Pen and Ink Reflections - Pen and Ink Reflections

on elf pilots and dianellas

12/15/2024

Do you remember the twelve days of Christmas? No, I don’t mean the song. I mean the time when the festival of Christmas began around Christmas Eve and ran through to the eve of Epiphany, otherwise known as twelfth night. That is where the song comes from of course, alongside the tradition, now long gone in many places that used to practice this, of taking Christmas decorations down before January 6. Today, in contemporary Australia, the Christmas season seems to start at the beginning of November and is essentially declared over before the feast of St Stephen, aka Boxing Day. This year this has been vividly illustrated by the Wundrful World of Christmas,[1] which opened near us on the corner of York and Market Streets on 8 November and continues until Christmas Eve. Complete with helpful elf pilots – mainly friendly students and backpackers needing a job – it is billed as ‘an epic animated walk-through immersive experience and journey to the North Pole’, with ‘stunning’ VFX and CGI, and tickets from $25 but free to under 3s, all coming with a free Santa letter pack and complimentary North Pole digital family photo. No, sadly, especially for our treasurer, I am not getting a commission! What it does give me however are three questions. Firstly, in that context, and many other such lively things, what are our churches doing in marking the ecclesiastical season of Advent? Secondly, how, in doing so, are we engaging with the contexts in which we live? And, thirdly, and not least, what has the message of John the Baptist we hear today (in Luke 3.7-18) to say to our world?

disrupting divorce, defending the discardable

10/6/2024

‘anyone who divorces and marries another commits adultery’ – what are we to do with these words that sound so condemning? Is there any good news here for those who have divorced or are contemplating divorce? Should those, Penny, like you and me, who’ve been married nearly forty years, just be thanking our lucky stars? How do we read this troublesome text?

disturbing the peace

7/14/2024

Giovanni di Paolo, “St. John the Baptist in Prison Visited by Two Disciples,” ca. 1455-1460 (photo: Public Domain)

Try as I might, I have always found John the Baptist to be an off-putting, and certainly a disturbing, figure in the Christian story. And I have tried. For I was ordained deacon in St John at Hackney, a church named after John the Baptist, and I served in the community there. Each year, we would have our patronal festival, and try to find ways to see how the Baptist could relate to our usual church life. To be honest, it was easier than in the past. For St John at Hackney was originally a very high society church – indeed, the focal borough church in Hackney - and its impressive churchyard still contains many notable figures, such as the Baden Powell family, from whom the worldwide scouting movement issued. By the 1980s however, Hackney was both London’s poorest and most multicultural borough, and our congregation was very different; all part of the Anglican Church’s journey in the inner cities from being the church of ‘the great and the good’ to being one of the ‘marginal and the odd’. Over half of our congregation also drew their origins from West Africa or the West Indies. Well, maybe John the Baptist might have felt somewhat at home, being on the prophetic margins of his society. Yet his appearance and demeanour would still have marked him out. Indeed, even some of the more radical and vibrant of our congregation would have struggled with some of his language of repentance and its tone. Similarly, I suspect that we would not be wholly comfortable with him here. For John the Baptist was most certainly a ‘disturber of the peace’ in very uncomfortable ways. Indeed, the story of his violent death we heard this morning is hardly the most attractive within the Bible. So what do we make of it, and of the Baptist’s significance within our faith journey?...

beginning beloved

1/7/2024

image by Josh Eckstein on Unsplash

Some of you may have noticed a change to our worship space today. The baby has gone – transformed it seems into a scallop shell. I am passing it around among you as I speak and I invite you to hold it for a few moments if you wish...
...Now, what strange alchemy is this, you may ask? What does this signify? We’ll come back to that. For now, just be aware that we are being subtly, and not so subtly, redirected, from the outer to the inner; from the seen to the unseen; from creation to re-creation; from the incarnation to the resurrection. This is a theological progression that demands that we go back to the beginning – to the creation of light in the story of Genesis as we heard, and to the beginning of the gospel as the author of Mark proclaims it just a couple of verses earlier than today’s text, ‘the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God’...

disturbing angels in the wilderness

12/4/2022

Angels by Marek Piwicki on Unsplash

John the Baptist is an angel. This is explicit in the biblical text, where Mark writes of them, quoting Isaiah, “behold I send my messenger ahead of you” – and the word used for messenger (as everywhere in the Greek text) is angelos - angel! John the Baptist probably does not fit the picture we have of an angel – no wings, no obvious glowing light, no message of peace. But he’s an angel. He’s pretty unmissable – wild, eccentric to say the least, and certainly not welcome at the average family tea table. As Jo has written in her brief Biblical commentaries in Insights for this season, “If he was a toddler someone might suggest his emotions were disregulated by his diet and he needed to calm down and get a good night’s sleep! Yet, his prophetic voice is one we cannot ignore. He reminds us that there is always a place for righteous anger and that sometimes the new and better requires actions of clearing and letting go that can be painful and disturbing to some. His voice acts as corrective to tendencies in some Christian circles to associate the gospel with niceness or respectability. John was not respectable. But his message was essential.” His was the message of a disturbing angel calling us to change.

silence, dreams, and strength

12/12/2021

Henri Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest, once said that “somewhere we know that without silence, words lose their meaning”. When there is silence, words also become infinitely more powerful. An enfleshed Word, like an infant Jesus – remembering that the word ‘infant’ comes from the Greek for ‘not speaking’ – carries most meaning of all; ‘the Word without a word’ as T.S Eliot expressed it in his poem Ash Wednesday...

'with you I am well pleased'

1/7/2021

Do you feel that God is pleased with you? I do hope so, though I know that at times I myself have not been sure about that, and it is an area with which many people struggle. We are in the season of epiphany – the season of revelation, which is what epiphany means. Our readings for the next few weeks reveal something of who Jesus is. But in doing so, they also reveal something of who we are and who we have the capacity to become.

the voice that calls us home

12/6/2020

Today, the second Sunday of Advent is traditionally devoted to the prophets – and in particular to the voices of second Isaiah and of John the Baptist as recorded by Mark’s gospel. Those voices, spanning the centuries, call us home from various kinds of exile...

the things that ignore us save us

9/16/2020

The contemporary mystic Andrew Harvey once wrote that ‘the things that ignore us save us in the end. Their presence awakens silence in us.’ I have been pondering this week whether this is what all wild places have in common, whether they be the Australian outback, other deserts, mountain places or wilderness forest. Regardless of the particularity of their wildness, wild places ignore us – in a healthy and health-giving way. In a wild place we cease, as human creations, to be at the centre of our own worldview and become aware of all that is beyond us. As the American Presbyterian theologian Belden C. Lane expresses it in his great work “The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: exploring desert and mountain spirituality”: 'There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul. They heal, as well as mirror, the brokenness we find within.' When we find ourselves bereft of human company and resources, then we find ourselves in a place to let go of the demands of ego, the trivialities of our everyday lives, and to receive something of the incalculable and transforming presence of God...

coming out into the light from above

4/27/2017

Today's Gospel (John 3.31-36) appears very abruptly in the text of John's Gospel. Indeed some commentators have even considered whether they are words of John the Baptist. For he has just been speaking and there is no change of speaker indicated. Yet they seem to me all of a part with the Johannine figure of Christ and its high christology Key themes of the Gospel are indeed included in it. Let me turn to them in a moment. Firstly however, as Penny observed, at yesterday's eucharist, about an earlier passage in this same chapter 3 of John, these words clearly come from a context of conflict...