Bear Fruits Worthy of Repentance

Bear fruits worthy of repentance. (Luke 3:8)

Winter strips everything back and we are left to focus on what really matters. The hedgerows are devoid of leaves and only the red berries remain to signify the life multiplying truth of this plant's existence. Such an extravagant botanical investment in the future is also a present and welcome gift of food to many of the species of birds for whom the hedgerow is a vital part of their habitat. They in turn spread the seed far and wide beyond the parent plant. Such ecological mutuality and interdependence is a fundamental given of this landscape.

Mutuality and interdependence are integral to our wellbeing too. They signify an outlook which goes beyond self to others and which acknowledges the fundamental interrelatedness of life as a given of a healthy society. The fruits of such a worldview are obvious in terms of the bright red berries of welfare, social security, healthcare, justice and social capital which brighten up the wintry landscape in these austere and recessionary times.

The absence of berries in the hedgerow would indicate a catastrophic failure to provide for future generations and a breakdown in the local ecology which would put its very survival in jeopardy. Something would have gone terribly wrong.

And in the view of John the Baptist something had gone terribly wrong in contemporary society. The natural ecology of God's Kingdom of Love was in dire jeopardy. The fruits of mutuality and interdependence were remarkable by their scarcity. Looking around him John was struck by the comparative lack of the bright red berries of compassion, righteousness and service which signify a healthy faith. He confronted those who came to him with the simple facts of conversion, discipleship and Kingdom living. Their lives should bear clear witness to their belief. Their longing for a fresh start with God should entail a fresh start in how they live their lives towards others. They should bear fruits worthy of repentance.

The bright red berries which John looks for are very practical and down to earth and one can easily imagine that they are tailored to the individuals and groups who come to him asking what they should do: “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.”Even tax collectors came to be baptized. “Teacher,” they asked, “what should we do?” “Don’t collect any more than you are required to,” he told them. Then some soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?” He replied, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay.” (Luke 3:11-14) John emphasises the social, collective and communal dimensions of authentic faith in God. In this is he being absolutely true to the faith he has inherited and in which he stands. Without these expressions of mutuality and interdependence one can rightly conclude from the Hebrew Bible that as long as the heart remains unmoved, lip service is being paid to faith, for to take God into the heart of our being is to take the heart of the other there too.

Because the human ecology of grace is such a fundamental given of John's faith landscape, in his wintry words he strips everything back and focusses on what really matters; and not just to us, but to God. To be told unequivocally to bear fruits worthy of repentance is as much of a shock to our sensibilities today as it was when the phrase was first uttered by John the Baptist. For it suggest that the opposite holds true, and draws our attention to all that remains unworthy.

Our wintry world desperately needs to see evidence of bright, berry red lives. And John still prepares the way for us to take that truth to heart in Jesus and make it our own.

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This post comes from the ever wonderful Visual Theology blog, by Dave Perry. The original post can be read here

Hope

Thanks to Occupy Advent for this gem - you can also look at their blog here...

Advent: How Deep is You Love (God)?

How bleak, how awful were things for her in recent days. How desperate that she felt that the only way out of a situation was to take her own life. She decided that taking her own life was the permanent solution to the short term problem she found herself in. How utterly utterly awful.

How awful that she was not able to live with the consequences of her actions. How awful that she was not able to see herself as how people described her in death, as an excellent. How awful that she could see no other way through. And her family are utterly utterly broken, devastated at their loss.

I am speaking of Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse who made the headlines this week but I could also be speaking the words and sentiment of Israel, to whom God spoke through the prophet Baruch.

Like last week’s first reading from the prophet Jeremiah, through Baruch, God is speaking to His people in exile after the Assyrian attack of Jerusalem. Many are now slaves in Babylon or dispersed to other parts of the Mediterranean. Earlier on in the book, God chastises Israel for their lack of faithfulness to Him, and the exile is God’s judgment for their waywardness.  She, God’s people Israel, is bereft of her home, in a wilderness of hopelessness, bleak, broken, grieving, unable to see a way through. Yet, says God through Baruch, that is about to dramatically change, and change because God alone wills it.

Israel is pictured in mourning after a bereavement - wearing sack cloth and ashes. Into that bleakness and barren hopelessness, God offers hope. He reminds them that they are His much loved people. The language is tender, like a newly married husband to his much loved wife. God will restore his people in hope like undressing from funeral attire and redressing into the beautiful clothes of a princess and the dignity He gives to Israel is His to give - there is a call to share in again the divine life and purposes of God.

And lets face it - everyone loves this sort of rags to riches story. It feeds right into our own inbuilt longing for justice and into our celebrity obsessed, lottery roll-over mentality. God is the handsome Prince Charming to Israel’s Cinderella.

With that image in my mind, Baruch then goes on to portray God as reaching down to the cowered Israel in all her finery. Unsure that she deserves all this lavishness. He helps her stand, and leads her to the dancefloor in the sight of many wealthy guests. This is full to overflowing with the romance of a Jane Austen novel.

God will restore Israel and give her a new dignity, but will also restore her children to her from the places that they have been dispersed. Again the imagery is deeply intimate. This is the tear-streaked face reunion that we all long for for Kate and Jerry McCann with their daughter Madeleine.

But this isn’t simply an undoing of all that has gone before. This isn’t a raising to life of a tragically dead husband returning to his grieving widow; nor is this the reunion of missing children to a distraught and worried mother. This is God doing something new in His love for His people. The love that God has for His people is so intense that the landscape is physically altered so they can return to Him in safety.

It’s like the love that flows and shapes the landscape of God’s heart is so intense, like the Colarado river carving the Grand Canyon, that it flow from His heart in a way that shapes and reshapes the world in the same way it did when all things were created. Even the stuff of that natural world will be used by God, the trees will bow low to shade His people from the scorching heat of the sun, to ease their journey home. God is not just in the business of renewing a relationship. He is doing something completely new, with such intensity of love, that it captivates the heart and reshapes the physical world as we are called home.

It is into the wilderness of our lives that God speaks and continues to speak and into which John comes. But through John, God comes to a very specific time, to a very specific place, to very specific people, but his message comes again and again - resonating down the years of history.

That message that we hear echoing through this Holy season. It is Baruch’s message but for all people. Many of us are enslaved and far from God’s intimate and intense love.  We self obsessed, unwilling to look for Him or now too blind to see Him - are focussed on our rights not our responsibilities to others; on what I can gain not what I can give; on the language of ‘me’ not ‘you’ or ‘us.’ Many of us are literally and metaphorically in a wilderness of hopelessness, bleak, broken, grieving, unable to see a way through.

It is normal and commonplace these days to deny this loving God and to shake our fists at the sky... If these’s a loving God how can He allow such and such. He cannot be.  And yet we all too easily forget that we are far from loving too -  to ourselves and others and especially to those whom we say we love the most.

Advent calls to our heart and in these days of bleakness and hopelessness, and God woos us like a lover. He sings songs of love and hope to all things created, in the climax of which He reaches down to even to us, having dressed our brokenness and failing with lavish love and outlandish hope, and in His coming among us, calls us to dance with Him in His Divine life and purposes.

Cinderella’s story only really begins when she recognises what she has been, and with the guidance and gift of her Fairy Godmother and the determined love of Prince Charming, she then accepts what she is - beautiful and worth loving whether dressed in a ball gown or not.

The same rags to riches story is God’s call to us - it begins, when we recognise what we have been - broken, failing, hopeless - and then filled with the intense love of God, we begin to accept what we are - beautiful and worth loving no matter what we have done, no matter who we are.  This is the repentance that John calls us to still - God doing a new thing - that this Advent God comes to us with a love for us so intense that it leaves the glories and grandeur of heaven and reshapes the intimate landscape of our hearts, and He asks us, even us to dance with Him in Divine life and love.

And I now have this song in my head...

How to Celebrate Advent and Lower Anxiety

What follows come from the Lutheran Confessions blog. I thought it an inspiring and engaging post and it has helped me over recent days. You can read the original post here.

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Some things just work in the doing of them. For example: take a really deep and full breath right now. Now take another one. Can you feel your body melt slightly, your heart slow, your head ooze out tensions into your neck? There is a reason practitioners of meditation, prayer, and exercise focus on breathing--it matters.

Keeping Time matters: This week is the beginning of the year, according to Christian tradition. We keep time according to a slightly different pattern from the lunar calendar. The year begins with anticipation of Christ's coming, and Christ's birth. We begin a new year recognizing God is the Lord of our years, and our weeks, and our days, and our hours. We begin the year relaxing into a sense of God's watchful care over all of our moments, keeping time with us.

Living life on God's clock brings real peace. It is relaxing to melt into the solidity of the Christian calendar, the life of weekly worship, the offices of daily prayer.

Prayer is healthy for those who practice it.

Ritual matters: In church last Sunday we had distributed a simple Advent calendar, and our goal as a family is to do the activity for each day. So last night our family blessed each room in our house, per calendar instructions.

We tried to invent a ritual that would make sense to the kids. So we lit a candle and carried it around to each room in the house (having dimmed the house lights in advance). One person said a prayer over each room, prayers to bless sleep, help stay clean, lots of thanksgiving for food and toys. By the third room, even our 22 month old had the liturgy figured out, and so whispered quietly, "God---thank you."

By the end, there was this sense of unity in our family, prayer calling us together in a common purpose. In each room, we made the sign of the cross. We did the cross together. And our oldest had invented a portion of the ritual I will never forget. In an operatic manner, he sang "Aaaaaaaaameeeeeeeen" the way families sing the Amen at the conclusion of the Doxology.

It was somber and hilarious in equal measure.

Keeping time as keeping calm: In a sense, keeping time and keeping rituals are keeping calm and lowering anxiety. The benefit is in the doing of them. Often when we are sad, anxious, depressed, we tend to avoid these habits. We stop exercising. We fail to call friends to talk on the phone. The way out of the hole, the healing that is available, is to step into the routines, and let the givenness of the ritual and prayers lead us to a new place.

This week we are mindful of Zechariah. In fact our mid-week worship will include meditation on his story at the beginning of Luke.

Once when he was serving as priest before God and his section was on duty, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to enter the sanctuary of the Lord and offer incense. Now at the time of the incense offering, the whole assembly of the people was praying outside (Luke 1:8-10).

With Zechariah, or at least with the whole assembly of the people praying outside, we give ourselves over to these practices, entrusted to us by God and the communities out of which we are risen, and we trust that in them, God will give us rest.

Do not be anxious. Light some candles. Do not fear. Breath. Find some others to breathe with. Celebrate Advent.

wrapping paper (tree)

wrapping paper (tree), a photo by ben bell on Flickr.

This just made me think... Thanks Ben Bell for a fantastic photo.

God's greatest gift just shoved under the tree?

God's greatest gift willing to to be amongst the other gifts in life?

Looks like all the others...

Incarnation

Masterchef

As I write this I am watching Masterchef and I am beginning to feel hungry - I know that's a bit Pavlov's dog (I see food therefore I feel hungry) - but there it is!

Advent is the expectant waiting, the hopeful anticipation and cheerful preparation for the coming of Christ at Christmas - His breaking into our world and into our lives every day. Advent is not to be confused with Lent even though both seassons are coloured purple.  Advent is about hope and not repentance, the hope of God coming amongst us.
In the story of God's involvement with people as told in the Bible, again and again God speaks of things many of us hunger for - justice for poor, liberty for the metaphorically and literally captive, food for the hungry and so on.

The question is, as we wait, what are we hungry for? Are we willing to be fed from God's menu of justice, mercy and peace? And are we prepared to be a part of satisfying the appetite of of our neighbourhoods and our communities serving up God's love in practical and demonstratable ways?

O Come O Come Emmanuel - Sufjan Stevens