LUKE 2:15-21

Laterally Luke…Naming & Circumcision of Jesus…New Posting for 2017

(for The Epiphany see MT2:1-12 @ matthewinthemargins.blogspot.com)

The opening sentences of Ch.2 leave unresolved questions concerning the census, as does the report of the birth of Jesus. The caravanserai is overcrowded & has no proper space for Mary & Joseph, let alone the new child. So Jesus is born out in life’s margins, out with travellers’ animals; bound in cloths, & placed in a manger. Angels (of some form) visit shepherds out doing what shepherds do. These are people as low on the rungs of life as you could get in that society. Jesus begins life as He goes on to continue, among outcasts! All of this is territory beloved of Christmas pageants & cribs; most usually far removed from reality. 

A good starting point for today might be: ‘Who are the ‘everyone’ the shepherds tell about their experiences? The context leaves open the possibility they tell those out & about round the inn. Start with those nearest you. Then they return home & tell others further afield. Other shepherds in all likelihood. Respectable people didn’t mix with shepherds! Though God’s not above doing so!  Who do we tell,  close at hand, or further afield - about our experiences of God? Ours don’t need to be as unique or way-out as those of the shepherds. As long as they’re real!

Themes worth picking up on & developing are: a) people being astonished by what the shepherds tell them; b) Mary taking all this in & pondering it deeply; c) shepherds going back to their flocks glorifying & praising God for what they’ve been privileged to share. There’s a sermon in each of these, & we may be able to reflect at least something of this in our approach to Christ’s Naming & Circumcision. 

Such as: How long is it since anything concerning God or Christ astonished us? Really astonished us? Or, when did we last astonish anyone by the way we’ve presented Christ to them? Does the Church astonish people these days (other than for the wrong reasons)?! Do we often enough ponder deeply the things of God? As Orthodox Christians & others gaze deeply into icons & beyond them to the truth they seek to reveal, perhaps it’s time for us to gaze deeply into the things of God rather than just reading about them, or talking about them? They’re not surface stuff! Do we go about our daily work, whatever it is, if we’re fortunate enough to have any, glorifying & praising God? Or is that best left to religious enthusiasts & cranks? Maybe there’s a way of glorifying & praising that’s more seriously religious & enthusiastic, & less cranky? A contrast to today’s self-glorification & praising! 

Everything in this whole passage is in accordance with God’s eternal promises to His people via the Scriptures. Sometimes, too, God will make or fulfil promises outside the accepted ways we interpret them. The Christ child isn’t just suddenly ‘dropped on us’; His coming has been part of God’s plan for us from the beginning (as John the Evangelist tells us in his great Prologue). As an integral part of this plan, Our Lord’s Circumcision & Naming take place in accordance with the dream Joseph has [MT1:21]. His Circumcision implants Jesus firmly within God’s Covenant, & His Naming plants Him firmly within Joseph’s family line & its connection with messiahship. 

These solemnities mark & celebrate that in accordance with God’s will Jesus has come among us as our Saviour. One who saves us from our sins by restoring us to that state of grace which has always been God’s will for us. We may be slow learners, but being astonished by all this, ponder-ing it all deeply, & glorifying & praising God as a natural part of life will surely help us catch up! 

WELCOME TO 'LATERALLY LUKE' 

  TO THE PREACHER:

If you’ve visited either 'matthewinthemargins' or 'marginallymark', you may have read this Introduction already. I use it again here for those who haven't visited either site & wonder about its aim. 

Gathered in 'church', most congregations look surprisingly like pages of Scripture. All set in lines, row upon row. Here a stop. there a comma, an exclamation! a question or two?? But a congregation's life is lived mainly outside these rows of pews & aisles. As Scripture itself arises more from that outside life than from what goes on inside synagogue or church. It's heart stuff, Spirit stuff, before it's head stuff, in-house stuff!

LLK is an attempt to help preacher, congregation, & the text of LK as read week by week, to better ‘connect’ during 'Year C' of the Revised Common Lectionary. It aims to encourage us to find new 'entry points', to break out from blind spots & strait-jackets we’ve fallen into in our preaching. Maybe to give us an idea to start with, when we could not, for the life of us, see how to 'break into' the passage, break it open.

Good preaching operates out there in the margins of life where scripture still happens. Rabbi Lionel Blue once described Jewish Midrash imaginatively as 'scribbling & doodling in the margins'. Preaching needs to scribble & doodle too, enlivening the relationship between text & readers. In his 'Day Trips To Eternity' [DLT, '87] & other writings, Rabbi Blue gives some stimulating & insightful examples of such goings on. On another wavelength, but in kitchen imagery this time, Beth Yahp [Weekend Australian 30.8.97, p.12] writes: ‘I am always looking inside & under pots, pans, cupboards, anecdotes, stories; listening for what lies beneath their skins. I am always hungry.’

LLK encourages us to look hungrily inside & under the skin of the Gospel as we engage with it in the Eucharist. So we can move in & out of the text creatively & relate to it out there in our laterals, in life’s margins. Out from presuppositions that bind us, & on to new, more imaginative trains of thought; to 'fly a kite' with, develop, or even ‘cook’ with for the hungry! So we & LK &, best of all, YHWH God can come alive to each other.

LLK assumes the serious preacher will do the hard-yards of theological homework. Dare I suggest we oughtn't know what our sermon thrust will be till we've done a lot of poking around in the margins of text & life. Scripture is intuitive before it's logical. Matthew Fox says somewhere, 'faith is the creative use of the imagination', so, go for it. And, as we all ‘go for it’ let’s all pray God's Spirit will stimulate & foster all our faith imaginings to create a newly unfolding chapter of the Old, Old Story.

P.S. I tend to work from The Complete Gospels [ed. Robert J.Miller, Polebridge, '94] compared with NRSV, NJB, & other versions & commentaries to hand. But in the end, we all have to become our own version & our own commentary!

Brian McGowan,  ‘Retired’ Anglican Priest, Falcon, Western Australia  Revised 2018 

Email: tirnanog1@iinet.net.au)

LUKE 3:1-6

Laterally Luke…Advent 2…Revised 2016 

We may choose to omit vv.1-2a, but they ground John (& therefore Jesus) in history. It’s important for us all to ground our stories firmly in history. That’s part of living in the real world. Who are or have been key players, ground-markers, reference points in our own journeying? Those LK names aren’t a pretty lot! Most, if not all, suspect in one way or another! Would any of them have bothered to go out to John to hear him underline Isaiah’s words from long before to ‘straighten their lives out ready for Messiah’? It’s not hard to imagine some of them, though, sending spies out there to see what John’s up to!

Who of us doesn’t need to be constantly discerning whether our lives are turned in God’s direction? Experience tells me keeping myself turned towards God is part of that ‘whole armour of God’ [EPH 6:11] I need to wear on my life-journey.

John is born into a priestly family, part of the religious establishment. But he rebels against ‘the system’. Any way we look at it, out in that wilderness he’s setting up in opposition to, offering an alternative to the religious powers-that-be in the ‘big smoke’. John is on about reformation from the ground up, as Jesus Himself is too, of course. From of old the Prophets have consistently pointed us towards reformation. Long before the Reformation that features so largely in Church history & still influences churches today.

In building as he does on Isaiah, John demonstrates (as Jesus will, later, too) how we need to move on from facts of history to what we do with history. How we live out our own little chapter of it. John, & the One He points to, Jesus Himself, stress by demonstrating the importance of having a living faith in the God of history. The One whose paths we still constantly need to make straight. Which paths I’m treading need to be made straight? Which of my ‘valleys’ needs filling in? Which of my mountains & hills need to be brought low? Is there anything at all about me that’s crooked & needs to be straightened out? What ‘rough’ aspects of my being still need to be smoothed? We’re not talking about someone else here. We’re talking about me, & you! The question is, ‘Who is to do this straightening, etc., of anything blocking God’s way?’

How concerned are we that ‘all shall see the salvation of God’? Given God’s pattern of ‘thinking laterally’ & working in unusual ways, often outside bounds we set, how can we reach out with this message to the ‘all’ who aren’t part of our church circles? Who don’t ‘come’, & don’t see why they should. Often people see what we’re on about excluding the likes of them. Genuine Wilderness experiences, though, can help us erase many of the lines we draw between us & others. Pray for courage to venture out there more often, & be more open to being changed by God & for God. 

LUKE 21: 25-38

Laterally Luke…Advent 1…Revised 2016

Rather than getting bogged down in apocalyptic & its interpretations, the import of this passage as LK reports it is living in the present! When things aren’t going too well, it’s often tempting to look into the future for a saviour rather than trying to live out what’s already been revealed to us by the very much feet-on-the-ground Son of Humanity & Saviour who’s already come. Why not heed what He teaches us about living in ‘Now’ time, which is always ours & at the same time, God’s.

At the moment the world looks more threatening - for many people in many lands - than it’s looked for a long time. That doesn’t mean ‘the end’ is coming, though it does raise the question of whether  any ‘end’ will be of our own making; climate change, all-out warfare, or otherwise. Neither the Scriptures nor Faith guarantee God will rescue us from trials & tribulations, personal or on any wider scale. They do, though, assure us of God’s presence with us throughout whatever we’re going through. More, anything that happens to us needs to be seen in the context of what we do about what happens! To be constantly looking for the Son of Humanity coming on the clouds may simply be escapism. Pray, always, ‘Save us from the time of trial, and Deliver us from evil’, and expect saving & deliverance, even if it comes in surprising ways!

Jesus always reads ‘the signs of the times’. Signs in the creation all about us & in us. As He also reads the signs of the state of our humanity. As Celtic spirituality often reminds us, all things are at one in God’s eyes, and it helps if there’s a one-ness in the way we think about them, pray about them, & face them. In a frontispiece to his ‘God & the New Physics’ ¹ Paul Davies quotes Einstein as saying, “ Religion without science is blind. Science without religion is lame.” Those of us who preach do well to take that on board, & with it, the ‘signs’ such physicists read in these same skies Jesus reads too. It might be an interesting exercise to modify, for instance our Australian 4th form of Great Thanksgiving with, say, ‘Therefore with angels & archangels …with holy men & women of every age….with those skilled in medicines, chemists, biologists, physicists & cosmologists……we proclaim your great & glorious name….Or would that be just a silliness on my / your part? Perhaps it’s time we unlocked a lot of the compartments we shut others who differ from us up in. Already the forces let loose by such lock-ins are among the many & varied forces shaking our world apart.   

As Jesus takes respite (v.37) after a hard day’s work, most of us need to take more of His kind of respite than we usually do. Time in which to pray, not ‘my will to be done’, but for God’s will to be done on earth as in Heaven. That understanding can take a long time to reach, as many of can bear witness to. But the more time we take, hopefully & prayerfully we can get there. Which will make it that much easier for God to get there, reach us, too! 

¹  Reprinted by Penguin, ’90.