[Propertalk] 2 Christmas b

[robertpmorrison at charter.net]

Home to read this and eat a little!

Merry 2 Christmas  ... that sounds a bit like a sequel of some sort!

Bob

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY				            		           2 
CHRISTMAS B
JEREMIAH 31:7-14 						                            		       4th JANUARY, 
2015
EPHESIANS 1:3-6, 15-19a					  	                       			        PSALM 
84
MATTHEW 2:13-15, 19-23

	Recently I’ve seen two films which really engaged my mind and involved 
me. Curiously enough, they both dealt with what’s been in my thoughts 
this Christmas season. And add into the mix the movie which the Monday 
morning group has been watching. 1 That makes three. They all dealt with 
the concept of time.

	What is the purpose of time? Why is this one of the gifts with which 
God graces our lives?

	Most people, at least once in their lives, ask themselves – ask God – 
what is their purpose in life. Perhaps when entering the educational 
process after high school people try to make an assessment of who they 
are, what they enjoy doing, for what they seem to have an aptitude. In 
Scotland educators attempted to do this when children were aged eleven. 
I’ve lost track of the details, but I imagine something similar 
continues today.

	Think about that. Children whose greatest pleasures may be riding a 
bicycle, or swimming, or beginning to develop an interest in library 
cards; children who may have a somewhat limited and not altogether 
healthy concept of life as relayed by television and the internet; 
children at that age were, and may still be, evaluated and “streamed”, 
as they called it, into an academic or a vocational track for the final 
four to six years of grammar school.

	This is not to say that there aren’t families – children and adults – 
who  have had lengthy and productive discussions about life – about the 
social, cultural, economic, political and spiritual aspects of who they 
are and what seems intriguing and rewarding. But at age eleven, I 
suspect that most parents would be happy if their children knew not to 
run out into the street without determining traffic movement, and about 
not pocketing unpaid-for things in stores, no matter how easy it may 
appear.

	Not very advanced, perhaps, and yet it’s a start. With some basic 
skills we can help one another to try to discover where we fit into 
nature, what creation may mean, specifically to them. At the very least, 
it’s possible to help everyone develop the skills of critical thinking – 
not the least of which may be whether or not the preacher has thought 
things through before opening her or his mouth!

	This is part of our understanding of what time is. As the films I saw 
suggested, there are analytic and scientific ways of looking at life and 
the use of time as a marker help us to establish relationships – between 
parent and child, between one adult and another, between cities and 
states, between nations AND between humans and other species, AND 
between us who are animate and the inanimate world and creation.

	Time, then, is one of the ways in which can define ourselves and 
others. Time is one of the ways in which we can discover how God 
interacts with us and us with God. Time is one of the ways in which our 
understanding of place may become clearer. And, in all of this, for the 
most part, our sense of God’s call to us becomes more clear, sometimes 
more insistent.

	Think how it must have been for Mary and Joseph, as well as for some of 
others seemingly on the periphery of this morning’s Gospel story. It 
seems, though, that none were really “outside”. Each of them, in one way 
or another, affected the other. From Jesus and His parents to the 
unusual visitors, to the king and his court – the lives of all were 
intertwined because of where they stood in time.

	Was it unfair for any of them? Certainly Mary and Joseph could have 
found something better to do with their time. For that matter, those 
Magi, whose life-goal appeared to be seeking truth wherever they found 
it, even they could probably have been able to do something a little 
closer to home. And Herod? Yes, Herod – was he forced to behave out of 
character, was he inveigled into an impossible situation by virtue of 
the pressure exerted on him by time?

	But THAT’S the point: time is a gift to each of us, an unsought gift, 
and God invites us to respond to it as much as to any of the other gifts 
we have. Time is the opportunity to relate to our sisters and brothers 
whom we know or see, as well as to and with those whom we’ll never know. 
We’re to acknowledge and be aware of all the butterfly-wing type events 
which send ripples across both time and space, ripples that can never be 
retrieved. We HAVE to act within time. That’s a given. But we have to be 
aware of how our use of time, our respect of time has such an impact on 
God’s creation.

	Herod had such a chance to interact with the Holy Family in a positive 
way, but he couldn’t overcome his jealousy and fear of the loss of 
importance and power. He’s the exact opposite of who John the Baptist 
would become. Herod connived to remain controlling, to subvert time to 
his own purposes, and thus forced Joseph, Mary and Jesus to find hope 
and peace elsewhere.

	The Holy Family itself could have ignored the treasure that had been 
entrusted to them, could, somehow, have lost themselves among the people 
of the small country village. But that would have been taking a chance 
with the gift with which God had blessed them.

	They looked to the big picture. They accepted the inconvenience, the 
possible hostility they might experience on foreign soil, the insecurity 
of being speakers of a foreign tongue, not knowing how they’d earn 
enough to eat. They fled to give hope to the young child, hope that He 
would grow up to make his mark on society by listening for God’s word 
and making it his own. Herod, meanwhile, did not leave character, as he 
might have. He saw nothing about the sweep of time other than the 
opportunity to try to bend it to his own will so that he might be 
comfortable in life and famous in death, regardless how anyone else felt 
– even his own family.

	John the Baptist, some twenty-five plus years in the future, would 
submit to time and place and bow to Jesus whose ministry would supercede 
John’s own. John may have been anxious about where life would take him, 
yet he never wavered, he never grasped at time for his own ends, 
choosing deliberately to see it as a means to reveal what humanity might 
become.

	This is getting ahead of ourselves, but I’m sure you see the point. 
It’s about time! Life is about time. Everything we do, and think – or 
don’t do and don’t think – everything has to do with time and accepting 
our place in history. And the interesting thing is that the hinge of 
time is God’s assumption of everything human, God in Christ so that all 
may be reconciled. God who is outside time, yet who created it, God 
assumes all the implications of living within it. Thus God too becomes 
an actor with whom we have to interact.

	This doesn’t mean that everything follows along some predetermined 
path. God’s love is so full, so generous, so free precisely because it’s 
offered to us and WE have to make the choice about what to do with it. 
Do we accept it or reject it? Do we accept it but run with it in a way 
that twists the meaning of it? Do we reject it but act as if we have it 
and are in complete control?

	Time, and how it colours how we look on ourselves, and our friends and 
neighbours, and those whom we don’t know, time can such a challenge. One 
of the great dangers, I fear, is in not being willing to time-dream, to 
hypothesise about the big picture, to see how far we can take the 
message of God’s passionate love and concern.

	The late spiritual counsellor, Henri Nouwen, wrote about “Holding on to 
the Christ”. Mary and Joseph did. They held him tight to themselves for 
all their sakes, but were willing to shelter Him even if it meant 
harassment to themselves. They walked with Jesus through time. They held 
Jesus to themselves so that Love would be nurtured, so that God might 
know what it feels like to be in such a close relationship, and so that 
God’s Love could enfold them for those times of stress.

	Herod wanted to hold Jesus tight too – in a completely different way. 
He had no inclination to nurture Him. He wanted to snuff him out, to 
eradicate anything which would move the king out of the centre of 
attention.

	The Magi – they were somewhat different, though. They held fast to 
their quest to find Truth, and Love, and Life. But then, when they left, 
they didn’t hold on to Jesus physically. They held Him in their hearts 
so that every moment in the remainder of their lives could and would be 
touched with the glow of what they had seen and heard.

	And we need to hold Jesus tightly too. Nouwen wrote, “Life is 
unpredictable. We can be happy one day and sad the next, healthy one day 
and sick the next, rich one day and poor the next, alive one day and 
dead the next. So who is there to hold on to? Who is there to feel 
secure with? Who is there to trust at all times?”

	We know that feeling – of having the wind knocked out of our sails just 
as much as we do of being filled with unexpected love. For our own good, 
for our health and comfort, We need to include Jesus in our time, allow 
Him to direct us.

	Nouwen continued that the only one to whom we can hold with absolute 
confidence is “Jesus, the Christ. He is our Lord, our shepherd, our 
rock, our stronghold, our refuge, our brother, our guide, and our 
friend. He came from God to be with us. He died for us, he was raised 
from the dead to open for us the way to God, and he is seated at God's 
right hand to welcome us home.”

	Therefore, because nothing can come between us and the love of God 
except what we may choose to do ourselves, we’re invited to use our time 
wisely, to see how God’s gift can empower us and everyone else.

	So when we read, as I saw last week in an Israeli newspaper, an article 
about “The religious cleansing of Middle-East Christians”, we’re called 
to respond to the “Melancholy, frustration, outrage, deep pessimism, 
shock and exasperation (which) seem to be the dominant themes when 
experts discuss the plight of Christians in the Middle East. …”

	“Dexter Van Zile, a Christian Media Analyst for the Committee for 
Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, said, ‘The really sick 
part of this picture is that the Christians in the west not only won’t 
come to the defense of the Sunday people in the Muslim world, but 
rather, seem fixated on not letting the Saturday people defend either 
themselves or the Sunday people who live among them. With their western 
enemies behaving so self-destructively, it’s a good time to be a jihadi. 
..

	“‘Western policy makers and politicians have failed to mobilize the raw 
energy of their capitalist economies to stop jihadi attempts to wipe out 
Christians.’”  2

	Time, it seems, is a two-edged sword, and we’d do well to be aware, as 
the Prayer of Confession puts it, of the “things left undone” as much as 
of the “things done”, not forgetting  the things “done on our behalf”.

	Finally, there’s always the danger of not making the most of the time 
we have – the time this very morning, or this afternoon and evening; the 
time we can take today when tomorrow may not allow us to maximise the 
message of the love that God has for everyone.

	What WOULD have happened if the Magi had not acted when they did, and 
HAD gone to report in to Herod? What WOULD have happened if Mary and 
Joseph hadn’t responded in care and taken up residence abroad?

	“What ifs” CAN be burdensome. But, if we learn from them, then we’ll 
understand that life IS about time. And a movie can remind us of this – 
before it’s too late.

NOTES:

1 	“Interstellar”, “The Theory of Everything” and “The Curious Case of 
Benjamin Button”.

2 	“The religious cleansing of Middle East Christians” by BENJAMIN 
WEINTHAL 12/28/2014 
http://www.jpost.com/landedpages/printarticle.aspx?id=385924
 
http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Analysis-The-religious-cleansing-of-Middle-East-Christians-385924

Robert P Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban
PO Box 1556
Albany OR  97321   541-921-1076 (cell)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://stsams.org/pipermail/propertalk_stsams.org/attachments/20150103/aa358c88/attachment.htm>