Today has been bitty - lots of odds and ends to do, but nothing very concrete.  Now it's late afternoon, time is not on my side and I feel I ought to say something...

Isn't this the trap we all fall into now and then, the 'need to say something' or to 'do something', that our self-imposed expectations control us, rather than us them.  Somehow creating Christmas swamps what Christmas creates...   Into this self-imposed overload, God says simply this: "cease!"

Busy, busy believers, trying to create Christmas: cease!

Overstretched, overwhelmed carers: cease!

Overexcited, overindulged receivers: cease!

Be still

I AM

God

Cease

You Are

Mine

I

for

You

I

in

You

I

with

You

~

Emmanuel: God with Us

Amen.

OK so today I did some protoypes for craft activities for church...

Two jam-jar lanterns:

Two tree decorations/sun catchers (plastic things that came with the glass paint)

It does seem a little odd not to be leading worship today.. I usually try to get a free weekend just before Advent so that I am fresh and ready for the hurly-burly run up to Christmas.  This year it just didn't work out that way - I had the Sunday off but was needing to take at least one a month  to get my quota in!!

Advent 2 carries with it the themes of The Prophets and, in some older schemes, Bible Sunday.  A lot of people who read this stuff will remember that for me it is also "Calling Sunday"... for it was on the second Sunday of Advent 1997 that I heard very clearly God's call, in the night, to ordained ministry and had the weirdest most disturbed Christmas ever as I wrestled with what to do about it.  Golly, that's a long time ago now, yet it is still important, the sign-post to which I return when the going gets tough, my clay feet crumble to dust, and my spirituality is as parched as Sahara sand.  Fifteen years (plus a few days) since that 'epiphany' (in its proper sense not its contemporary one); fifteen years of working out what it all means day by day, day-to-day.

I suppose the prophets of ancient times would have understood some of this - the sense of "here I am, I can do no other." The sense of "who? me!"  The reality of "me? oh dear..."

I could not have begun to imagine, fifteen years ago, where the path would lead.  Could not have coped if I had known, I'm sure.  Prophets aren't sooth-sayers, aren't necessarily mystics who see visions, aren't always those who denounce the status quo... they are people who are alert to the hints and glimspes of what God is saying in and through the ordinary stuff of life.

To be clear, I am not styling myself as a prophet or even as having prophetic gifts (and certianly neither as understood in some more conservative Christian circles) but it must have some significance that the liturgical anniversary of my call to ordained ministry, and indeed my ordination some six years later, fell on the second weekend of Advent.

God of Jeremiah, Micah, Amos, John

(and men both minor and major)

God of Deborah, Miriam, Huldah, Anna

(and the daughters of Philip)

God of wise ones, strange ones

God of scary ones, gentle ones

God of those who gave themselves

To watching and waiting

To seeing and hearing

To weeping and raging

To enacting and expounding

God of those who live for you

Because they could do no other

Show me - show us -

How to see and hear

To listen and discover

Your words, your signs, your decrees

Spoken through each other

This day

Amen

For this weekend, PAYG focus on The Immaculate Conception - as tomorrow is evidently the feast thereof.  I don't think I had ever before grasped the proximity of this date to Christmas, and the potential for a very literal view leading to a 17 day pregnancy!  It is too easy to 'diss' aspects of Roman Catholic theology and ritual, whilst supplanting it with our own Protestant equivalents (such as the baby who does not wail when woken by noisy cattle written in to the narrative centuries later).  For centuries far too much time, ink and angst has been expended on trying to prove/disprove the literal asexual origin of Jesus... theories about Roman soldiers, debates on translations of Hebrew to Greek, and even contemporary scientific stuff that recognises the (vanishingly small possibility but theoretically feasible) angle of human parthenogenesis and, subject to the appropriate conditions such an offspring being in appearance male (as I say near impossible but theoretically could happen). 

All of these seem to be adventures in missing the point.  In other world religions divnities appear fully adult ex-nihilo; and presumably God could have done the same.  In other world religions divinities have blue skin or multiple limbs or are animal rather than human; presumably God could have done the same.

The immaculate conception is, I suggest, less about the 'how' of what God did, but the 'what' and 'why' of what God did.  How about this off the top of my head hypothesis:

Immaculate conception = the birthing of the perfect concept (idea, word)

God's brainwave was to slip into the experience of creation as a creature, a human embryo, and to share totally in all that meant.  And as a result of that participation in creation, creation would once more participate in the divine, in God.  No blue, ten limbed, superhero, just a wailing baby boy tugging at the breast of a peasant mother in a forgotten outpost of the Roman Empire.

Conception as becoming, active, risky, hopeful, vulnerable

Immaculate as perfect, unsullied, ambition-free, open, sacrificial

Immaculate Conception - the perfect realisation of God's good intent for all creation

Trouble is, God, we are dependent on concepts to make sense of the world

We need words and theories and laws and narratives and metaphors...

We need categories and systems and boxes and boundaries

Trouble is, God, we confuse immaculate with squeaky clean, perfect whiteness

We want to impose our ideas of good and evil, greed and generosity

We want to be the good guys and to identify as bad those we name as 'them'

Trouble is, God, we fall prey to the temptation to demystify, demythologize, rationalise

Sanitise, glitter-ise, commercialise, and over complicate that which is

Too simple

Too profound

Too incredible

Too wonderful

Too true...

Trouble is, God, your prefect idea is beyond our dumb arrogance to conceive

And the irony of all our cleverness

All our fundamental-liberal-Protestant-Catholic missing the point

Is this

You wait to be born in each and every one of us

Born in me

Born in them

Becoming, transforming more and more into your likeness...

Trouble is, God, depsite everything, it's true!

Prepare my life-scarred, world-weary self to receive you afresh

Come Lord Jesus

Amen.

Already the first week of Advent draws to its close. 

Children (of all ages) have opened a quarter of the 'windows' on their Advent calendars.

More and more windows twinkle with light as trees are put up in homes across the land.

Works Dos are in full swing, with the annual warnings about inappropriate behaviour and the dangers of too much wine...

Quarter of the way there, and yet, to me anyway, it seems as remote as ever: I lack any sense that Christmas is about to happen.

Yesterday our lunch time reflection, centring on Elizabeth & Zechariah reminded us that Israel had been waiting against a background of perceived divine silence lasting around four centuries.  The promises seemed as remote as ever.  As I pondered this, I was reminded of this lovely Advent hymn:

Earth was waiting, spent and restless,
with a mingled hope and fear;
and the faithful few were sighing,
'surely Lord the day is near;
the desire of all the nations,
it is time He should appear.'

Still the gods were in their temples,
but the ancient faith had fled;
and the priests stood by their altars
only for a piece of bread;
and the oracles were silent,
and the prophets all were dead.

In the sacred courts of Zion,
where the Lord had his abode,
there the money-changers trafficked,
and the sheep and oxen trod;
and the world, because of wisdom,
knew not either Lord or God.

Then the Spirit of the Highest
on a virgin meek came down,
and He burdened her with blessing,
and He pained her with renown;
For she bare the Lord's anointed,
for His cross and for His crown.

Earth for Him had groaned and travailed
since the ages first began;
for in Him was hid the secret
that through all the ages ran-
Son of Mary, Son of David,
Son of God, and Son of Man.

Walter C Smith (1824-1908)

Our reflection leader yesterday shared really interesting information about the Jewish priesthood at the time of Zechariah - how there were around 20,000 priests, divided into groups, each serving in the Temple for a week a year, along with extra duties at festivals.  The drawing by lot of the priest whose turn it would be to offer the incense became far more significant in that context.  There must have been hundreds of priests patiently doing the day to day work, and feeling it would never be their turn to offer the incense.  The "spent and restless" feeling may well have been as real for them as it can be for us today... exhausted by the daily round, restless for arrival of Christmas.

Boundless God, it is not just earth that is waiting, spent and restless

It is us, the people who try to follow Jesus and spend ourselves in what we hope is his service

We fill our time with preparations and yet there is so often a void within - we are indeed spent

We try to pause, to reflect, to centre ourselves as activity lures us on - we are in fact restless

But You rested

If only once in all eternity

If only to make a model for us to emulate

Still my restless body

My busy mind

My overfull heart

Take away anxiety and activity

Just for a moment

And let me pause

To savour the promise

Of Emmanuel, God with us...

Amen.