17 August 2014

Mary and the Dragon

Revd Andrew Bain

Readings:

Revelation 11:19–12:6 – a woman clothed with the sun

Luke 1: 46-55 – My soul magnifies the Lord

Well, there was a choice of readings for today’s festival; but there aren’t many readings that give you a real live dragon, so there really was no contest. Revelation it had to be.

We begin with a scene that could have come from “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark”. The Ark of the Covenant surrounded by flashes of lightning, crashes of thunder, the very earth shaking and the Ark, the symbol of God’s promise, encompassed on every side by signs of terror.

But this scene gives way to an even more extraordinary vision. A woman clothed with the sun, the moon beneath her feet, and crowned with twelve stars representing the twelve tribes of Israel. And from her there comes the cry of all humanity. It’s the absolute vulnerability of bringing any child into the world. One of my sharpest memories of the night my eldest daughter was born was of leaving the Royal Infirmary in the middle of the night, something like four in the morning, and just overwhelmed by the emotion of it all; but also feeling a strange kind of indignation, because this was right in the middle of the Falklands War – and I remember thinking, “How dare anyone be fighting when my little girl’s just been born!”. Like all of that should somehow stop, just for her.

But the point of this fantastic amazing story is to say that from God’s perspective, I wasn’t wrong. At the cry of any mother, at any child’s first cry, the whole world should stop what it’s doing, and, yes, put away its weapons and fall down on its knees and worship.

So Mary stands in that place of vulnerability and hope and trust and joy for all of us. She’s pregnant with the divine life that’s always creating new things.

Now I like this picture of Mary, because her whole life is a great Yes to God. And a Yes to everything parenthood will mean. Not an easy Yes. Not a glib Yes. But Yes anyway, because she’ll be there at the foot of the Cross; there at the Resurrection; there on the day of Pentecost when the Spirit comes. Jesus couldn’t have shaken off this mother even if he’d wanted to.

So this is a real woman, a real mother, a real human being, and when your life is tough and things aren’t working out she’s there to remind us not just of her great love, but much more so the love she knows in God. (She always points away from herself: Whatever he says to you, do it).

This is the love in which she exults when she cries out: My soul doth magnify the Lord. She knows that God is faithful. She knows God does great things in any heart that’s open to him. Along with Joseph, so strong, so faithful, this is the faith they shared with her infant Son: “God is good and you, Jesus, our mysterious little child are beloved beyond all imagining”. This is the message Fiona and Arran will share with Charlotte (who’s being baptized here later this morning). Just as Mary treasured in her heart the growing sense of just how special this miracle child of hers was and would be, so they now find themselves on the holy ground of parenthood, with just so much to treasure.

Charlotte, this starburst of a life to change the lives of her Mum and Dad, and many others, is a word of life spoken into a world with much darkness. When we celebrate her this morning that will include every human child. Baptism is an absolute proclamation of hope. This is a world in which a little child leads. To us a child is given and human history pivots on that. Charlotte’s anointing will show her to us as clothed in royal dignity –because God sets his seal on her for all time and tells us and her that she is and always will be a star, a spark from the divine life itself.

No wonder Mary magnifies the Lord. No wonder dictators have seen the Magnificat as more subversive than Karl Marx. Because the Magnificat and indeed baptism are a charter for human freedom and dignity. Because this is a love that even beats dragons, and the little child triumphs.

10^th August 2014

“Do not be afraid”

Revd Andrew Bain

Readings:

1 Kings 19: 9-18 – after the whirlwind, a still small voice

Matthew 14: 22-33 – do not be afraid, it is I

Just this week, on the evening of the 4^th of August, I went to see a special commemorative play called Forgotten Voices. Put together by the Imperial War Museum from memories of ordinary men and women who experienced the First World War and set against a changing backdrop of mages of all that horror of the trenches, these were the real voices of people like us.

It strikes me that Elijah’s experience on the mountain had something of that horror about it. The chaos of the world, the wickedness of Queen Jezebel from whom he’s fleeing in fear for his life, the evil of the religion of Baal with a whole culture of abuse of people through prostitution and possibly even human sacrifice – all these are symbolised in the crashing of the world around him as the mountain almost breaks apart, the rocks split, the wind howls and an earthquake shakes even the mountain itself. And where, in any of it, is God?

As shells churned the fields of northern France and Belgium into a sea of mud and men could drown just in the shell-holes, never mind by enemy fire, this sense of the world falling apart and terror all around must have shaken the men who went through it to the very core. No wonder so few could speak about it when they came home. How could anyone understand if they hadn’t been through it? They say that for many men, faith died in the trenches. Certainly Victorian optimism, that sense that everything was just one relentlessly positive march into the future, that just as we’d made such strides in medicine and science and engineering, and in exploring previously uncharted parts of the world, so we would make endless moral progress too. The future looked bright. Nothing seemed beyond our grasp.

But then Ypres and Paschendale and the Somme, and that bright optimism didn’t stand up to the reality of death in the mud, and gas, and men reduced to living in the most dehumanising conditions imaginable.  And yet men prayed. One survivor remembered hearing a wounded man dying out in no-man’s land singing with his dying breath: O for the winds of a dove – echoes of a psalm of trust and hope, words and music of beauty choked out in the face of darkness. Chaplains crawled through barbed wire to reach wounded men to offer the comforts of faith to the dying. From Old St Paul’s in Edinburgh, the famous Canon Albert Laurie was almost worshipped by the men he served as chaplain for just that kind of courage. But why would anyone do that, why crawl through hell just to hold a dying man’s hand and speak empty words?

But empty words they weren’t. Amidst the crash of guns and the falling apart of worlds, this is the still small voice of God, calling his children beyond darkness and death into deathless love and stillness and peace. It’s Isaiah’s vision that one day all the instruments of war will be rolled up and burned, spears be turned into ploughshares, and a little child will lead us into God’s future. We won’t study war any more.

I always remember how, in the Cathedral, we would sit daily in the Resurrection Chapel  for morning prayer. Each wall of that chapel is just covered in the names of men who died. Young men from Haymarket and Dalry and the New Town, shopkeepers and lawyers, factory workers and footballers – notably a whole team from Heart of Midlothian and hundreds of their supporters too, name upon name, and many of them from the same family. Where could God possibly be in that, for all those families who got that fateful, world-ending telegram or letter – we regret to inform you...

Well, high above us, hanging from the chancel arch, the first thing you see when you walk into the Cathedral was the great hanging rood, designed by Robert Lorimer (who designed some of the features of our own chancel). It’s a great, enormous, hanging crucifix and on it lies the broken body of a beautiful young man, the young man, the poor man, of Nazareth. In my time, we had this great crucifix taken down for cleaning, and when it was cleaned and the grime of years removed, we discovered that this body of Jesus lay on a field of Flanders poppies, blood-red for sacrifice. Where is God? Well this is, I think, a still small voice of an answer. He lies with the dead. Whether it’s the dead of Ypres or the dead of Gaza, the suffering of God in Jesus is united with the suffering of men and women and children today. The Babe of Bethlehem and the young man of Nazareth, he represents them all.

And he calls to us over the tumult of our life’s wild restless sea and says follow me into a world better than this. Blessed are the peacemakers, he says, for they shall be called the children of God. God is not in the crash of falling worlds, in the horrors unleashed by the Jezebels and the Caesars of the ancient world or the power-mongers of our twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He’s in the still small voice of God crying out in the victim: O for the winds of a dove. He’s in the courage of the peacemaker Jesus calls blessed, the prisoner of conscience, the doctor who hasn’t slept for a week struggling to mend bodies torn apart by shelling in Gaza, he’s in our own struggles to make peace in our churches, our families, and in our own hearts.

The same Jesus who will take all this to the Cross and beyond the Cross to a risen future for all of us, God’s “something better”, he reaches out his hand to us right now, across the tumultuous sea of the world as it is, and you and me as we are, with all our storms within and without and he says: Come. Don’t look down at the waves. Do not be afraid: I have conquered the world – and he has. Don’t be afraid. Take courage. It is I. When the world’s sorrows seem almost too much to bear and you can’t bring yourself to watch any more, when your own struggles seem overwhelming and you feel like you’re sinking, this is the voice to hear. Our world is not without hope. Beauty and truth and love are not absent because God is never absent. In the middle of everything: Do not be afraid. It is I. Take my hand. Come to me. 

“Loaves and Fishes”

Pentecost 8 -3rd August 2014

                                                                                                                               

Liz Gordon

Readings:

Isaiah 55: 1-5 –invitation to the thirsty

Matthew 14: 13-21- Jesus feeds the five thousand

This story in today’s Gospel is one that really resonates with me because I’m someone who likes to know where my next meal is coming from! When in doubt carry a picnic or at the very least an emergency banana! In today's story, I suspect that I'd have been the one carrying the loaves and fishes in my rucksack. Would I have willingly handed them over? Well that's another story.

Let's look a little more closely at the events that led up to what we now refer to as the feeding of the five thousand. Well it seems that this event was not part of Jesus' planned itinerary. The day begins with him needing to spend time alone to take in and reflect on the news that his friend John the Baptist has been killed. So he takes himself off by boat to a deserted place. However, somehow word gets round of his intention and the crowds are there to meet him when he steps out of the boat. Does his heart sink? Does he get back into the boat to get away from them? No! We are told simply 'he had compassion for them and cured their sick.' Jesus, despite his own need for solitude, simply cannot help himself. He is the embodiment of love and compassion. It’s who he is. I’ve no doubt this is what made him so attractive to people, why they followed him and pursued him. There’s nothing so compelling as feeling totally loved, cared for and understood.

To get back to the story. It’s getting late and the disciples suggest to Jesus that it’s time for the crowds to be dispersed so that they can go off to buy food. (I suspect that the disciples themselves might have been wondering where their next meal would be coming from.) Then Jesus turns round and says to them ' there's no need to send them away, you feed them.' WHAT!' Can you imagine it? Faced with thousands of hungry people and a paltry two fish and five SMALL loaves and Jesus says 'you do it’! But then he says ' Come on, bring them to me' and because, by then, they’re beginning to trust him, they hand over to him the loaves and fishes. He blesses them, breaks the bread and then . ... well, we know the rest.

It's such a well known story. One that we learnt in Sunday School and have heard many, many times since - one of the miracle stories.

But I believe it has something important to teach us about prayer.

Let’s look at the disciples. They see a need. These crowds of people, in their urgency  to see Jesus have lost all sense of time and haven’t made provision for themselves. They’ll need to eat soon. I can imagine the disciples huddled together, having a little discussion. Then they approach Jesus 'Send the crowds away so they can go into the villages and buy food.' Simple! Sorted!

Imagine the scene if Jesus had done as they suggested. All those people turning up to buy food at the same time. Imagine the queues! The irritability! What about those who’d forgotten to bring money and would have to trudge all the way home on empty stomachs?

As it was Jesus took the little that they had to offer and transformed it so that the day ended up with a great big picnic, everyone got plenty to eat and they were all fortified for their journey home.

So often, we come to Jesus, just like the disciples did with our own plan of action. This is the problem Lord but I've worked out what needs to be done so please answer my prayer in this way. Then, if God doesn’t answer our prayers in that particular way, we become discouraged and if it keeps happening, we might even feel that prayer is useless or at least doesn’t work for us.

I fell into this trap three years after my husband had died, when I was feeling really lonely. I worked out that the solution to this would be to find a new partner and marry again. So I prayed for a husband. Well obviously that prayer wasn’t answered!  It has taken me a considerable time to realise that God’s answer to the very real problem of my loneliness might not be the same as mine. It’s taken me even longer to accept that his solution might actually be better than mine. Moving to Dunbar, coming to St Anne’s, starting training for lay readership. None of these were part of my plan but through them I’m finding that my loneliness is diminishing and what’s more, life is taking off in new and exciting directions.

Sometimes we struggle to pray for others because their needs seem so complex or their situations so desperate that we can’t see an answer. We can’t come up with a plan of action to put to Jesus. I think Jesus says simply ‘Come on, bring them to me.’

As the fourth century Egyptian monk Macarius  said “There is no need at all to make long discourses; it is enough to stretch out one’s hands and say ‘Lord as you will and as you know, have mercy’. ”

As for ourselves we know that our merciful and compassionate God, wants the best for us but we might just be surprised by what that ‘best’ turns out to be.

So dare we put ourselves into his hands as an offering (like the loaves and fishes) to be broken, maybe and then transformed?

Maybe rather than asking God to bless the plans that we have made, we could pray something along these lines.

Lord, you love me and care for me like no one else can. I believe you want the best for me. You know my needs, you are aware of my limited resources. Please take me and what I have, bless me and transform me in ways I cannot even begin to imagine.