FIRST SUNDAY OF CHRISTMAS
28th December 2003
QUOTES OF THE WEEK
Christmas is not something which the Church possesses, but is rather God's wonderful gift to the whole human race, symbolised in the racially mixed, religiously varied and economically insecure world into which God climbs though his own back door at Bethlehem."
Kenneth Stevenson
He had a thin vague beard - or rather, he had a chin on which a large number of hairs weakly curled and clustered to cover its retreat.
Max Beerbohm
NUTS
A man walked into a pub and noticed that he was the only one there, apart from a bartender talking on the phone. The bartender signalled to him that he would be with him in a minute. The man nodded and waited at the bar. Suddenly he heard a little voice say: "Hey, you're looking pretty sharp today. New suit?" The man looked around, but couldn't see anyone else in the place. He heard the voice again. "Seriously, you are looking good, mate. Have you lost weight?" The man looked around again, and still didn't see anyone. "Hello?" he asked. "Is someone speaking to me?" "You bet! I just had to say that I thought you were looking great!" Other tiny voices suddenly rose in agreement. The man realised now that these voices were coming from a bowl of beer nuts on the bar in front of him. He stared at them as the bartender finally hung up and came to serve his only customer. "What will you have?" he asked. "Oh, a glass of beer, I reckon," muttered the man, still staring at the nuts. Then finally he looked up at the bartender pouring his beer, "What's the deal with these nuts?" he asked. The bartender brought the beer over, set it before him and said: "They're complimentary!"
PIGS
Fr Andrew
I have a soft spot for pigs. This could be one of the most Christian things about me. All Christians should have a soft spot for the underpig. And pigs are always and most unfairly being insulted by unfavourable comparisons to human beings! So why not make pigs the subject of a pew sheet article?
Pigs are attractive and comical animals. They are very clean. If you allow them enough space in their sties they will never lie or sleep in their own muck, which is more than can be said for donkeys, horses and cows. When a boy I discovered that they have a taste for lumps of coal. Throw into a pig's sty a nog of clean black coal and he'll crunch and crackle it down with relish, as if it were a lump of butterscotch.
The pig in ancient Palestine was the domestic animal only of non-Jews and bad Jews. To the Jew the pig was an unclean animal and they would no sooner eat it or sacrifice it than they would a dog.
We don't know why the pig come to be condemned in the Law as unclean. No reason is given in the bible. Most of the nations round about had no scruples about eating or sacrificing pigs. Among the Babylonians the meat was sacred to various gods, and could be eaten at certain feasts. Among the Syrians it was sacred to the god Tammuz. Among the Egyptians the meat was usually taboo, but could be eaten at certain times. Among the Greeks it was the most sacrificed of all animals.
Perhaps the Jewish Law rejected the pig just because of this. Rejection expressed a revulsion from the habits of the nations around the Jews.
The references in the bible to pigs, as you would expect, are not usually complimentary. The wild pig is mentioned for its destructiveness. Apparently it still exists in Palestine, because of course few people will hunt it to eat. In Proverbs there is the striking image of a beautiful woman without discretion being like a golden ring in a pig's snout.
The parable of the Prodigal Son in the New Testament has the younger son becoming a keeper of pigs. This expresses extreme degradation for a Jew. Also in the New Testament is the strange story of the man called Legion possessed by demons. When he is healed by Jesus the demons take possession of a herd of pigs and the pigs gallop over a cliff to their destruction in the sea.
My favourite reference is in St Matthew's Gospel. There Jesus says that pearls are not to be thrown to swine. I love this reference because only too often the beauty of the Gospel and of God are indeed presented to people, who like pigs with pearls, have not the slightest inclination, capacity or will to appreciate them, let alone respond appropriately to them.
Because I am fond of pigs and so naturally feel guilty about my love of pork, I leave my piggy subject on a complimentary note to pigs: the famous Irish ditty which goes as follows:
It was an evening in November,
as I very well remember,
I was strolling down the street
in drunken pride,
But my knees were all aflutter,
and I landed in the gutter
And a pig came up and lay down by my side.
Yes I lay there in the gutter
thinking thoughts I could not utter
When a colleen passing by did softly say:
"Ye can tell a man that boozes
by the company he chooses..."
And the pig got up and walked away.
THE SWEETEST THEOLOGY OF ALL
If fundamentalism drives you, as it does me, crazy, in either its protestant or catholic forms; if sometimes the thin theology of John Spong make a good deal more sense to you, as it does to me, than that of many of his opponents, though you wonder, nonetheless, whether the boundaries of his liberal theology are not so absurdly nebulous as to allow unbelief into belief and atheism into theism; if, like me, you wonder whether it is possible to make any sort of intellectual sense of Christianity in a recognisably traditional form, then you need to read John Austin Baker. In 1970 he published a book called "The Foolishness of God" which sets out the Christian Faith in a rigorously argued, elegantly styled and beautiful way that moves not only the mind but also the heart. It has become a classic of its kind and was some years ago reprinted by Dartman Longman and Todd. It saved me, I think, for the faith, way back in the early seventies, because although in many ways very radical, it is still, at root, recognisably and profoundly the orthodox faith, but the orthodox faith set out with a coherence and honesty second to none. It also helped gain me a First in one of my New Testament papers, for I regurgitated his arguments with the devotion of a true disciple! I used to go and hear him preach when I was on leave in London in the late seventies, the only sermons I have ever found truly spell-binding. He was at the time a Canon of Westminster Abbey and Rector of St Margaret's Westminster. He became Chairman of the English Doctrine Commission and also Bishop of Salisbury, retiring from the latter post a few years ago. He is six foot four and a delightful man.
There follows an excellent article on the Incarnation by him which appeared in the "Church Times" some years ago..... (AN)
....WHO IS GOD
AND LORD OF ALL
(By John Austin Baker)
And is it true? And is it true
This most tremendous tale of all....
John Betjeman's fondly familiar words frame the question centuries and civilisations have asked, the question that Christian theologians themselves have worked and reworked with particular intensity for the last 100 years or more. For some indeed the issue has become not "Is it true?" but "Is what true?" Whose reconstructed picture of Jesus can we trust, if any? What meaning can the images of early Christian faith in him have for us?
For Western Christians the pressure is increased not only by living in a secularised society but also by sharing that society with devotees of other world faiths. The classic Christian doctrine of incarnation, claiming Jesus as the man who was and is God in a unique sense, makes religious neighbourliness an awkward pursuit. Might the doctrine be modified to make it more companionable? What of spiritual substance would we lose if it were?
Let me begin by stating my own conviction in the matter. For me, Jesus is God living a human life from conception to death, and through death to the completeness of resurrection existence. Or, since God is Trinity, that ought perhaps to be phrased more precisely to say that in Jesus we see in human terms the life of God. The relationship of Jesus of Nazareth to God as "Abba, Father" is the "enhumanising" (to render the Nicene Creed literally) of the eternal mutual love between the Father and the Son. The way in which the life of Jesus was created, shaped, guided and empowered by the Holy Spirit was the working out in the conditions of this world of the way the love at the heart of God has always flowed out to create, sustain and perfect all existence.
Springing from this doctrine I see six principal streams of insight and transformation, not all of which, it must be said, have been welcomed or developed or even recognised by the Church.
First, by entering the human race God became kith and kin to every human soul, past, present and future. In the words of St Leo: "Herein lies the greatest of God's gifts, that humankind may call God their Father and Christ their Brother." The incarnation means that every human being is from the first moment of his or her existence a child of God and a brother or sister of his Son. We are all God's family by his own initiative. It is pure grace. Faith is the moment in which we recognise that, because of Jesus, we already are God's beloved children, and respond with gratitude and joy. Likewise baptism is (or should be) the sacramental act in which, on behalf of particular individuals, the church celebrates and acknowledges this prior adoption by God, and incorporates them into the community of faith.
Second, we learn that in human nature even God can be his essential self. This has two major implications. One is for the potential of our own humanity. Whatever our technological cleverness, harsh experience tempts us to despair of our moral and spiritual possibilities. But if, while authentically one of us, even God could be true to his own moral character, those possibilities must be enough for all our needs. Moreover, this is true of men and women as human beings, not just as Christians. The Christian gospel is that God has healing and liberation for all the diseases and distortions of our imprisoned selves; but it also teaches us to look for goodness and wisdom in all human beings, Christian or not.
The other implication is that if God could be truly himself within the limitations of humanity, then the heart of what it means to be God cannot be such things as immortality or infallibility or cosmic power. It cannot even lie in awareness of one's own divinity, for if Jesus had been conscious of being God he could never have been truly human. The heart of God's being must be something we can share; and that is love, the love which surrenders self, and accepts limitation and suffering for the good of others. Here and nowhere else are we to look for the true image of God.
Third, the particular historical circumstances of the incarnation show that God's concern is with the whole life of the world, not just with some limited department called religion. "God so loved the world...."; "God was in Christ reconciling the world...." That was why God prepared a nation which had nothing corresponding to a Church. Israel believed that God's law was for every aspect of life and work, and that community sprang from living all life in covenant with him. When, in Jesus, God shared our human life, it was in that setting that he did so.
Fourth, by incarnation God enters into the whole range of human experience, including suffering, both mental and physical, and death itself. God's eternal, divine relation to pain and evil is a mystery; but here we see him enduring them as we have to endure them within our own limited horizons: "My God, my God, why have you deserted me?" Jesus did not undergo every type of suffering; no individual person can. But the very fact that here was God not just sympathising or even empathising with us in our agonies from outside, but sharing what it can be like for us, revolutionises our whole attitude to him. It does not solve the problem of pain and evil, but it does help us to trust where we cannot understand. And of all the gods on offer in the world the crucified Christ is the one of whom this is true.
This is perhaps the point of deepest divide from other faiths. On the one hand there are those who, in Karl Rahner's words, "have seen through their tears the everlasting stars of love and peace because in their faith they knew, ‘the, the eternal meaning of the world, the Word, has wept with me, he too has drunk of the chalice'." On the other, we have those like the Muslim who said to me: "I could never respect a God who allowed men to treat him like that."
Which brings us to the fifth consideration, God's making himself vulnerable to us, and his response to the suffering we inflicted on him - and still inflict through our sabotage of the possibilities of good in his world, our addictions to the perversions of evil. What that response is we see in the return of the Crucified on the first Easter Day with the greeting of "Peace!" Faith in the incarnation assures us, as the ambiguities of history never could, that nothing we can do to reject God or to harm his purposes will lessen his loving will of forgiveness toward us. Ultimate judgement may well turn on whether pride and self-engrossment can accept that forgiveness; but the offer will be made.
Sixth, in the resurrection of the incarnate Son we catch a glimpse of God's possibilities for the material order. Today we are increasingly aware of our humanity as the field of a constant interaction between body and spirit. Easter holds out the promise that, where human life has been lived in openness to the divine will of love, the body itself can be transformed to share in the divine glory; and why should not some similar principle apply to the whole creation? Were humankind to fulfil its calling as God's stewards of the earth, extending his kind of love to all creatures, who can say what transformation of Nature might be possible, both now and in that new world of which Easter was a foreshowing?
In the Confessions St Augustine tells how, in the writings of the Platonists, he read many truths about God, "but that `the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us' I read not there." Still today this affirmation of God's humble, loving identification with us sets Christianity apart from all other faiths, and draws souls with an appeal that will not be gainsaid.
Teach that Jesus was but a man uniquely pleasing to God, and that appeal has gone, but so has much of the dynamic of the incarnation for human life. To review our six themes: do we acknowledge all humankind as God's children? Do we look expectantly for wisdom and goodness in non-Christians? Have we not specialised in religion rather than in the needs of the world? Do we imitate God's vulnerability by our forgiveness, by our being alongside the poor and sinful and rejected? Is concern for the creation, both animals and the environment, a mark of the Church?
"God is known in so far as he is loved," ran the old maxim. The answer to question, "And is it true?" will only be found insofar as "this most tremendous tale of all" takes possession of our hearts and lives.
CONGRATULATIONS
Congratulations to Bill Kuehnapfel who celebrates his birthday on Tuesday the 30th and to Jeanette Smith who celebrates hers on Sunday the 4th January. Also to Mason James Tucker to be baptized today, the son of Hayden and Debra Tucker.
ROSTERS
Next week we will be preparing Rosters for next year and so today is your last chance to put down your name for any rostered duty or pleasure
ST. AUGUSTINE'S OLD TIME DANCE
Wednesday Dec. 31st. New Years Eve: If you are attending please bring a plate of slice or cake (sandwiches are being catered for)
BLESSING THE CHAIR
The beautiful Celebrant's Chair in the sanctuary is a gift from Hugh Oakes' family in his memory. We will be blessing this chair this Sunday. Welcome to visiting members of this fine priest's family.
THANK YOU
Thank you to my loving friends for all your kind throughts, prayers and visits during my recent stay in hospital. God bless you all.... Joan O'Reilly
PRAYER
A new prayer list will be started on the 1st. January. Those who have requested continuing prayers will be transferred to the January list. Please make a point of checking for continuing prayers also for those who now do not require our prayers.
Prayer List
Liam Bognar, Jack Clarke,Joyce Clark, Nell Dent, Adie Edwards, Sheila Edwards, Rita Esam, Nance Evans, Neil Feldtman, Peg Galt, Iris Grant, the Harrison Family, Jean Hastie, Fr Wayne Ireland, Joy Merrigan,Ann Mills, Sue N, Joan O'Reilly, Julieanne Ross-Soden, Rodger Saville, Gwen & Bob Scott, T. Scott, G. Scott, M.Scott, E. Scott, Troy Scott, Wayne Skinner, Peter & Eva Swindells, Vera Stolz, Des Walker, May Wallace, Brian Ward, Clare Wilkie, Bruce, Natalie & baby Alexandra, David, Emily, Faith, Gary, Heidi, Hunter & family, Jaclyn, Martin, Midge.
Rest In Peace
Kim Chapman, Gwen Hounslow, David Rossiter, Craig Siely, Chloe Schaper
Anniversary of Death
Pamela Ball, Alec Steen, Esme Dennis 28th, Rosaline Gluning 31st.
IMPORTANT DATES
Jan 10th Wedding 4.30pm
Jan 10th Wedding 6.00pm
Feb 7th Wedding 2.00pm
Feb 7th Wedding 3.30pm
Feb 14th Wedding 3.00pm
Feb 25th Ash Wednesday and AGM
April 11th Easter Day
May 18th - 21st Annual Priests' Retreat
May 28th -29th Synod
Jun 5th Ugandan Martyrs - Breakfast
Nov 13th Parish Fair
THIS WEEK
Monday December 29th Thomas of Canterbury
7.45am Mattins & Eucharist - Lady Chapel
2.30pm Funeral - Gwen Hounslow
5.30pm Evening Prayer
Tuesday December 30th
7.45am Mattins & Eucharist - Lady Chapel
5.30pm Evening Prayer
Wednesday December 31st New Year's Eve
7.45am Mattins - Lady Chapel
8.45am Pine Road Nursing Home
10.00am Eucharist - St Augustine's
11.00am Banksia Lodge
1.30pm Hakea Lodge
5.30pm Evening Prayer
Thursday January 1st Naming of Jesus
7.45am Mattins & Eucharist - Lady Chapel
5.30pm Evening Prayer
Friday January 2nd
7.45am Mattins & Eucharist - Lady Chapel
Saturday January 3rd
7.45am Mattins & Eucharist - Lady Chapel
5.30pm Evening Prayer
Sunday December 28th Christmas One
8.00am Mattins - Lady Chapel
8.30am Sung Eucharist - St Augustine's
9.00am Eucharist - St Luke's Dookie
10.30am Eucharist - St Augustine's
10.45am Eucharist - St Mary's Katandra West.
5.30pm Evening Prayer