the waters over which the Spirit of God moves. There is a tradition with this reading we're sharing today that the waters in the pool of Bethesda took on their healing property when the angel of the Lord stirred up the water -- this is stated in the verse now edited out of modern translations. So the water in the pool is living water, and if we're speaking of living water, then we're talking about waters through which we have all passed. When we meet water in the gospels we should immediately think of baptism, about how this makes me and you part of the body of Christ. Baptism propels us to live in a transformed and transforming way. We become the presence of Jesus in the world, and this is embodied for us in our gathering here at the table. In our baptism and in our gathering here for Eucharist we are still a bundle of human contradictions, but in our own way we are like the man transformed by his relating to Jesus. Like him, we can suddenly catch a glimpse of new and exciting ways of living.

The man by the pool is like the slave forgiven the large debt, but with very a different outcome. Both men are figures of human contradiction, but the offer to both of them is the same – to be given their lives. Forgiving and being forgiven, receiving a message and proclaiming it to the people around you, these are calls to transformation, to living in a reality much closer to God. Every step we take in that direction brings us more and more into that reality, which Jesus calls the kingdom of God.

Olivier Latry and the organ at Notre Dame de Paris

Betjeman for Christmas

For Christmas

Catching the gaze

This is the latter part of a homily I gave at a Christmas service for the Brotherhood of St Laurence last week.

Here you can see the hipster nativity that has been doing the rounds lately. My pondering of this has gone from the initial shock of wise men bearing Amazon boxes on their segways and the shepherd with his iPad, to gradually realising what's going on at the centre of the picture. See Mary and Joseph posing for a photo around the manger. See their radiant look. It reminds me of nothing more than a photo of a friend of mine, a moment of meeting with the newborn baby of another friend: adoration, wonder, awe. This from eyes that are sometimes a bit world-weary, but in this photo those eyes are full of life and radiant gentleness. And the look from the baby to my friend: adoration, trust, wonder. That look is full of pure gift, flowing grace.

Looking at Mary and Joseph in this modern imagining of the nativity, a question comes to me. What is it like to look towards God? Is it like taking a selfie? There’s plenty of smug talk about how the selfie is just the latest indulgence of our basic narcissism, yet more evidence of our need to be the stars of our own long-running media show. I've seen people driving cars while taking pouting photos of themselves -- truly a scary spectacle! Some people seem so driven to seek the camera’s gaze that they cannot sit down to a meal without photographing their food. Surely you've seen it happen. But perhaps behind the camera there is a deeper hunger to be looked on and loved. Even when we are staring down the camera barrel we need someone to return our gaze and look back in love.

How does God's look towards us?

Have you ever sat in a busy cafe next to a baby in a high chair? Have you noticed how the baby will scan the room, looking for someone to return their gaze? Think of how they respond when their eyes meet yours: they smile back, or frown back, or give you that unmistakable quizzical look. A baby searches with unflagging zeal and ingenuity for someone to meet and return their gaze.

This is what God’s looking towards us is like. In Jesus, God with us, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, God is looking at us because he cannot take his eyes off us. In the infant Jesus, God comes and looks towards us out of absolute vulnerability and helplessness. And those infant eyes are full of endless engrossing adoration, trust, wonder.

Can we hold the gaze and return with a look filled with adoration, wonder, and awe?

Shadows by the blaze

This is the longer version of the first part of a homily I gave at the Christmas services at the Brotherhood of St Laurence last week. This is the part of the homily that addressed the readings, which are included here, plus some other material that didn't make it to the final cut.

Over the past couple of months I've had the great joy and blessing of coming to the Brotherhood, and to get to know you here.

Just lately it's been a privilege to speak with some people about how Christmas can be a time of mixed feelings. Around all the light and parties perhaps there are those spots of grey, shadows and palpable gaps that remain with us as we travel through the whirl and bustle of the party season. Perhaps we each have people we carry in our hearts whose absence weighs around the edges of the joyful stuff of Christmas — our carols, our food, our beverage of choice, our merry-making. There are people I have loved — and who have loved me, often towards my better self, sometimes very much in spite of my lesser self — where the shadows and gaps of time, distance or death are all mixed in with the blaze of festivity. Perhaps this is true for you.

Our readings today have some striking images of light and dark that help us to hold the festivities and the grey moments together.

The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness—
on them light has shined.
You have multiplied the nation,
you have increased its joy;
they rejoice before you
as with joy at the harvest,
as people exult when dividing plunder.
For the yoke of their burden,
and the bar across their shoulders,
the rod of their oppressor,
you have broken as on the day of Midian.
For all the boots of the tramping warriors
and all the garments rolled in blood
shall be burned as fuel for the fire.
For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named
Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
His authority shall grow continually,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom.
He will establish and uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time onwards and for evermore.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.

(Isaiah 9.2-7) 

Isaiah speaks of people not simply walking in darkness, but deep darkness. Maybe we can imagine it to be like sleepwalking. The promise of light comes in the form of a baby — “a child is born for us, a son is given.” And what a wonderful sequence of names that really describe the gift of light in the present darkness: Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace. (Can anyone who knows Handel hear this passage without the following coming to mind?)

I think the Gospel of John echoes this very well — the light shines in the darkness, so powerfully that the darkness is itself swallowed up. It looses its power to consume. This blazing light is a person: a person whose very nature is to bridge the gaps in the way people relate to God, and to each other. I think Handel catches this contest between light and dark so well in his setting of the centre of this passage from Isaiah, with his constant walking bass (the people walking in darkness, to whom the child is given) and the radiant setting of the series of titles -- Wonderful Counsellor, etc.

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel’,
which means, ‘God is with us.’ When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus. 

(Matthew 1.18-25)

When we turn to Matthew we see a complicated picture in Joseph’s desire to do the right thing by dismissing Mary quietly — seeking to spare her the pain of public shame. Joseph is a man of heavily mixed feelings: wanting to do right in a situation where he feels wronged when he discovers Mary's pregnancy. I wonder if the gospel writer is being ironic when he describes Joseph as a righteous man just when he is contemplating a very dark, quite unrighteous, action: abandoning a vulnerable woman and her child to a fate that would certainly have spelt homelessness and victimisation. It is very unlikely Mary could have returned to her family after the marriage contract was broken on account of her pregnancy.

When I read this passage I can't help wondering if it could be that the angel appearing in Joseph’s dream was a drastic last stand to change his mind when angelic approaches in his waking hours failed to break through? Looking through the prism of the gospel we would say Joseph was certainly chosen by God to be the protector of Mary and Jesus, and for this reason we revere him as the first protector of the Church. But it remains that the story could have ended very differently and entirely in line with the mores and conventions of the time. Looking through the prism of Matthew's telling of the story we can certainly say that God's choosing Joseph still required his all-to-human assent, his willingness to trust in what God was calling him to do and to join in.

Joseph’s change of heart is a move from darkness to light. And again, the transition is towards a light that comes in the form of a person.

Joseph goes from acting rightly by the worldly conventions of his time and place to doing good in helping God to be present to his people. The good is to protect a baby with a momentous name: Emmanuel, God with us. This is the reason we now revere Joseph as the first protector of the Church. As we read on in Matthew we encounter the magi, and Herod. Joseph's protection is both a means for people to come to Jesus, and a way of helping Jesus to withdraw to a more sheltered place when overwhelming danger comes calling. Joseph's action in taking Mary as his wife is divine because it steps outside the patterns of power and judgement that form so much of how people lived in his world, as much then as now. Joseph shows mercy and loving-kindness when he has the choice to act otherwise. In making the choice towards mercy and loving-kindness, Joseph is displaying the attributes of God in his own life. His life is his witness.

Hail! Bright Cecilia

Quote of the week

...the assumption [is] that religion is a private hobby, basically there to support believers in trouble. In stark contrast stands the world-view shaping, visionary impact of Christian faith...The idea in modern life that 'religion' is a private matter is itself a dangerous one. In failing to accept that everyone lives by faith, out of a vision of living grounded in a world-view -- i.e. is deeply 'religious' -- masks motives, and shuts out the wisdom of the ages, not least those incarnated in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Charles Sherlock, book review in The Spirit Monthly, October 2016, page 8

Train stations

John Silvester has an interesting piece up on The Age today about PSOs at railway stations. It is worth taking the time to read it.
About 20 years ago the state government started withdrawing station staff from the railway network. It was part of a general efficiency drive, trying to save resources in order to soften the operation up for the privatisation that followed. In the years that followed the major contribution of the private operators was the removal of station amenities from passengers -- toilets, most notably, and sheltered waiting areas.
I spend a lot of time on the trains, trams and busses. They are my main way of getting around Melbourne, and on the whole we have a very good transport system, just as long as you're not in a hurry after 7.00pm or trying to catch a bus on the weekend. One of the things I notice is the lack of amenity on all transport modes if you're waiting the 30-40 minutes between busses or trains at night. For example, along the South Morang line most of the older stations have had their waiting areas locked up behind barred gates. Stations such as Jolimont, West Richmond, Rushall, and Northcote offer no sheltered waiting areas, which gives theses stations a rather bleak and windswept feeling on a cold winter's night. They are the most unwelcoming places on the transport network.
This is some of what lies behind my underlying unease and resentment about the PSOs at these stations. They sit in purpose-built huts while the provision for passenger comfort of a century ago sit gathering dust and bird poo. I consider the expansion of 'law and order' policy to the staffing of railway stations to be a complete failure of government. Why can't we just have old-style station staff? Even, perhaps especially, the antisocial types that used to be such a feature of stations like Tooronga?
Another part of my unease comes from the experience of arriving at Birmingham (UK) in July 2007. In the heightened public panic of the days and weeks following attempted bombings in London and Glasgow the armed police presence around public transport was overwhelmingly visible. I remember being shocked at seeing heavily armed and armoured police wandering around the station concourse, and wondering what it meant for civic life to have people walking around with automatic weapons in a public place.
I am sympathetic with the quandary of PSOs having limited power: they have police-like status without being able to fulfil basic police functions. The latter part of John Silvester's article outlines this quite well, and begs the question of why we even need armed security on station platforms at all. It seems to me that improved passenger amenity -- you know, basic things like shelter and toilets -- would make a far greater difference to public perceptions about the transport system. You don't need police-like status to do that.

Rather good

From the Opera Australia 2011 season.

Michael Lapsley

Father Michael Lapsley at the UN speaking on Healing of Memories from Melvin MCCRAY on Vimeo.

Date Palms

There's a major level crossing removal project in progress down on the Frankston line, and one of the incidental works involved in this is the preservation of date palm trees. Here is a quick overview of how they're managing the removal and storage of the trees.

Florence Foster Jenkins