Matthew 18:15-20

essentially concerns the management of conflict within the community of faith. However, it’s a notoriously difficult text. Those preachers who tend towards the embrace of authoritarian interpretations of Scripture site this text with enthusiasm. Preachers who reject interpretations of Scripture that support authoritarian views of social relations explain the text away often by suggesting that these are not Jesus’ words but the words of the later Church inserted into chapter 18. (So which message are you anticipating getting from me this morning?)

Our first question: how are we to read this text?

Christian history is strewn with examples of how this text leads to harsh judgment, then condemnation, then excommunication of others who we perceive to have sinned against us. We are all familiar with the tyranny of Christian mob rule. Authoritarian interpretations  have relied on this text to conceal the evils of scape-goating that goes on in communities.

The passage seems to be suggesting a process of escalating conflict to the next level up and ultimately to the body of the Church. At first sight its got the feel of corrective re-education used in totalitarian systems where the perceived wrong doer is invited to acknowledge the error of their ways – in order to avoid collective judgment and punishment.

The cardinal rule of Biblical interpretation in our Anglican Tradition states that no word, no line, no section of Scripture can be interpreted to mean something that contradicts the spirit of the whole of Jesus’ teaching.

My approach to this text is to accept an invitation to struggle with it. I neither accept a naieve reading nor do I want to exclude the text from consideration. I suggest we look at the broader context of chapter 18 to see if this can help us with this text?

In 18:1-14 Jesus teaches:

1. In answer to the question who is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven Jesus replies that we are to be as a little child for such is greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.
2. To abuse and/or confuse a child is a sin beyond comprehension.
3. Then there is the slightly worrying passage about cutting of our hand and or our foot, plucking out our eye when these cause us to sin. But this is a typical Jesus hyperbole, for it’s not our limbs that are responsible for sin but something more deep-seated in our minds and hearts.
4. In v 12 Jesus offers us and image of the qualities of The Good Shepherd who when having lost a sheep leaves the others and does not rest until he has found and restored the lost sheep to the fold.
5. Then comes the section in today’s Gospel on the management of conflict within the community.
6. It’s followed by the statement that where two or three gather in my name I am with you. Note that although Jesus in the line before is talking about agreement between members, here he simply says that he will be present not when two agree in his name, but when two or three gather in his name. Can we conclude that disagreement among those who gather is not a bar to Jesus being present?
7. Finally the chapter continues with Jesus’ teaching about the nature of forgiveness as he rebukes Peter about the number of times he is called upon to forgive when his brother who wrongs him. Not seven, Jesus says but 70 times seven.  The chapter concludes with the powerful parable of the unforgiving debtor.

Read in its entirety the thrust of Jesus’ teaching in Chapter 18 indicates that God’s judgment is not reserved for those who wrong us – but for us if we do not forgive those whom we perceive to have wronged us -from our hearts.

Our second question: how are we to apply this text?

In our community how does this text guide us in being able to address conflict?

1. Is it possible for me to come to you and tell you how something you said or did left me feeling?  Note I am not asking if it’s possible for me to come to you and accuse you of doing something to me.
2. What if we can’t communicate about how we feel? Can others help? The answer is yes but only when others act as witnesses to the quality of the encounter between us without taking sides.
3. When an issue becomes a flash-points between individuals or small groups of the like-minded the issue is best seen to be one that affects the whole community. Conflicts between individuals or small factions are usually a playing-out of wider tensions within the community that are being avoided and need an airing.
4. Should we not be more careful about truth claims? Conflicts that emerge around truth claims are usually irresolvable. When we focus on truth claims we take literally the words in v19: And again I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my father in heaven. On its own this text makes no sense to me other than to support statements like: I say what I mean and I mean what I say. If  you agree with me then obviously God is on our side because it says so in Matt 18 v19. Does this not sound familiar to us from the language of contemporary politics?
5. However, could v19 mean where two agree to differ? V20 is then read as an extension: for where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.

Jesus emphasizes that where two or three gather that he promises to be present. Gathering presupposes agreement but not necessarily agreement as in the sense that we are all of one mind.  A more accurate reflection of the reality we live with day in and day out is: where two agree to recognize difference and to respect disagreement then gathering becomes a powerful experience of the real presence of Christ in his body.

The hallmark of a healthy culture is not the absence of conflict but the capacity to negotiate our way through our differences. The ultimate indication of emotional and psychological maturity in both individuals and the communities – is the capacity to tolerate difference. Difference is more than the sum total of the differences between us. Difference is a fundamental fact of life that allows communities to flourish a thrive in celebration of diversity.

We live in an immature culture. Our body politic is a prime example at the present time because it’s a culture that is regressing to a state where difference can no longer be tolerated. We are currently less able to celebrate the rich fruit that the toleration of difference brings.

What can our collective history teach us?

This is Labor day Weekend. Its one of the few opportunities in the American work calendar to celebrate the equivalent of the great British institution of the Bank Holiday Weekend – so named because the Banks are closed on the following Monday.

The celebration of Labor Day is a reminder that there was a time when we understood as a culture the need to negotiate the conflicts that naturally occur in a system such as Capitalism.  This is a huge achievement and so much of the post war prosperity depended on negotiating a balance in the unequal distribution of power in economic relationships. Are we really to roll time back to the period where the principle might is right governs our social relations?

History or historical accident has uniquely equipped Anglicanism for the task of recognizing and negotiating difference.  As a rule religion likes to obliterate difference through the assertion of truth. The evolution of English Christianity into a national church required that the principle of gathering together could not be on the basis or agreeing together. Whether you held to the old Catholic religion or embraced the new religion of the Protestant Reformers, you had to meet one another Sunday by Sunday sitting in the pews of your Parish Church.

This gave rise to a remarkable principle – that right relationship did not require common agreement about right belief. As Episcopalians we embody the maxim – as we worship so we believe. We have no beliefs other than those expressed through the way we worship. Worship shaped by the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer enabled difference to be tolerated over a period of some 500 years. This experience provides us with a very necessary antidote to the prevailing ideologies that privilege so called truth over being in right relationship together.

For us then Matt 18:15-20 is not a text about the heavy-handed correction of our brother and sister. Its not a justification for ganging-up or scape-goating. Viewing the text within the wider context of Jesus’ teaching in chapters 17 and 18, the text offers us a way to honestly recognize that difference stems from the nature of human experience. Human beings see the world through different eyes shaped by different experience. Following Jesus teaching on the need to be child-like in our actions it seems to me that humility is the cardinal virtue required in relations between us.

All of us stand under the judgment of God. All of us are indicted and none of us can selectively exonerate ourselves while condemning our sister, or our brother. Jesus enjoins us to face to face encounters with our brother, our sister. Social networking is not sufficient. If necessary call others in the community as witnesses to honest negotiation of differences. Privileging relationship with one another enables us to tolerate our differences and disagreements. Jesus enjoins us to gather together in his name. This gathering is an exercise in diversity. Jesus enjoins us gather together in all our diversity in tolerance of difference among us. Only then can the Lord be truly present in his Church.

The image of Jesus being on a journey is for Luke a major motif throughout his Gospel. So it’s not surprising to find the first post resurrection appearance of Jesus takes place while two of his followers, one Cleopas and one Simon who were journeying back home to Emmaus – a village outside of Jerusalem.

The image of Jesus being on a journey is for Luke a major motif throughout his Gospel. So it’s not surprising to find the first post resurrection appearance of Jesus takes place while two of his followers, one Cleopas and one Simon who were journeying back home to Emmaus – a village outside of Jerusalem.

It has been a long and bewildering day. The loss of Jesus’ body only adds to, and compounds their grief and sense of utter loss following the events of Good Friday.

For Luke the journey to Emmaus represents not simply an external physical journey but also an inner journey of spiritual awakening. The inner sense of the Journey on the road to Emmaus continues to inspire many. I don’t know about in the US but in England  the fact that a good many retreat centers bear the name Emmaus is testament to the enduring evocation that today’s gospel story has with our human spiritual journeying.

For me the significant element in this story lies in the fact that the disciples do not recognize the man who walks alongside them as Jesus. This experience is echoed also in John’s account of Mary Magdalene mistaking the risen Lord for the gardener. Did Jesus look significantly different in his resurrected body? In the next section of Luke has Jesus come and stand in the room where the disciples are meeting. It is clear that this is not the explanation. Jesus looks still the same complete with the marks of his crucifixion.

I find the most likely explanation for the failure of the disciples to recognize Jesus is that they were not expecting to see him. Distracted by loss, grief and a huge anxiety following the seeming failure of Jesus’ promises the disciples had become emotionally shielded by disappointment. This happens to human beings all the time. By limiting our expectations we shield ourselves from disappointment. Who among us was not raised with the advice ‘don’t expect too much and you won’t be disappointed’?

There is a fundamental rule of psychological life. The mind recognizes only what it already knows. The brain is a pattern mapping machine. It stores and catalogues experience. All new experiences are pattern matched against previously stored templates or what we usually refer to as memories. New experience is matched to existing memory. And this leads to an experience which Freud named as transference. Older feelings from earlier experiences are inappropriately transferred onto new experiences. Therefore, we are caught in the dilemma of choosing only what is familiar to us. This leads us to the cruelest disappointment of all is to endlessly make the same choices yet longing for different results. That’s why the disciples on the Road to Emmaus only recognize Jesus when he breaks the bread. Suddenly, Jesus initiate an experience that triggers a memory response. The present experience – breaking the bread become matched to memories of Jesus and so their eyes are opened.

We think of choice operating only at conscious levels of awareness. But our choices are more often dictated by our unconscious resonances of the familiar –i.e. unconscious memory.  Once the disciples recognize Jesus they become aware that all the time this stranger has been journeying with them they have been dimly aware of something nagging at the fringes of their awareness – something unconsciously familiar.  Once it becomes clear that it is Jesus standing in front of them they exclaim:

were not our hearts burning  within us  as he walked with us on the road and opened the scriptures to us?

Our personal stories are the source of our identity – (refer back to the sermon for the Easter Vigil ) and our stories limit our expectations.

The Disciples on the R-t E had a story to tell. Cleopas with incredulity addresses the stranger’s question to them when he asks what are you talking about? With:

are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?

The Road to Emmaus was a story of dashed hopes ringed by fear. They had already begun to withdraw into their disappointment and adjust to the new situation. Each of us has such a story. It’s a story we tell ourselves about ourselves and how we have made the most of the hand we were dealt and got on with living our lives as best we could. In these stories there are elements of courage and fortitude.  These are our personal stories of self-reliance and self-determination in the face of life’s disappointments. These are our stories of expectations of God tailored to disappointments.

For do we expect the risen Christ to stroll up and walk beside us? Maybe in some notional way but is this part of our everyday hope and expectation – a hope and expectation of actually being met by God? And the problem for us is the problem for Jesus’ first  disciples. When God strolls up along side and falls into step with us, maybe our hearts do burn within us but we are blind to his more obvious presence because like them we have no expectation of this happening.

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves stories largely reflected back to us unchallenged by social values of autonomy and personal responsibility close us off from the divine reality of a world infused with the presence of God all around us. A world each day made new by the promise of new life. This is a promise that takes the form of invitation. Invitation to participation in the process of resurrection which God sets in motion by becoming one with us – inviting us into a dying and rising with Jesus.

The resurrection is about a dying to older and less complete versions of our story. When we open to new life then we begin to see that the stories we tell are not the only versions of the story we might tell about ourselves. Stories of self-protection through low expectation can give way to more courageous stories that embrace the risks of hopeful connection to A God who is infused into the world all around us.

We open to Grace and Grace breaks the endless repetition of the familiar. We become liberated from the confines of what we can imagine to lives filled with the surprise of things unimaginable to us. Bit by bit or maybe all of a sudden new choices emerge into consciousness. What we can’t do by ourselves Grace facilitates. Then we notice decrease of fear and increase of gratitude for do not our hearts burn within us a-lot-of the time?

Being open to Grace is fostered by our taking seriously a rule of life. This involves a regular presence in community worship where Christ makes himself known to us as a community in the breaking of the bread, our daily commitment to common prayer where we encounter Christ unfolding the message of the scriptures, and the making of time and space to deepen our awareness of the deep penetration of God into all things within and around us. Through prayer, worship, reflection and service we become open to new elements in our stories that shift our direction.

The Road to Emmaus is a journey we take everyday of our lives.  It’s the journey that begins with our stories of disappointment. These stories that protect us by not expecting to see God. The Road to Emmaus is a journey of transformation as we learn to recognize and leave behind the self protections that our stories afford us. When this happens we risk opening to versions of ourselves that are more than we can imagine because they are fashioned by the Grace of God’s invitation to new life.

This is what it means to participate in the dying and rising to the new life of Easter.

A sermon on the Great Vigil of Easter

The question I put to you tonight is are you saved?  If you are then from what are you saved?

This is a rather nasty question to ask Episcopalians. If we were Baptists or Evangelicals of any kind my guess is that we would instantly know the answer.  We would know that Jesus died for our sins upon the cross. Jesus is God’s sacrifice for the sin of the world. Jesus died in my place as the payment God exacted for my sins and the sins of the world. As Episcopalians does being saved mean anything to us any more when the fear of hell and damnation recedes? When our eyes no longer anxiously focus on the future prospect of salvation in the afterlife as a precarious prize that can be at any moment snatched away from us if we do the wrong thing.

The question are we saved becomes of little interest for us. Yet, it’s a question that remains at the heart of this liturgy of the Great Vigil of Easter. It’s a question at the heart of our Baptism and our weekly participation in the Eucharist. Yet, it’s a question we tend to skip the question by saying – of course we are saved. Doesn’t a loving God desire to save everyone. I personally believe this to be true. But when we can no longer say with any conviction that it’s the fires of eternal hell that we feel saved from – then the question – from what is it we are saved remains a problematic one.

The simple answer to the question of what are we saved from is that we are saved from life as a living death without the promise of new life. In the Epistle we read tonight, Paul is at pains to show that Jesus’ death and resurrection is not only about Jesus, it is also about us. For he says:  do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death …buried with him by baptism into death …. so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For Paul, Jesus’ death is not a substitution for ours as atonement theology would have it. It is an invitation to participation. God’s saving love invites us into a covenant whereby we join Jesus in his death so that we too might be raised to new life. Paul says so consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Rather like the question I began with – are you saved?  The language of dying to sin is problematic language for Episcopalians.  As a group we’re not much into sin anymore. Why is that?

I think its not that we reject the notion of sin, but we tend to disidentify from the way a largely absolutist Christian culture, both Catholic and Protestant defines sin as  something private and personal and largely to do with sexual behavior.  For Anglicans – community is at the heart of our identity. For us sin cannot be narrowly defined as private. Although individual confession has its place, our standard practice is corporate confession because sin is something that distorts our community life. Sin is systemic and manifests as a struggle against the principalities and forces that dominate and control our world. In other words sin lodges in systems and as Individuals we need to respond.

Anglican understanding is very Pauline. For Paul the Cross and Resurrection confront the values of Roman imperialism. This is what Paul means when he talks of the world. He is referring to the political values that enthrone oppression through violence. Personal sin for Paul is the way cosmic forces of fear, oppression and violence become internalized in each of us and become accepted as our own moral compass. We become conformed to the values of the world. Our old self of sin needs transformation through our own participation in the death and rising of Christ.

At the personal level how is this transformation accomplished? If sin is systemic, societal, cultural, or as Paul would put it, cosmic, each of us has to recognize and own our part in this. When we do we become transformed from the inside out. Although society and its cultural and political order remains much as it is, we are no longer conformed by it or conformed to it. We come to have minds of our own.

Paul tells us this internal transformation comes about as a result of our baptism into the death and new life of Christ. He means more than the ceremony of Christening. He means becoming alive to the implications of the baptismal promises we have just reaffirmed this night. If we let them these promises transform and liberate us. Paul’s life experience gives us the clue. He experiences a major shift in his identity. Saul becomes Paul. Persecutor becomes apostle. Anger and rage transform into love and passion. If we live out the implications of our baptismal promises what can we expect to notice?

We can expect to notice a shift in our identity. So what is identity? Identity is a kind of story we construct to tell ourselves and others about who we are. When we become more aware of our identity as rooted in the story we have come to tell ourselves about ourselves it then becomes possible to wonder – is this the only story I can tell? This process of coming to a deeper awareness is the process of the spiritual life. Being saved is being baptized into the death of Christ through the continual day-by-day process of dying to our old selves and becoming alive to the new life God invites us to take up.  This involves a shift in identity, a change in the personal story we construct from our experience to tell us and the world who we are. As our hearts and our minds open through our spiritual practice of prayer, worship and service God’s Grace rushes into the opening. Grace then becomes and integral part of the process of transformation. For in the larger scheme our transformation is part of God’s work of redeeming the world. We begin to tell a different story about who we are and this heralds a shift in identity. New identities express through different choices leading to different actions. We notice a deepening of gratitude, an increase in generosity, a strengthening of participation in community through service.

Never forget that we are baptized into community where your story and my story are in the perpetual process of becoming our story. New life is breathed into dry bones.

Romans 5:1-11

The task of entering into a living engagement with the text can be a complex matter. We read the words and firstly we note their emotional impact upon us?  We then ask: what do I understand by the words as we sit with the feelings evoked? As we sit often in tension, or conflict, or a sense of being baffled by paradox what understanding begins to emerge in us in relation to the text?

Can you recall just a moment ago your thoughts and feelings when you heard Paul speaking in his letter to the Romans? Maybe it is even a blank for you because without even realizing it you switched off when you heard the well known phrases he uses. I find Paul often difficult to understand because I am left with a sense of hearing only one side of a conversation and only snippets of this conversation at that. All of us a familiar with some of Paul’s key phrases such as:

•being justified by Faith

•having peace with God

•hope resulting from endurance

• boasting of our suffering

•being counted as righteous

•Christ died for the ungodly i.e. for me no longer making me and enemy of God.

Many of us can only hear Paul speaking to us filtered through the doctrine of the ATONEMENT even when we are not conscious of this happening.   Atonement theology is part of the blood stream of American religious culture and its logic goes a bit like this. Jesus died for our sins therefore Jesus is the sacrifice for sin. Jesus died in my place  therefore Jesus’ death is the payment God exacted for the sinfulness of the world, i.e. for my sin.

Atonement theology is here understood as a theology of Substitution –i.e. Jesus is the substitute for me having to pay my own sin debt to God.

I want to look at the word Atonement. It breaks down into three word fragments At-one-ment. Atonement and substitution  presupposes a situation of loss and alienation for which payment has to be made. At-one-ment presupposes a situation of  estrangement- separation requiring reconciliation. Both Marcus Borg and J. Dominic Crossan make the point in their book The First Paul (2009) that atonement as substitution is a concept that would have been alien to Paul.

For Paul the meaning of the Cross is complex  but in essence its about reconciliation and transformation through  participation not substitution. Jesus’ death and resurrection is not a once for all instead of my death. Jesus’ death and resurrection is something we are invited by God to participate in. In Gal: 2 Paul says I have been crucified with Christ and its no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. He paints a picture here of a radical internal transformation and the death of an old way of looking at himself and the birth of a new identity and the death of an old way of seeing the world.

In Romans:12 Paul continues but be transformed by the renewing of your minds. Paul continues  may I never boast  of anything except the cross of Jesus Christ by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.

At-one-ment is participation through transformation of heart and mind. For Paul it meant to enter into a different way of looking at the world. The world to which he invites us not to be conformed. This is not the world of nature which is good, but the world organized by the wisdom of this age. The world organized along the line of hierarchy, dominance, oppression and violence through abuse of power and pursuit  of self interested greed. What might transformation of heart and mind this look like in our world?

I find myself experiencing a sense of profound culture shock. If you are like me you too may be experiencing profound culture shock. I was raised in a post World War II world which presented the middle class values of meritocracy and social mobility achieved through self help, educational advancement, and hard work. This world had a concept of a broad egalitarianism, social welfare for all based firmly upon a belief in the common good i.e. that what was good for me was good for others and an unquestioning faith in a steady scientific advancement that would bring with it only increased prosperity raising us above, and insulating us against the unpredictability’s of the natural world. This imbued in me a world view in which the forces of nature and human civilization were generally speaking predictable and benign.

This world view for me is now shattered by many things that are happening around me. Three elements stand out for me. The first is the full realization that the global economic order is not a projection of my values and I can no longer harbour the comfortable illusion that it is not my side. Secondly, that the global political order that sustained  my world view is collapsing as other people claim the right to freedom and prosperity filling me with a fear that my birthright to these things is now at risk. Thirdly, the recent destruction of my home town of Christchurch – a gem of English Victorian architecture transported to the south seas – in two major earthquakes separated only by months. The disaster of catastrophic proportions that has hit Japan and which in a matter of hours reduced this beacon of technological culture to the conditions of primitive survival characteristic of many places in the undeveloped Third World shakes my confidence to the core.  I contrast the socially cohesive values of Japanese society which at least enable them to all pull together with the current values in our own society. Were we to face a catastrophe  of similar proportions our now totally individualized values would not stand us in very good stead as we might all run for the guns necessary to defend what is mine. For we live in a political culture where notions of the common good are derided having increasingly been replaced by individual self interest based upon the lie that we are each autonomous. Autonomy is an illusion that is sustainable only when there is an excess of resources to go around.

As I struggle to come to terms with what has and continues to happen all around me I turn with a new urgency to the words of Paul and take to heart that I need a radical transformation of world view and personal identity if I am going to meet the coming challenges with courage, confidence and hope in a loving God in tact.

The way of transformation is to open ourselves to the process of dying and rising with Christ in our relation on the one hand to the world around us and on the other an internal transformation of who we experience ourselves to be. You don’t need to know how exactly you do this. Transformation is not a recipe to be followed step by step. Transformation is rather more like a process to orient towards. Open yourself and trust that God will bring about in you the transformation he requires, the sacrifice of heart and mind. What are the signs to look for that this is happening? These would be a transformation of world view and personal identity exhibited by a strengthening in you of a sense of gratitude to God for his love which generates a generosity in you as you come to increasingly identify others through shared solidarity and service.

Here is where we start from- 

In all Western Societies and the US is no exception we have developed a taste for endless analysis as if the very act of self-reflection by itself has the power to magically transform society. It is following a major tragedy that this taste for analysis – now the major activity of news reporting in an age of 24/7 news coverage reaches a climax.

What I have been observing over the last week- and not for the first time – is our simple- minded approach to making connections. We have three core ingredients to the endless news coverage of the Tucson shootings:

1. The current vitriolic atmosphere of political rhetoric and commentary
2. The evil the lies at the heart of any criminal act of violence
3. The unbalance of heart and mind commonly referred to as mental illness

The argument goes around – and around as to the existence or absence of connections between these three core ingredients with reference to the shootings last Saturday in Tucson.  Some voices seemingly from the left clearly see powerful connections between all three. While other voices seemingly of the right seem to see no connection between them any of them.

What I find so frustrating is that both positions are grounded in a simplistic view of connection as cause and effect. This is a weakness in our Western worldviews so influenced by the scientific paradigm where things are observed to connect or not according to the laws of direct cause and effect. To my way of looking at the world this is too simple.

Spiritual traditions have always recognized interconnection between all things. Nothing exists in isolation from everything else. However, this sense of interconnection cannot be reduced to chains of cause and effect. To my mind the three ingredients noted above all impact at multiple levels upon each other. The manner of this impact is difficult to determine which is why spiritual traditions stress the importance to take care with every thought and every action knowing the there flow from every thought and action a mysterious chain of unforeseen and unintended consequences.

Violent political rhetoric pushes on the boundaries of what is considered acceptable and even normal in wider social discourse. As levels of anger rise in the general populace social inhibitions towards violent outburst weaken. Societal stresses impact upon the emotional formation and stable development of social units at the levels of community, family and the individual. Saturday’s shooter is responsible for an act of unthinkable criminal violence. He is now also revealed to be a person with a poor mental and emotional health history. His target was a political figure and in a sense the other deaths seem collateral to this central motivation in that he knew his primary target.

I spent 20 years of my ministry working in the field of mental health care, 18 months of which were here in Phoenix. My current preoccupations as a pastor to a growing and diverse urban congregation concern the relationships or interconnections between emotional experience and spiritual health and development. I believe all of us find our healing within healthy and healing communities. Its the community and our membership within it that offers or denies each of us the potential for our healing and capacity to thrive.  The 17th century Anglican priest and mystical poet John Donne remarked ‘no man is a island’.

But where are we to end-up?

Currently a truth about our society is that mentally disturbed individuals of a psychopathic disposition continue to become more and more disturbed until some of them trigger the reactions of the criminal justice system which by default has become the main institution that deals with serious mental illness of many kinds. After the huge progress beginning in the late 19th century and gathering momentum in the 2oth in understanding the roots and causes of mental illness can we really intend that we as a society should return to a situation where mental illness is once again something to be ignored until it becomes a matter of crime and punishment?

With the Episcopal Church’s adoption of the Three Year Lectionary, there has been a loss of significance concerning the lighting of the pink candle traditionally done on Advent III and the proclamation of the Annunciation. The candle is still lit on Advent III accompanied by a gospel about John the Baptist with the gospel reading for the Annunciation now occurring  today on Advent IV.

On Advent Sunday the lectionary moved us back to the first of our three-year cycle of readings. This Advent we have been hearing from the Gospel according to Matthew. Note the wording here the wording that each sunday announces the proclamation of the Gospel  hear the holy gospel according to — –.Each Gospel writer or Evangelist although following a general outline has a theme and a context that is particular to the time and place in which they lived. Although the Evangelists are constructing their narrative under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit they are writing after the facts – so to speak. Or put another way they are setting the facts into an overarching narrative about God’s action in the world. Writing after the fact is an important point to which I will return later.

Matthew is a Jewish writer writing for a Jewish Christian context and so sets the local story about Jesus of Nazareth into the historical context of God’s call of the Israel – the Jews to be his people. In Jesus the promises that God makes to Israel are finally fulfilled. In Jesus the Law of Moses and the prophecies of Isaiah are fulfilled and for Matthew the symbolism of Jesus is that he is the new Moses, and also the Emmanuel spoken of by Isaiah. But not only the law but all human desire and longing is fulfilled and made compete in Jesus. This includes our individual desires and longings.

So Matthew opens with a long genealogy which locates Jesus in line of decent from Abraham. The message here is that Jesus emerges out of and is the completion of an historical relationship between God and the Jewish people.

The Birth of Jesus

Matthew begins with ‘the birth of Jesus took place like this’ ….

1. Mary discovers she is pregnant while engaged but not yet married to Joseph. Unlike today sex before marriage is not an explanation for her pregnancy.
2. Joseph is shocked and in two minds about what to do. The Law allows him to take her to court and have the engagement annulled. Or he can deal with the matter quietly and send her back to her family without a fuss.
3. While trying to figure out what to do he has a dream in which God tells him to marry Mary because her pregnancy results from an action of God’s holy spirit. Joseph is also told to name the child Joshua – savior of the people.
4. In the dream Joseph is told that the birth of Jesus is the fulfillment of the promise made through the prophet Isaiah – a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and his name will be called Emmanuel – God is with us.
5. Joseph listens to his dream, marries Mary and does not consummate the marriage until after Jesus is born.

The doctrine of the Virgin Birth

In liberal theological circles its fashionable to describe the doctrine of the Virgin Birth as a myth.  There is often confusion over meaning of term ‘myth’. Is the VB a version of a myth similar to others found in the classical religions of the Mediterranean?

No the VB is not a myth like the conception of Apollo or Hercules. The way Matthew tells the story there is a marked absence of the literary convention of the heroic tale. Its an ordinary story rich in biographical detail in which we see the protagonists as two perplexed, frightened, and ultimately courageous human beings. They struggle to understand what is happening to them and this struggle forces them to move beyond the conventional frame of their society into the uncharted territory of an encounter with the divine. The most important detail in this story is that Joseph heeded the call of the luminous moment (Interpreter Bible). Although Matthew does not mention it the same theme is picked up by Luke, who implies that Mary could have said no! The message of Gabriel to Mary is that of an invitation that requires a willing response on both her’s and Joseph’s parts.

Does myth of the VB mean a story that fills the gap left by an incomplete scientific understanding of human procreative biology? If Matthew had had a biological understanding of the possibilities and limitations of human procreation would he have told the story like this?

If we think Matthew is offering us a pre-modern explanation of how Jesus was conceived then we miss his point completely. Matthew presumably knew enough about sexual procreation to know that what he was writing seemed highly improbable if understood as a biological explanation. Have you seen those paintings of the Annunciation that depict a ray emanating from the Holy Spirit depicted as a dove or from the mouth of Gabriel and entering into the ear of the BVM. Is this a kind of Star Trek beam me up Scotty kind of sexual penetration with laser ray? Hardly! I noted earlier and said I would return to the point that Matthew is writing after the fact. Matthew is not depicting a supernatural biological event. He is constructing a narrative that accounts for what he and his listeners already experienced as being true. This truth is that in the birth of Jesus God has come into the world and everything has changed as a result.

Does our scientific understanding of human biology now mean that we use the word myth to view the VB as a kind of fairy story which is no-longer credible to the modern mind?

The Narrative of the VB, which occurs in both Matthew and Luke comes to be understood in the early Church period in a variety of ways. This variety of interpretations later recognized as heresies increasingly gave concern resulting in the need for an Ecumenical Council to thrash the truth out once and for all. The result was the Nicene Creed in which the Church states that Jesus who is the pre-existent second person of the Trinity was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit – came down from heaven – and became incarnate from the Virgin Mary – and was made human. Like Matthew the Nicene doctrine emerges after the fact so to speak as an affirmation of the essential experience of the Early Church.

Again this is not an explanation of a process its a statement of a belief. A belief that has arisen to account for a lived experience that in Jesus the God of Israel has created a completely new relationship with humanity. This relationship is a new covenant in which the human and the divine while remaining distinct are equal participants in a relationship – a relationship which mirrors the equality yet separation of the relationships between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit the ‘persons’ whose relationship makes up the Trinity. By the time of the Council of Nicaea the Church has the gospel of John where Jesus makes the point over and over again that if the Father and he are one so then the Father and we are one through him.

In Jesus our human nature and God’s divine nature meet in relationship yet remain distinct. Nicaea repudiated all heretical explanations, which tried to say either God is masquerading under the guise of being human in a semi divine Jesus (allusions to Classical thinking) or Jesus is a really great and good man – a Buddha-like figure through whom God speaks. The VB is the formula that explains nothing. Instead it protects the mystery of God’s reaching-out to his creation and pulling us into a relationship of equality hither-to unknown and unthinkable. This is a truth we can’t explain but a truth we nevertheless experience the fruits of in our lives as Christians.

Today we live in a world dominated by the scientific paradigm. Science seeks only to explain what it can see. If it can’t see it, it can’t explain it, and so is silent on the matter. As the technologies of observation increase scientific explanations change and advance. For three hundred years the proponents of theology as a competing explanatory paradigm have fought with science and lost every battle. Today fundamentalist Christianity challenges the theory of evolution as if they are competing explanatory systems for the origin of the universe. Science and theology differ. There is no competition between scientific theory and theological belief. Theory and belief operate completely differently. Theory seeks to make the unknown known about. Belief seeks to protect the mystery of what we experience yet can’t know about from being reduced to mere explanation.

As Episcopalians our Church accepts only the teaching of the first five centuries of the Christian Church – which is up to the end of the last great Ecumenical Council. Therefore, unlike liberal Protestants we cannot jettison the VB or any other teaching of the Tradition when it seems to conflict with scientific explanation. The tripartite balance between Scripture, Tradition and Reason which Anglican Tradition upholds constantly propels us into an engagement between our own experience and the teaching of the Tradition through which the Church has come to understand Scripture. This bears a richer fruit than simply editing the Tradition to fit the arrogance of modern minds. We avoid easy explanation as the basis for faith and experience faith as a journey involving a struggle with mystery. I use the word mystery here to describe what we cannot ever know or control and yet dimly perceive and experience. For us the VB is not about biology at all its about the mystery of God’s action in the salvation of the world. It articulates God’s first invitation of the New Covenant. Like all invitations it awaits appropriate response. In this way humanity is invited into a new covenant to with God co-create the Kingdom together.

As Episcopalians sacramental worship lies at the heart of our practice. In this context I conclude with the final stanza from a great 20th century mystics response to the invitation to Rejoice.

Fifteen years old –

The flowers printed on her dress

Cease moving in the middle of her prayer

When God, Who sends the messenger,

Meets His messenger in her Heart.

Her answer, between breath and breath,

Wrings from her innocence our Sacrament!

In her {white} body God becomes our Bread.

Annunciation by Thomas Merton

Last week I had the experience of accompanying my grand daughter Claire to her Montessori School Halloween costume procession. I was struck and not for the first time by the way these preschool children have been taught to conduct themselves. The children approach one another with a directness of gaze and openness of expression that communicates interested curiosity. They have a way of approaching one another, signaling interest and then waiting for the approached child to respond. As I observe them behaving in this way sooner or later a child approaches me, looks me straight in the face and asks “who are you- are you Claire’s Dad”? “No”, I reply. “I am her granddad”. The child then tells me “You talk funny”. Of course what they are referring to is my New Zealand take on what in Britain is referred to as BBC received pronunciation of the Queen’s English. My heart opens under the direct gaze of such curiosity which is devoid of judgement and filled with innocent observation.

Montessori education strikes the modern world as somewhat odd in its description of the educative process as work and its belief in the child controlling the pace of their own learning. I approve of this and have always been impressed by the way Claire has been taught to communicate with the world around her. Long before she could talk she was taught the phrase “I need help”. Armed with this simple phrase she was able to elicit appropriate responses from those around her which avoided the build up of frustrated rage so often seen in little children battling to make their desires known. Like her class mates, she too approaches the world with open-faced innocent curiosity which facilitates observation rather than snap judgement. Observing two children arguing one child simply offers the other the observation, “those are not very nice words”! How different our world might be if we adults could emulate this practice of offering one another observations on behavior. If we could simply report to one another the impact for us of an other’s words or actions we might avoid the escalation of anger and hurt that results from our usual practice of delivering judgements upon one another in accusatory tone and form.

I am left wondering how many of my life’s hard lessons I could have been avoided had I enjoyed  the kind of formational start in life that it gladdens my heart to see 5 year-old Claire enjoying?