The responsibility is ours

I think I can paraphrase this bit of prose from Luke quite succinctly like this;

Don’t worry about how sinful or otherwise other people might be. Sort your own life out. Your life is the only one you have direct control over.

Take responsibility for your own being and standing before God. The last  little parable of the fig tree  Jesus uses to emphasise what he says suggests there is always time to change and bear fruit but that time won’t last forever because eventually the fig tree will be cut down. Of course in the natural course of things we will die.

Nurturing our spiritual lives is what Jesus is alluding to when he talks about putting manure around the tree.

The fig tree is used in the Bible as a symbol  of the people of Israel, and of course  they always thought more collectively than we instinctively do but taking into account our more individualistic frame of mind I invite you to think of yourself as the fig tree or actually as any fruit tree you like.

Close your eyes and Imagine yourself as any kind of fruit tree. What state are you in?

Are you flourishing? Are you well watered, have you basked in the light, has your tree been pollinated? Will you produce lots of blossom that will produce lots of apples or pears or figs or whatever?

Or is the ground your tree in standing in poor ground, did the rains fail to come, the sun not shine, were you not well fed and watered so your crop will be a bit miserable.

Taking responsibility for the growth of our own tree is a spiritual task that only we can do for ourselves.

Part of that nurture will be coming to church on a Sunday. Part will be time spent in contemplation meditation or prayer. Part will be in taking theology seriously. Theology means just “God talk”. Who is God, what is God, what is the essential nature and character of the divine. Learning and discussing in a more structured and intellectual level is also a constituent part. Does it make any sense at all? Can you defend your faith publically?

The responsibility for each of us precious plants to blossom and grow is primarily our own responsibility  but naturally there is always a communal aspect in Christianity. We, each of us has a responsibility to make this space and this community(the church) fertile ground where a person can set down roots and grow. Our communal responsibility is to hold and accept and offer an open space where a person can freely explore their own way of being in the light of God.

To be held in community is a vital human need which when neglected causes something inside to atrophy and sometimes even die and people can turn in on themselves.

To stop that happening, to provide fertile ground for all of our journeys  the best place to start is as an individual taking responsibility for our own spiritual development and then also realising  our part in our collective responsibility to build a community worthy of the name.

All change

There is a story, probably apocryphal, of a priest asking a group of children what a saint was. One of the children pointed at the stained glass windows and said. “They’re the people the light shines through” which I’ve always thought was rather lovely.

That is the way I’d describe what was happening in this story, now known as the Transfiguration of Jesus when his face and his clothes shone dazzling white.

In order to ram home the point of the closeness and intimacy Jesus enjoyed with God the story is set on a high place. High places were always thought to be especially Holy places in those days. Then another metaphor for God is employed – a cloud – envelops them and then the cloud representing God speaks and repeats the form of words Jesus heard at his baptism “This is my beloved Son – listen to him”

As I have said before, the presence of Moses and Elijah is there to show the Jews that followers of Jesus saw him as the culmination, the zenith of everything their religion had been hoping for.

I always thought that transformation was a central goal of all religion – that in putting ourselves in God’s way, as we are doing here this morning – perceptible change would happen. When I was at Mirfield,  and we knew which was to be our first parish we’d go to after training – our vicars where we were going to serve came up to visit us.

I always remember Brian Sharp, vicar of St. John’s Margate asking me. “What do you expect to see in your ministry?” I said “Transformation”. He then said in his deadpan way “You are going to be very disappointed”. And he was right.

Not only in my ministry but in me as well. Transformation, the changing of habits, becoming kinder, more loving, braver, bolder, just doesn’t happen overnight.

Change does happen, but it is slow, steady, almost imperceptible. Change comes gradually. It is bolstered and encouraged by regular practice. Coming close to God, the source of that light, is what we are doing in church. It is what we do when we pray and meditate.

Ironically the biggest and fastest change in my experience comes through trauma;  death, disease, divorce. It appears that we have to die a bit inside before we can grow again, this time a little differently. The central Christian motif of death and resurrection couldn’t be truer in this case. The trouble is that we have to die inside first before we eventually grow the fruits of resurrection, and even then it may be slow and may indeed never happen.

That is not to say that there are not people who do let the light shine through in their lives a little more than others. I often hear people talk of Peggy Conway in those kinds of terms, who I have never met but obviously left a deep impression on all who know her and on Tuesday I conducted the funeral service of Nancy Deas, and Maureen spoke of Nancy in just those terms.

Unusually for a funeral we didn’t have the usual readings about death – we had Paul’s hymn to love – 1 Corinthians 13. Maureen also linked that to something else Paul wrote about the fruits of the Spirit.  A list, not exhaustive, of what our characters grow into, how we change when we let more of the light of God shine through our lives    Paul writes “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,  and self-control”

And of course Jesus said. “By our fruits will we be known”. 

The trouble is, that when we compare our own lives with that impressive list the outcome could be depressing, when we  see where we don’t measure up. I’m sure my life is pretty spare of most of the things on that list.

That is where the other , and actually the most important Christian understanding of God is so important. We believe that even when we don’t measure up – God loves us unconditionally anyway. That idea is called GRACE.

No, perhaps we don’t measure up. Perhaps we never will, though we want to. That is why we continually put ourselves in God’s way by coming together to commune with the divine and each other Sunday by Sunday.

Transformation does occur. But it is slow and sometimes brittle and it relies on practice. And as I say, often the most dramatic change occurs through trauma – but it does happen.

The way to personal growth is to bask in God’s unconditional love for you. To know that you are infinitely loved  is the greatest and most fertile soil you can have to blossom and grow.

But we can often forget that simple fact, as I often do myself. We need reminding often.

We are infinitely loved.

The shock of the new

That Luke in his story is confused in his description of what is going on – he confuses  two Jewish customs – The purification of Mary and the presentation of a first-born male – is of no real interest to me.

That is all just a preamble anyway whose function is simply to place the infant Jesus in the Temple so that Luke can explain the real thrust of the story. It doesn’t really matter how he got there – it is more the fact that he was in the Temple. So we come to the real meat of the story  - the encounters with Simeon and Anna.

This might sound a bit harsh but what we heard read today is actually a marketing strategy that failed.  It failed to reach and convince its target audience – the Jews.

Just as the figure of John the Baptist was supposed to be representative of the entire prophetic tradition of Israel that was pointing to Jesus as the Messiah, so the story of Simeon and Anna are, in a similar way supposed to represent the Holy and wise sages of ancient Israel.  Their function too was to point to Jesus and say “this child is the one we have been looking for all our lives, the one who is going to redeem Israel.”

The reason for these stories is that the nascent Christian movement was desperately trying to convince their fellow Jews (and Christianity at first was a small sect within Judaism) that Jesus was no bolt from the blue, no wild eyed radical with no back story or provenance. However new and decisive Jesus was, he was essentially, for Jesus’ Jewish supporters, the culmination, the climax of Jewish religion. There was continuity with the past and everything that had gone before.  This was essential to establish because human beings distrust new things. They prefer, especially in religion to imagine continuity with what has gone before. The tightrope they were treading was also trying to express the universality of the Jesus way with the closed promises to a “chosen” people.

“A light for revelation to the gentiles and for glory to your people Israel” (V. 32)

But of course this failed in a quite spectacular way. Judaism was not convinced in the slightest. Judaism continued in its own way and developed into the vibrant modern day religion that it is today and within a generation Christianity became an almost entirely separate gentile (non Jewish) religion.

The tragedy is that the relationship between the two faiths became increasingly poisonous and paved the way for two thousand years of hatred, discrimination and pogroms. When we hear people like the new Egyptian leader Mohammed Morsi who was recorded making comments comparing Jews to pigs and monkeys or the rhetoric of Iran, we understandably baulk, but let us not forget that the planned extermination of Jewry did not take place in Islamic lands, but in the heart of Christian Europe just over  70 years ago.

The catholic church’s Good Friday liturgy referred to “Perfidious Jews” until very recently and in a return to Latin rites have reared their head again.

So to return to the story itself; to the audience it was actually aimed at, this story and others like it in the New Testament were dramatic failures.  So is there anything we can draw from it at all?

For me, the most striking thing to draw out is the deep seated need in human beings for continuity which provides a kind of solidity.  For the majority of Jews, Jesus couldn’t be true in his own right – only in the context of the established religion. We instinctively seem to distrust new things. We get comfort when something is old. It seems to convey comfort and time honoured truth. That is why people are very conservative and traditionally minded, especially in religious terms.

If its old it must be true!  We get comfort from tradition, from old buildings, from old hymns. You will hear people wax lyrical about walls steeped in prayer, or lose themselves in ancient mystical sites like Stonehenge.

People get comfort from the Book of Common Prayer, because it is old and uses arcane English, whilst perhaps missing the fact that when it was written it was a radical expression of Protestantism written in the common language of the day. Everything old and venerated was once bold and new!

But there is a deeper spiritual point I want to make here. All of this is a grasping after something  that appears permanent or at least has an air of permanence about it  (and we all do it), I submit that this is always a search for a deeper reality  that is God

Because here’s the rub. Nothing is permanent in the created universe. Everything is in a permanent state of flux. All the things we use to convey an air of permanence are in themselves in a constant state of change. Not only will this church one day not be here, but neither will the earth on which it stands. Our search for permanence, our search for solid ground, is partially sated by “things”, but in reality they are all just substitutes for the search for God.

The problem is that God is indescribable, ineffable, a true mystery that we struggle to comprehend and apprehend. But we can comprehend things like books, wonderful words, ancient buildings, people, so we fix our gaze on them.

There is nothing wrong with that in principle. It is only a problem if we mistake and confuse that which is transient and impermanent with the eternal mystery that we call God – the true depth of all things.

 In what is for me the most helpful part of this religion we call Christianity is that impermanent things can be vehicles for communion with God, because the divine indwells all things. That is the underlying logic of all sacraments – that physical things can convey God.  Pernickity Western Christianity, true to form, wanting to neatly package God tried to name and list them. Baptism, eucharist etc. As official ways of meeting God through things. Thank goodness for Orthodoxy who saw the madness in that and said – why list them. The whole world is aglow with the glory of God and God can come to you through anything and everything.

When for example we pray and light a candle, that most beautiful image and icon of our prayers , this ancient symbol touches something very deep. As a sign it seeks to bypass all that is transient and join our collective prayers together  at a deeper level, the level at which we are all joined together, with each other, with the candle, and with the essence of all those people we are praying for, subsisting in the wholeness that is God.

A mystical communion that joins the physical with the spiritual, the living and the dead, using a beautiful physical symbol to embody a deeper spiritual reality.   In that sense tradition is magical. It has the power to move and connect us with the deepest parts of ourselves .  All things, ancient churches and liturgies and hymns, ancient mystical sites, symbols like candles or flowing water, dramatic landscapes, or the mundane yet magical miracle of childbirth or the beauty of a tree or a flower can all move us towards the oneness of the divine, so long as we don’t see all of those things as having a power of their own separate from the divine. That, in the Bible is called idolatry. God is the  mysterious depth within all the impermanent things that we use to commune with the divine. 

Come the revolution.....

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” (Luke 4: 18 from Isaiah)

Justice for the poor – making sure everyone gets a chance to enjoy the fruits of life is one of the core policies of the Old Testament. I use the word policies advisedly because it often reads like a political manifesto. And these sentiments are carried on into the New. The Bible abounds with it.

From the prophet Amos (as a representative of all the prophets) addressing the rich women of his time thus “Here this you cows of Bashan, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy........behold the days are coming when you will be dragged away on fish hooks” (Amos 4:1)

Luke has already put these words into the mouth of Mary “He fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty.”  Jesus tells us it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

“Let Justice roll down like a river, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” Says Amos. Justice is far more important in religion, according to all the prophets, than all the worship put together which is revealed as being false worship because if it is indifferent to injustice.

The letter of James – Jesus’ brother – is vitriolic in his condemnation of partiality and says

“But you have dishonoured the poor man. Is it not the rich who oppress you, is it not they that drag you into court?” (James 2:6)

As I’ve said many times before – the Judeao-Christian tradition is intensely political. It was politics that got Jesus executed when he challenged the religious and political status quo.

As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said. “Those who say that religion and politics don’t mix must be reading a different Bible to me”

When Jesus, in quoting Isaiah, proclaims “the year of the Lord’s favour” he is most likely referring to the Biblical notion of Jubilee  where every fifty years, no matter what has happened during the last fifty years all land and property is given back to the original owner and debts are cancelled. It is a notion of society hitting the re-set button – and was designed to stop inequality becoming cast in stone. This is why the Christian pressure group that campaigned to have third world debt cancelled called themselves “Jubilee 2000” if you didn’t already know.

So a big part of the “good news” is obviously social justice. It is how we perceive each other. It provides the base on which Victorian philanthropy was based. Paternalistic certainly but their motivation was  making life better for their fellow man – taking from their excess and spreading it around.

In our dog eat dog, increasingly loveless world  great acts of charity still happen, and charitable giving has probably never been higher, but in our national and international world order, inequality is increasing at an alarming and I would say unsustainable rate. Inequality has become entrenched.

In Britain the latest data tell us that social mobility has stalled. Basically. If you are born poor the increasing likelihood is that you will always be poor. The richest 1% of the country have massively increaded their share of the national wealth in the last thirty years.  Only 7% of the population go to private schools yet 24% of vice-chancellors, 32% of MPs, 51% of top Medics, 54% of FTSE-100 chief execs, 54% of top journalists, 70% of High Court judges …went to private school.

If we are to take Jesus seriously, and take the witness of the Bible as a whole seriously these are questions of great importance for Christians.

The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many runs contrary to the whole history of Jewish and Christian world views.

We coo at Jesus being born in a stable – but miss the hard political point being made there. We have sentimentalised Christianity so much that most people see it as children’s entertainment to get them through the Christmas period rather than the hard political statement it was.

The message is sentimental and infantile.  A religion divorced from life and the way society runs itself isn’t worth very much.

I may have theological differences with our new Archbishop of Canterbury on many different points but one thing he does bring forcefully to the table is an uncompromising attitude towards the city and the mindset of the people who inhabit it.

By introducing the idea that what we do with money has a moral component he is confronting head on some fundamental notions that underpin capitalism, that profit is the only thing that matters. At for that I thank him. Perhaps that is exactly what we need at this time, when socially and economically we are entering dire straits.

Britain, apparently according to the news, for the first time in its history is entering a triple dip recession. Mobility is squeezed, so hope ebbs away. Fragmentation of society is increasing, our national debt is getting larger and we are now on the cusp of having our credit rating down graded.

What we as a nation do with our money – where we prioritise it, who holds it, how it is distributed, what life chances does it afford and for whom – the few or the many are intense political questions.

But they were also intense religious questions. You cannot divorce the two. I would never dream of telling anyone how to vote. I have voted for many different parties over the years, and I must say have been routinely disillusioned by all of them. It is not even a simplistic left/right question either.

But what I do strongly suggest is that a Christian could and should be a political animal and our politics as far as we can ascertain from the entire tradition should be governed by fairness, compassion for the poor, equality, and controversially perhaps (though it is all there in the Bible for all to see)re-distribution of wealth for a more equitable society.

It is far from obvious which parties achieve those aims by which policies but we must be at least looking and thinking about the social consequences of our choices. Jesus never had the chance to vote because he was born in a dictatorship but, if had been allowed to vote, from all the evidence we have, social justice would have been his guiding light. 

Water into wine

Something is always happening on two different levels in John.

There are things that happen on the physical level, the level you can see by the light of the sun, that you can take a picture of and record for posterity.

But within these physical events there is another level of reality being revealed. This reality you cannot see by the light of the sun but only with another light, the light that shines from within the events and ourselves. Our eyes are opened and you begin to see things in a new light.

In all the signs John tells stories of great detail and colour – a woman at the well, a Father desperate to save his dying son, a wedding party where the wine has run out. Things happen at the human level of time and space but John tells us that these things are signs that point to things that are happening at the level of the Spirit.

As a signpost in Gainford will point the way to Darlington so these signs point to things happening on the level of Spirit in eternity. These two levels of reality John calls “up” and “down” – ano and kato in Greek.  

When John uses these two words ano and Kato he is describing two orders, two patterns of reality.

On the simplest level when John describes the order of Kato (Down) he is describing the order where the guiding principle is the dictator ME. My ego centric self, where the pattern of society is people competing with, manipulating and trying to control each other.

In the order of Ano (up) the ruling principle is the Spirit of Love, and the pattern of society is one of compassion – people giving to each other what they really are, and accepting what others are, recognizing their differences, and sharing their vulnerability.

These two orders are in conflict with each other. This is how things are, but not as they could or should be if we are to find peace. The question is how these two sides to reality can be reconciled. All of us on a spiritual quest feel this every day. We are all both earthly and heavenly, both physical and spiritual. We instinctively know that one side cannot be allowed to submerge the other but need to be reconciled to each other.

Our egos are unique. There has never been before, and there will never be again anyone quite like you, with your own capacity to both create and love. You are unique.

But there is a deep longing and unease within us that knows that something is missing. We are not whole. We long to be our true selves and to find our wholeness in the exchange of love with other people. I heard Russell Brand say recently, quoting someone else, that all desire is a desire for communion with God and I think he is right.

What John’s gospel is trying to tell us is that “I have seen and touched the answer”. For John he sees the two orders of reality reconciled in Jesus.

And for me, in seeing that pattern I recognise a pattern available for all humanity.

Another phrase essential to understanding John’s gospel of reconciliation is his use of the words “I AM”. In John’s gospel Jesus uses this phrase again and again. It has two meanings. When Jesus uses it he is affirming his humanity – the whole of himself from head to toe, his body, his passions, his intellect, his self consciousness. His Kato (down)

At the same time he is using the name of God. When Moses asked God “What is your name?” God answered “I AM. Tell the Israelites that I AM has sent you.”

So the heart of the consciousness of Jesus is a reconclliation between  up and down, ano and Kato, earth and heaven, flesh and spirit are one as they interact with each other.

The good news (gospel ) of John affirms this about Jesus  and then declares that  his consciousness can become ours.

Now we can approach the turning of the water into wine, a story which starts On the third day........Perhaps the most important clue to the symbolic intent of the story  is right there in that little phrase. The wedding took place on the third day.

Written about  Sixty years after the crucifixion John had been searching for a metaphor to tell what he saw as the inner truth of the story of Jesus, a story of how on earth a new world order of love was revealed – so what better than a marriage. In an ideal marriage that works, two separate persons begin to become one flesh. But  neither will be submerged but as they confront, and clash and forgive and grow together, they can learn to trust each other and see the truth in the depths of each other. They are transformed together and become one in the to and fro of love.

The fact that this marriage representing  the new world order is on the third day indicates that this third day is a story of life through death and more specifically the death of the ego.  A marriage on the third day is the symbol of the new age to come.

The marriage is Cana represents the ultimate marriage we all look for, the marriage of flesh and spirit, the marriage of ego-centricity and love, the marriage of Kato and ano, the marriage of earth and heaven.

There is much to say about the symbolism in this story, but suffice to say that the water pots and even Mary herself represent the old order, which is why Jesus speaks so harshly to Mary and says, “Woman what have you to do with me?”  It is a confrontation between the old order, also represented by the wine running out, which means it no longer satisfies, no longer excites and the new way of Jesus.

This keynote sign, the guiding principle of John’s gospel is that the water, the raw material of our human nature will be transformed, not by crushing or smashing it. (After all Jesus could have just said – smash the water jars up!)  but by exposing it to the transforming power of Love, and then this transformed water is then poured out and given to others.

In this new order the best wine is always now – the present moment. In our earthly ego-centric world we are married to finitude and death, we get old, our memories fade and we get ill, and we die but in the new order the best is always now. Didn’t Jesus say that he had overcome death? If life can be lived to the full in the present moment, then through each present moment can come that quality of life we call eternal life.

Let's be friends

The way the baptism of Jesus is presented in the various gospels is a fascinating case study in the complex relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist and their respective disciples.

Chronologically: Mark presents the baptism fairly baldly whilst having John say that Jesus is mightier than him. Matthew is a little more embarrassed about the whole incident but still has Jesus being baptised by John. By the time we get to Luke, even more distance is put between the two of them because when Jesus is baptised John is already in prison so presumably Jesus is baptised by one of John’s disciples, and by the time we get to John’s gospel direct reference to the act of baptism itself has disappeared but John testifies indirectly that he saw the Spirit descend on Jesus.

All very confusing as is baptism itself. You cannot construct a coherent understanding of baptism from the new testament because you have people receiving the spirit before baptism, during baptism and after baptism. You have people receiving the spirit in Acts because they only knew the baptism of John the Baptist and in Acts today the even more curious thing that some hadn’t received the Spirit because they had only been baptised in the name of Jesus! 

All very interesting but what the hell has any of it to do with us, with our life, here and now in the 21st century?

A good question and I’m the one that has to come up with somw kind of answer. Well the first thing I would say is the very obvious thing that you simply cannot pin God down and package God neatly in a nice tidy box.  The Spirit of God as Jesus himself points out in another place blows where it wills. You don’t know where it comes from or where it is going – and that is the truth. But organisations like the church don’t like things messy like that – they prefer things neat and tidy with no embarrassing loose ends and contradictions.

Lesson one. Don’t second guess how the Spirit of God acts in this world. The best we can do is try and align ourselves with the Spirit in silence and prayer and communion and try to listen to the Spirit’s promptings. Even here there is a huge amount of nonsense spouted in the church.

Lesson two. However the Spirit came and when exactly it came it was revealed as a Spirit of communion. It was the Spirit of relationship. Relationship with the divine expressed by Jesus as a parent/child relationship and strong relationships with other people because we share the same parent.  Strong relationships with the divine and each other are the result of receiving the Spirit of God.

Epiphany is often presented  as the revelation that Jesus is God’s only son, because the Spirit rested on him. But the point of Christianity is that at Pentecost the Spirit symbolically rested on all people making us all children of God. Jesus though is the example that we are to follow if we take that seriously.

When Jesus realised his sonship – his own personal epiphany – he retreated to the wilderness to think, to pray, to meditate on the ramifications of this revelation. What was he going to do with this revelation?

So was launched the Jesus ministry which resulted ultimately in us, the church. People who just like Jesus recognise God as Father and through the  actions of prayer and communion seek to follow in his footsteps.

Closeness to the divine is the defining feature of the Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition going right back to the common ancestor of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – Abraham – Who was known as the “friend of God.”

I love that phrase. In fact acknowledging God as a friend I actually find more satisfying than Father or mother. I  prefer to be known as a friend of God that a child of God because the latter is now so laden with theological baggage it has been rendered almost unusable.

Both are useful and have their strengths – but they say slightly different things. You can’t choose who your parents are – but you can choose your friends.

Friends are friends because they want to be. My favourite poet refers to God as the “friend” often. I started addressing my weekly emails to “Dear friends” not as an affectation but because at our purest that is what we are – friends of God.

Friends become friends because of mutual attraction and affection for each other and when nurtured over time this becomes very deep.

Friends bring lightness and fun into our lives and we comfortable in each other’s presence.

In the New Testament Jesus is presented as an icon of God and so his words are given a kind of divine status, so naturally one of my favourite sayings attributed to him in John (15:15) is

“I no longer call you servants. Instead I call you my friends, for everything I have learned from my Father I have made known to you”

Not master and servant any longer......but friends.......who seek each other out because we enjoy each other’s company. And God is in all things and can present himself in many different ways.

That for me, in the greatest epiphany of all.

Lord, let me see

An  epiphany moment is when scales fall from our eyes and the truth suddenly becomes clear to us.

But what truth? In vastly different ways of saying it, Paul and Matthew point in exactly the same direction, though Paul puts it much more explicitly that Matthew who wraps the revelation up in a rather beautifully told story.

The epiphany – the “mystery that has been revealed to him” might seem a little tame to us because it is now such a commonplace thing... is that the Gentiles – that’s you and me – non Jews – are incorporated into the same body.  As Paul writes in verse 6.....

“that is, the gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body  and sharers in the promise in Jesus Christ in the gospel”

That is the good news that Paul has become a servant of is the breaking down of the barriers that exist between people. There is no more “chosen people” and the rest – we are all of us chosen people.

Paul’s job he writes is to bring this great news to all the people of the known world. This he asserts was always the eternal will of God but it had been veiled, hidden until this mystery was fully revealed to him through Christ. This is Paul’s epiphany.

My own personal epiphany came when I realised that God’s Grace was indiscriminate – there were no chosen ones – no insiders and outsiders – just one humanity loved equally by the divine. That humanity if we can perceive it is “one body” but not only that but this one body has access to the divine.  So the breaking down of the barriers is both vertical and horizontal – a cross if you will.

All humanity is one and we are all at one with God – a cosmic healing – a mystery revealed in Jesus to Paul, but as we also read today – revealed also to Matthew.

The Magi – who were holy men of the Zoroastrian religion  - which still exists today as a small minority faith in Iran – were gentiles – foreigners – non Jews who are used here to represent the opening up of Judaism to the world.

The Magi represent all non Jews who find themselves on their journey arriving at the revelation in Jesus Christ. The Magi were noted astrologers so the fact that they were being guided by the stars is perfect symmetry – though of course the motif of being born under a star was a well known way of conferring a special status in the ancient world also.

The distinctiveness of the special revelation in Christ is revealed in the gifts they brought. The gold denotes a certain kind of kingship – though not one immediately recognizable to the world at large and of course in Jesus’ active ministry he preached almost exclusively on the “Kingdom of God”. A kingdom centred on the divine mystery we call God. To enter this kingdom is to become theocentric rather than egocentric. It is to discover that we are not after all the centre of the universe.

A gift of Incense can denote a priestly revelation. A priest in the classical understanding of the word denotes a go-between, an intermediary between humankind and God. An integral part of the Christian revelation is that a go between is not necessary – we all have direct access to God in the Jesus revelation so we all possess the priestly role innately within us. We are indwellt by the Spirit of the God Jesus taught us to call Father. We meet God in our own hearts. That was the significance of the curtain in the temple that shut humanity out from the presence of God in the Holy of Holies being torn from top to bottom in Matthew’s gospel.

We are all our own priests. In my theology  I am no more or less a priest than anyone else in this church. I was not ordained to become a priest, I was a priest already just like all of us. But I am a priest that got ordained. Ordination as the name shouts loud and clear is more about order than achieving a special status in the kingdom.

Myrrh is used in the embalming process so refers to the significance of Jesus’ death, which using the Jewish cultural motif of the atoning sacrifice carried out in the temple came to mean an atoning sacrifice for all of humanity, not that I believe in the efficacy of bloody sacrifice myself any more than most of you do.   I, like most modern people find that primeval notion rather baffling and pagan and grotesque. It was rather that his  at-one-ment with God that led him inevitably into a direct confrontation with the authorities that  led to his execution as a deadly enemy of brutal and unjust worldly power  - his determination not to compromise or shut up – that was his sacrifice that is an example to us all. Giving without counting the cost, in a lived example and reflection of God’s grace

The Jewish cultural motif of the atoning sacrifice to make them one with God was something they could understand because it spoke out of their culture but it doesn’t speak out of ours.  In our culture, talk of a bloody human sacrifice to make things right with God just makes us sound ridiculous, but it is what we have inherited and of course it still deeply permeates our official prayers, hymns and liturgies. 

Matthew and Paul are at one here, using vastly different literary ways of communicating the same shift in thinking to their respective audiences. The barriers have been torn down.

In Christ there is no east or west or north and south, no Jew or Greek, no male or female. There is one finite humanity enmeshed with one infinite God.