Un-costed Giving

Jesus said some pretty radical things in his day.

Could you imagine, having been invited to a swank soirée by a locally prominent citizen, telling the host what Jesus told the host of a party he was invited to? I reckon it would be a conversation-stopper and a sure-fire way of getting your name off the "A-List".

First of all Jesus draws attention to the way people were jostling their way to the positions of importance at the party. They were headed for possible humiliation according to Jesus - better to draw back and have the host invite you up to the place of honour.

The he says to the host that rather than inviting his friends and family and wealthy neighbours to a party, presumably with the understanding that they will reciprocate with an invitation of their own, he should invite all those who were outcasts, the ritually unclean and those who most certainly could not reciprocate the invitation.

Bruce Prewer, in his reflection on this story, coined the phrase "un-costed giving" as a way to describe what he thought Jesus was driving at. He reflected on the difficulty even we in the church have in living up to this calling, so pervasive is the cultural norm of quid pro quo in our society.

It made me think of some of the people mentioned by Philip Yancey in his book Soul Survivor, people he had met and interviewed in his journalistic career or whose lives, through the books they had written, had been an inspiration to him. He told the stories of people like Martin Luther King Jr, Dr Paul Brand who did some magical surgery for people with leprosy, Robert Coles, a social scientist who discovered that the children of the poorest of poor int he world had a lot to teach us in the west about life and the important things, and Mahatma Ghandi. All these people gave of their own lives unstintingly for the welfare of others, often ahead of their own welfare. Theirs are remarkable examples of un-costed giving.

On Monday evening last, the ABC showed a Talking Heads episode in which Fr Bob Maguire was interviwed. Father Bob has been involved in three different charities over the years that have sought to help out the homeless and mentally ill in and around Melbourne. He was awarded an Order of Australia in 1989 in recognition of his inability to put a cost limit on his giving - indeed his Bishop has had to step in and take over some aspects of his work be cause Father Bob is not good at the costings; and that is the way it should be.

Father Bob in Melbourne would rank alongside the late Father Brian Morrison in Perth and Father Ted Kennedy in Sydney as thorns in the flesh of the establishment of the church for two very significant reasons - firstly they never drew the line about who to help and how to help them; and secondly they had no fear of stepping outside the normal avenues to do what needed doing.

The Roman Catholic church makes a big thing of the processes they go through to formally declare someone to be a saint - and we will see the climax of that process soon in relation to the Blessed Mother Mary MacKillop - but these three guys are true saints who understood every word of Jesus advice about un-costed giving.

But it does move ...

Have you ever had one of those experiences where something you were very familiar with and thought you understood turned out to be something quite different – even the opposite of what you thought?

We sometimes call such events “Copernican Moments” because they are about turning our world view upside down.

You remember Copernicus, don’t you?

He was an amazingly well educated man from the 16th Century – a truly Renaissance Man who was learned in philosophy and the arts, law and theology, mathematics and the natural sciences.

He was fascinated by mathematics and his observations of the night sky, and by his observation of the movement of both stars and planets and the application of his understandings of geometry he came to the view that the sun was the centre of the universe, rather than the earth.

Ten years after his death in 1543, an Italian was born, Galileo Galilei, who, with the help of telescopes that had just been invented, went on to refine the theoretical work of Copernicus and sought to demonstrate without a doubt that the Earth revoled around the Sun as did the other planets.

He began advocating these deveoplments on Copernican ideas in about 1616 but by 1634, just 100 years after Pope Clement VII had supported the ideas of Copernicus, Pope Urban VIII denounced Galileo as a suspect heretic who was teaching things contrary to the bible and whom he would excommunicate if he did not recant or renounce his views.

There are times, aren’t there, when the church really resists new ideas with an extraordinary amount of effort.

I think that Jesus was a bit of a trouble-maker in his day, like Galileo, but with the passage of time, we sometimes seem to forget that.

Almost everything he did and everything he taught was intended to be a direct challenge to the religious, social and political conventions of his day – no wonder he got it in the neck; well the head and the hands and the feet and the side, I should say, when they crucified him.

But I suspect some of you at least are thinking, “Jesus doesn’t seem to be that radical!”

The story of the Good Samaritan might help us all understand something very important about what it means to be a follower in the way of Jesus.

He’s Not Tame, He’s Wild
Are you familiar with the CS Lewis stories about the imaginary world of Narnia. Most people are familiar with “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe” but there are six other adventures involving various of the key charaters from the first story.

Lewis did a wonderful thing in characterising the “Christ” figure in these stories as a lion. Aslan was the ultimate ruler of Narnia.

In one of the stories, the younger girl, Lucy, is talking to someone about Aslan. Lucy was describing Aslan in the most effusive and loving terms because she had met him, had trusted her life to him and loved him dearly.

Realising that Lucy was talking about a lion, she somewhat naturally asked “Is he a tame lion?” to which Lucy replied, “No, he’s not tame, he’s wild. But he is wonderful.”

There is an element of this kind of wildness in Jesus that I want to think about today.

Two Great Ideas in Israel
There were two great concepts that the religious system of Jesus’ day was built around – Covenant and Law – and the religious leaders of Jesus’ day had so tamed these concepts that they believed they knew exactly what to do to remain in God’s good books.

Covenant is essentially about being bound into relationship with another, and the Biblical narratives of covenant show God binding himself into relationship with his creationand with us his creatures.

But the Scribes took the idea of Covenant and tamed it into a mechanism by which you could get what you wanted out of God – someone once described it as a system of Requirements and Rewards by which if I did such and such, God would do such and such.

The ultimate example of this is “If I am a good person, God will let me go to heaven when I die.” But there are many more down to earth examples such as – “If I do all the things God wants me to do he will make me rich and bless all my family.” Or “If I pray hard enough, God will heal somebody I love.”

This creates a pretty tame approach to God, doesn’t it?

The Pharisees, on the other hand, took the idea of Law and turned it into something of a purity code. Purity is all about holiness for the Pharisees and it is important because they remembered a saying of Moses in Leviticus 19 that because God was holy, they should also be holy – and for them the pathway to holiness was purity.

Much in the Law was meant for the good of the community and to protect them but it was easily turned into a burden for most. The Pharisees, however, had set out to live their lives in such a way that they could say they they kept all these little laws (all 720 of them and the Midrashic interpretations of the) and so were a cut above the general hoipoloi. Jesus rightly described them as self-righteous.

So, in this context, Jesus tells a story.

The Good Samaritan
We have tamed this into a story about being a helpful neighbour – and that certainly is one layer of meaning in the story – but it is primarily a critique of the way of life that is ordered around purity.

Just look at the purity issues that are elemsnts of the story:

•The priest and Levite had purity obligations because of their role and status;
•Contact with the dead would defile that purity and the man is described as “half dead”; and
•The Samaritans were ritually impure because they repudiated the Temple monopoly on sacrifice and other rituals.

It is hard for us to imagine how outraged Jesus’ first listeners might have felt when he told this story. The only way to understand how Jesus is able to make the Samaritan the hero in this story is to realise that God values Compassion much more highly than purity.

A bit earlier in Luke’s Gospel he reports Jesus saying something very important. In the middle of a section of teaching by Jesus that is Luke’s equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount, just after he has exhorted his followers to love their enemies, and just before he wanrs of the perils of judgementalism he says something that is a restatement of that verse from Leviticus I mentioned earlier.

Instead of saying to his disciples that they needed to “Be holy because God was holy,” Jesus said “Be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate.”

If you look as a whole at the stories Jesus told and the things he did, you will find that again and again he is challenging the purity-based system with a compassionate grace-based system. He touched lepers, the hemorrhaging woman, and the mad man in the cemetery. He challenged the sacrificial system when he came into Jerusalem and chased out the money changers and their animals.

No wonder people got mad with him.

Jesus was wanting to say that our relationship with God is not one of requirements and rewards, nor is it contingent on us complying with all the requirements of the purity code the Pharisees had established over the years.

Because of his compassion towards us, God calls us all into an intimate and personal relationship with him that is founded fundamentally on grace and compassion.

This is why Jesus so often reached out to the poor and oppressed in society – these were the people whom society said were “cut off” from God’s mercy and Jesus said the opposite.

In the face of this, I feel really sad when I recognise how easily and how often the Church has fallen into the same pit as the Scribes and Pharisees.

I think that too often the church replaced physical purity with doctrinal purity and then had no qualms about executing thousands through an Inquisition or two, or excommunicating faithful people who had differing views.

And how often have you seen Christians following the idea that if they do certain things God will do certain other things – generally for their benefit?

A New Way
There is something very powerful in this call of Jesus to imitate God by being compassionate. Whereas purity divides and excludes, compassion unites and includes. For Jesus, compassion had a radical socio-political meaning. In his teaching and table-fellowship with all the wrong people, the purity system was subverted and replaced by a politics of compassion.

The Kingdom of Heaven is Like ...

When I begin the training for new CRE Teachers I usually lead a devotional thought on the Kingdom of Heaven based on the Kingdom parables we find in Matthew 13.

When we are involved in our own denominational and local church work our understanding of church very easily latches onto the idea of who belongs and who does not belong – as the most important thing. Church people, it seems to me, spend an inordinate amount of time determining who is IN and who is OUT. That is what the CREEDS are all about. That is what MEMBERSHIP is all about.

And it is very common for us to think of this as being all about THE KINGDOM OF GOD because surely, where we are, in our church, there is the Kingdom of God.

So, it comes as a bit of a surprise when we begin to rightly apprehend what these parables in Matthew 13 are all about. Let me recall them briefly to you.

The chapter begins with what we call “The Parable of the Sower” and this is the only one that does not begin with the phrase “The Kingdom of Heaven is like ...” But in the little interlude Matthew creates between telling us the parable and having Jesus explain the meaning of it, Jesus explains that he wants to speak to them in parables so that they might understand “the secrets of the kingdom of Heaven.” And in the explanation of the parable Jesus refers to the seed sown as words of the Kingdom.

So, in this parable, we see Jesus explaining that the words of the Kingdom will be broadcast freely for all, and, yes, the effect of them on people will be variable, but no-one is excluded from hearing it.

The next parable we call the parable of the “Weeds Among the Wheat”. The sower and the field create the image of the Kingdom here, and when weeds are seen to grow up among the wheat, in a sense contaminating the crop, the sower restrains his workers from the desire to decontaminate the crop by pulling the weeds up. The sower knows that purging the crop like this would actually undermine the viability of the wheat – it, too, would die.

The important idea in this parable is that the sorting of the good from the bad is something God would do at the end of time – the harvest – it was not something for us in the here and now.

Jesus then tells a number of very short parables – the Mustard Seed, the Yeast, the Treasure, the Pearl and the Net. Each begins with the phrase “The Kingdom of Heaven is like ...”

The Mustard Seed creates a great tree that can provide shelter for all the different kinds of birds of the air. A little bit of yeast in the loaf is enough to transform it (in other words the church doesn’t have to dominate the political system in order to transform society). The treasure in the field and the pearl of great price show the Kingdom to be something that, once found, whether by accident or as a result of a careful and exhasutive quest, one would be willing to give everything in return for.

It is the final parable, I think, that ties all these together, and is the one I draw my prospective teacher’s attention to.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a NET.” The story goes on to explain how the net gathers in all sorts of fish. The NET gathers them in – they are all in the Kingdom. But as with the Parable of the Weeds in the Wheat, the sorting out of the good and the bad is something reserved for the end of time, and for God’s angels in heaven. It is not something we should attend to in the here and now.

This clearly paints a picture of the Kingdom of Heaven as an INCLUSIVE place and a public school classroom must also be an incklusive place. But most of us don’t realise how radical this claim of Jesus was in his time and place.

Jesus, in his teaching and in his actions, challenged some of the fundamental ideas of the religious elite of his day.

The Scribes and Pharisees had created a religion based on two pillars – LAW and COVENANT – but these gifts of God that had been intended as a blessing had become a burden, even a curse, to the people.

Through the LAW they created a PURITY CODE by which people and things were all categorised as CLEAN or UNCLEAN and certain highly controlled rituals were necessary to transform UNCLEAN things or people into CLEAN things or people.

Reliant on the LAW these same people corrupted the idea of COVENANT from something centred on intimate relationship with God into a system of REQUIREMENTS and REWARDS – “If you do this and this and this, God will give you this and this and this.”

It was all very neat and mechanistic.

But Jesus challenged and indeed repudiated all these things – no wonder he got it in the neck.

Which brings me, at last (you probably wondering why did we read from Luke if he was going to preach on Matthew?) to the story we have in Luke’s Gospel that was read to us just now.

If you were a Jewish person of the first century hearing this story for the first time you would have immediately seen two very big RED FLAGS at which you would have been outraged.

Firstly, this woman was well known or visibly seen to be a person of ill-repute and touching her, or letting her touch you, would mean that you would be ritually unclean for at least a week.
Everyone knows this. Jesus should have known this.

But even worse, Jesus let her touch his feet. This was a very rude thing for her to do. Remember the story of Naomi and Ruth in the Hebrrew scriptures? Naomi told Ruth to go to Baoz and after he had eaten dinner, drunk too much wine and gone to sleep, she was to go and “uncover his feet” and lie there. When he awoke, Boaz would reasonably assume that “something had happened” that night and that he was now obligated to marry Ruth.

If the story were set in our time I guess the woman would embrace and kiss Jesus in the most passionate way possible in public.

BUT JESUS DOES NOTHING.

Now Simon, Jesus’ Pharisee host, recognised this straight away and his mind was racing with outrage, but he was too “polite” to mention it.

However, Jesus isn’t afraid to barge in. Just as the Pharisees often tried to trap Jesus, I think here Jesus traps Simon. His story of the money-lender and gratitude sets the scene for Jesus to gently scold Simon for his lack of hospitality which demonstrates that his efforts to live an exemplary and “sinless” life have actually diminished his capacity to love God – to be grateful.

Jesus then addresses the woman with these words – “Your sins are forgiven,” and “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” When some people retell this story the blend into it words from another story of Jesus with a woman “Go, and sin no more” but these words are not present in this story.

I find these words remarkable in our time, as much as they were remarkable in Jesus’ day. As well as adding “Go, and sin no more” most of us want to hear Jesus asking the woman to “repent of her sin” but these words are not present in the story and they outraged the first hearers of the story as much as they might outrage you, now that I have drawn your attention to them.

As you go through in your mind the stories of Jesus encountering so-called bad people – The woman from Samaria, Zacchaeus and others, and even the people in the stories he related like the Prodigal Son, Jesus never challenges these people to “repent” of their sin. We generally associate repentance with Contrition or being sorry for what we have done and determining never to do that again. In the Hebrew mind repentance is simply about “turning to God” or binding yourself into relationship with God. This is what has the power to transform the lives of the people in these stories – not the determination to BE GOOD NOW.

So, here is Jesus breaking all the rules, challenging people to think about old things in new ways – these are the treasures Jesus refers in that last story in Matthew 13.

And Jesus is creating a picture of the Kingdom of Heaven that isn’t quite what our template says it should be.

He sees the Kingdom of Heaven as an inclusive place, a place where all are gathered in, and where our place together is based on nurturing our relationship together with God, where God’s grace can abound and is celebrated. This is the place where transformation can take place, something that God wants us all to experience.

So, if we develop an approach to church that excludes people because we think they are not good enough yet, then we are preventing them from being in a place God needs them to be for that transformation to take place. So long as we don’t know the end of a person’s story we, none of us, can even hint at the possibility that they were IN or OUT.

We are easily inclined to creating all sorts of hurdles for people to go through to “get in” and to “stay in” but this story, and so many of the stories that are told of Jesus’ encounters with people as well as his teaching about the Kingdom of Heaven would suggest that we are called to a different way – a way that could lead to social and even ecclesiastical outrage – as we welcome all sorts, the “outcasts” of our day, to join us in the Kingdom of Heaven. We might even think it creditable to be regarded as a “friend of sinners, a glutton and a wine-bibber.”

I finished reading Steven Ogeden's little book "I met God in Bermuda" recently and found his reflections on the task of talking meaningfully about God to 21st century post-modernists.

I was initially attracted to the book for two reasons. Steven and I were in seminary together too many years ago to admit here, and my Great Grandparents (paternal) were married in Bermuda on Valentine's Day in 1884.

The work, however, does justice to the quest he began with - to answer the key question "Where on earth is God?" in terms that begin to be meaningfully connected to modern ways of thinking about the religious dimension. As Steven describes it in his Preface, "There are no simple answers (to this question). Nevertheless, a new description of God can enrich and inspire human life and community."

The key idea he grapples with in this new description of God is garnered from the work of Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner, each of whom, in different ways, explore the reality of human experience in which we "are forced to face the reality of the absence of God."

It's a great little work and well worth a read.

What do you think God is like?

This is the homily I offered to my work colleagues at our in-house celebration of Ash Wednesday this year. The imagery is inspired by the work of Marcus Borg. We all did a bit of the service, sitting in the round. A great way to start our Lenten Journey

What do you think God is like?

We carry this adage in our minds that we are "created in the image of God", so it is important that we cultivate an idea of what God is like so that we might recognise it when we see it.

There is an image of God that the Hebrew people picked up very early in their formation as a faith community - Lev 19:2 says "You shall be holy because the LORD your God is holy." And this image of God became something of a catch cry for them as it shaped more and more of their religious practice. So they developed all sorts of rituals to demonstrate and maintain their holiness - or purity, as it came to be.

This emphasis on holiness and purity has been carried over into the Christian church as we know it today, both in our emphasis on doctrinal purity and our reluctance to associate with those whose badness might be construed as tainting us. And much of what we associate Ash Wednesday with is borne out of those traditions. The symbolism of ashes was seen by the Hebrew people as a forceful reminder of the pervasiveness of human sin and the inevitability of human death. The Christian church adopted this symbolism readily and as people all round the world today will gather together and are marked with this symbol many will do so out of a sense of grief over their failure to be what they believe God has called them to be - Holy.

And so they will embark on this period of penitance we call Lent by declaring a total abstinence of some thing or another as a constant reminder of this failure and as a signal that they determine to be drawn into a deeper spiritual life with God.

Today I would like to call you towards a different image of God that might transform this period for you.

Shrove Tuesday in 1983 brought one of the most awsome experiences to Melbourne. A storm of Wimmera dust rolled in over the city, 1500ft high, turningthe mid-afternoon into late evening darkness. I doubt that anyone living in Melbourne was not taken somehow aback by this experience - it was a natural phenomonon but somehow rather terrifying. we were not to know then that the very next day devastating bushfires would erupt around the state, surrounding the city of Melbourne on three fronts and threatening Adelaide as well. I recall the day as if in slow motion, gripped by the radio being used to pass on messages, and terrified by the smoke in the air. At one stage I went out the back to see if the fire was in our street - yet we were actually more than 50kms away from the fire fronts.

That Ash Wednesday blackened far more hectares of forest and farmland than the fires Victoria experienced last year and the whole state was just as mortified then as it is now.

Not long after the fires I travelled out of Melbourne into one of my favourite parts of Victoria, the coastal areas between Geelong and Warnambool where the fires had been particularly severe. There I saw something that has forever transformed for me the meaning and symbolism of Ash Wednesday. As we drove through bushland and forest we saw hectares of stark skeletons of trees with thick trunks covered in fresh green foliage, even if the blackened ends of branches poked out crasily towards the heavens. The blackened trunks and the white grey earth had been transformed into vibrantly living symbols of the resilience of God's presence among us.

I mentioned recently to a friend that an alternative to the image of God that Leviticus gave to us is found in the words of Jesus himself. In Luke 6:36 at the end of a little saying about loving your enemies, Jesus says "Be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate." Here, I said, was a new way of understanding how God wants our lives to reflect his being. My friend laughed and said how glad he was to hear that. "I don't do HOLY very well" he said, "but I can do COMPASSIONATE."

When you look at the things Jesus said and did and the people with whom he associated it is not hard to see that he spent a lot more time living out the COMPASSION of God than the HOLINESS of God. In many ways the things he said and did actually challenged and repudiated the purity and holiness codes of his day.

Today I am inviting you all into a transformational experience. Rather than entering into this Lenten time with a purpose in your mind to make your life a little bit more HOLY, I would like to encourage you to take up Jesus' example and examine how you might better express the COMPASSION of God in the thinsg you say and do and the people with whom you associate.

Instead of abstaining from something or another, perhaps you might take up something new. Last year I decided to give a little extra donation every week of Lent to a charity, and I went through the STUFF of my belongings parting with a number of things I no longer used - including a Pentax SLR camera and goodies (all to a loving home).

Can you learn during the Lent to take a more inclusive view of God's Kingdom, sharing with Jesus his care for the marginalised and outcast of our day? Can you be especially mindful of compassionately mending broken relationships out of a conviction that we are all recipients of God's grace and mercy and should therefore practice the passing of it on to those near to us?

Let us spend a few moments in silence considering ways in which we might express the compassion of God. As my friend reminded me, we don't do HOLY very well, but we can all do COMPASSION.

Mentors & Heroes

I have just completed reading a very worthy biography of one of my seminary lecturers, the Rev'd Professor Dr Athol Gill. He was Professor of New Testament studies at Whitley College, the Baptist Theological College of Victoria from 1976 until his untimely death in March 1992 aged 54.

Pidwell, H A Gentle Bunyip: The Athol Gill Story Seaview Press: Adelaide 2007

Athol was a marvelous NT scholar but he taught in both Testaments, having a love for both the Gospels and the Prophets. His passion for these texts inspired in him a passion for a radical approach to living the Christian life inspired by various social and theological meovements of his day.

Before he came to Melbourne, he had somewhat controversially started the "House of Hope" in Brisbane where he and others began to explore this radical new kind of Christian discipleship. The authorities in his beloved Baptist Church were certainly perplexed by this and though his counter-cultural approach to the Christian life would undermine the established church structures too much.

On arrival in Melbourne, and in tandem with taking up his duties at Whitley College, he initiated a search for a place to start another community house. Within weeks he had identified the Clifton Hill Baptist Church where its remaining 10 members were willing to gamble with Athol's promise of new life. Before long, "The House of the Gentle Bunyip" was born and eventually the Community Church of St Mark.

"New and prospective members were taught a theology of mission through careful study of the Gospel of Mark." (p103) The mission of the community took three basic forms - serving the churches through training, camps, ministerial support and theological education; serving the community in which it was situated with a coffee house, street theatre, concerts, special events and publishing; and engaging in social issues such as providing counselling, forums, supporting indigenous issues, services for single parents, the homeless and political lobbying.

All of this was to happen out of a community of people, single and married, who lived together, where possible, and shared a common life. Patterns for their life together were very similar to those followed by monastic communities, although Athol never drew attention to this. They were bound to meet for Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer each day, following a pattern for The Office found in the Anglican Australian Prayer book, and following a lectionary of daily Scripture reading created by Athol that ensured that the whole of the NT was read each year and the OT was read in a three-year cycle.

Members engaged in 5hrs of ministry a week, tithed their income for the community and generally contributed to the common life.

This extraordinary life was incredibly attractive to many idealistic young people during the years I was in seminary and a number of those who studied with me were members of "The Bunyip" as it was affectionately known.

I enjoyed being reminded of the people and times of my Seminary training as I read through this book. I was also encouraged to ponder these things in relation to a dream we have been nurturing of establishing an intentional community as a place for spiritual formation and Christian mission.

One of the issues that are raised in "A Gentle Bunyip" is the nature of leadership in such communities. Clearly, someone needs to be the driving thinker that shapes the vision and mission of the community, someone needs to be the bearer of the story that originates the community, someone needs to create the myths that inspire others to join. Athol did all of these. He sought to do it collaboratively, using a leadership team, but at the end of the day his death left such a gap in the leadership that within a couple of years people had drifted off - the community died.

On Tuesday I will be attending the 80th Birthday bash of another friend and mentor who has known me since I was born, but I did not notice him until I was about 15. Brian was a secondary school teacher before training for ministry in the same seminary I went to many years later.

He had a passion for engagement with young people in the church and despite a disappointing experience as Director of Youth Ministry for the whole state continued to work with young people through the church's camping programs - which was where I came across him. Having returned to teaching he took an early retirement option so that he could take up an honorary position as chaplain in the secondary school in which he had taught.

In his latter years, he developed an interest in and passion for the ancient traditions of spirituality in the church - Christian meditation in particular. He also came to the view that the struggle of many in ministry was related to a poorly formed spiritual life.

Thus began a journey that would lead to him encouraging ministers in his church more widely to explore the possibilities of the ancient Christian traditions as a support for their ministry, and the establishment of a Centre for Christian Spirituality in his local church - a place for training in and the practice of spirituality.

There is no doubt that Brian was the driving force for the establishment of this centre, although he clearly did not do it alone. He, too, was the forger and articulater of the vision.

He was smart enough to recognise that there was a need for succession planning and quite intentionally groomed up another to take his place, but I am sure that he would reflect that even so, it has been the hardest part of the life of the community - passing the mantle on successfully to new leadership that can maintain the evolutionary development of the community in a manner that is consistent with the original vision.

I will be interested in seeing how much of this he shares on this milestone occasion on Tuesday.

The First Christmas

Tomorrow we will somewhat prematurely take down our Christmas Decorations - a task usually undertaken on the Feast of Epiphany.

Since just before Christmas I have been reading the book "The First Christmas" by Marcus J Borg and John Dominic Crossman. This reading was undertaken as part of my Advent disciplines and I have really enjoyed immersing myself in this close examination of the nature of the Birth Narratives in Matthew and Luke. I was further blessed with more Borg books as Christmas gifts, so I will be reading a bit over the next few weeks.

I have always been aware of the way in which the traditional Nativity story is the result of a harmonizing or blending of two very different narratives into a single story. However, I never paid enough attention to the details of each separate story to recognise the logical and historical inconsistencies such an approach created.

For example in Matthew Mary & Joseph already lived in Bethlehem while Luke has them living in Nazareth. Similarly, Luke makes no mention of the prospect of Joseph divorcing Mary when he discovers she is pregnant as we find in Matthew's account. The two stories are so different from each other that if each was purporting to be an historical account of the events surrounding Jesus' birth, one would have to be declared a fabrication - but which one.

Fact, Fable or Parable
In trying to understand how this came about, and how we should approach these stories today, Borg proposes that our obsession with the idea that the only things that are "true" are "facts" is a product of relatively recent times (from the period of The Enlightenment in the 17th century). Since the development of the scientific method in that time as well as new approaches to historiography Western people have thought about life and the world in completely different ways than their ancestors did.

The questions we instinctively ask of life are "How do we know?" and "What is true?" as well as "What is real?" and "What is possible?" This way of thinking has led to what Huston Smith called "fact fundamentalism" and according to it, if something isn't factual then it isn't true.

In addition to these changes in our world view, The Enlightenment asserted that "what is indubitably real is the time-space universe of matter and energy, operating accord with natural laws of cause and effect."

It only takes a brief consideration of these matters to realise that they pose an immense dilemma for the interpreter - If the authors of the text were not bound to facts as we are and could cope with supernatural events alongside natural events as euqally real, how do we make modern sense of what they wrote?

Borg introduces two very interesting interpretive devises that help deal legitimately with the different approaches Matthew and Luke have taken to the same story. Firstly he proposes that we look at the narratives as "neither fact nor fable, but as parables". Parable is a form of speech by which truth and meaning is conveyed without being reliant on factuality of historicity - the story of The Good Samaritan is cited as an example to help us understand how this works.

Along the way he makes the observation tha almost all of Jesus' parables had a subversive element, challenging social, religious and political assumptions and norms.

Secondly. he suggests that the birth naratives are like an overture to an orchestral piece. The term is derived from the French ouverture which was simply the opening part of a work that served as a summary, synthesis, metaphor or symbol of the whole. He cites some literary examples of overture but by bringing the two ideas together he lays the groundwork for a completely new interpretive approach to the birth narratives.

Matthew 1-2, considered as a Parabolic Overture, sets the scene and tone, as well as providing a summary of the Gospel that follows. Similarly, Luke 1-2 can be regarded as a potted version of all that will follow in both Luke and Acts.

What I found most satisfying about this was that rather than explaining everything away as the liberal-sceptical approach can sometimes do with Biblical material, Borg has provided an interpretive approach that enables the truth of the narrative to come to its fullness in a way that a merely factual approach to the interpretive task could not.

Gospel as Subversion
The consistent thread that arises from this interpretive approach is that the story is utterly subversive. Everything that is said about Jesus' birth is connected with Roman theology (not Roman Catholic, but Roman Empire and the emperors/Caesars) and it would have been plain to first century Christians and observers of Christianity that to call Jesus "Son of God" and "Saviour of the world" was to challenge the Emperor's claim to these titles. The purpose of the Birth Narratives was to assert a superior claim to these titles - each in different ways.

When this approach is taken it doesn't matter that Matthew has Mary and Joseph living in Bethlehem already and that those who visited Jesus were Gentiles, while Luke has them needing to travel to Bethlehem and the birth is acknowledged by a bunch of lowley shepherd folk, presumably Jewish.

It has brought new life to the Birth Narratives for me, helped me understand that it is okay for Mark and John not to even mention it, and given me new ways of understanding a few other tricky theological ideas that we all think are important.