Category: Mary

the angels are here! look, hear - here!

12/25/2022

image: Gareth Harper on Unsplash

I want to begin by inviting you to look up - Look – here! at this trinity of angels, symbolising Courage, Compassion and Joy. Jyllie Jackson, the artist who with her team created them, saw these as qualities particularly embodied – incarnated indeed – here in our community at Pitt St Uniting Church. Those of us who worship here regularly – can we see ourselves I wonder? It is hard sometimes to see ourselves as others see us! And those of you visiting here today – I wonder what aspects of yourselves you see here in our angels? For they are icons of incarnation...

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breaking and birthing

12/24/2022

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Courage - Compassion – Joy: these are the name of the angels we have, above us, this evening. Courage – Compassion – Joy: gifts of grace which our church community, with others, seeks to share at World Pride here in Sydney next year, and at all times. For Courage – Compassion – Joy: which of these, I wonder, do each of us need at this time, for ourselves, or for others? May these gifts truly enrich us, for they take us to the heart of our celebrations this evening: the very presence of God in humanity, in human birthing. As such, they are pointers to the deepest reality of our lives. As we see the angels above us, see and share light among us, and, above all, see and share bread and wine – the symbols of divine humanity in us – so may we know God’s extraordinary Love, within and beyond us. For the various elements of our Christmas celebration proclaim that, as above, so below and all around, between, and in all possible dimensions, the God of Love is born among us. Tonight, in the great Christian narrative, is the hinge of history, the heart of meaning, and the hallowing of human being. Let me briefly touch on three elements. For the Christian Christmas is a truly extra-ordinary happening, and a profound embodying, which is also ‘not quite nice’…

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a rather ordinary miracle

12/18/2022

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image: Luke Stackpole on Unsplash

Human beings need to sing and dance and feast – and tell stories. This is one reason COVID-19 times have been so hard for us. It is natural for us as a species to gather for ceremony and to share the stories that shape our lives and give them meaning and purpose.

Today we have a story – a story of hesitating and holding and humanity...

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blooming with justice and joy

12/11/2022

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image by brroklyn on unsplash

Christmas-time is so often a confluence of loss and gain. So many of us find that good and tough memories are tangled up. My parents died a year ago this weekend, just as a new child was conceived in my immediate family: a child who will therefore be a new gift among us this Christmas. Yet it is hardly the first time that death and birthing have been entwined. Reflecting on that helps me better understand today’s Gospel and not least Mary’s extraordinary cry of justice, and of joy. As Alla Renee Bozarth brilliantly expresses it in her poem Annunciation, it is a cry of subversive angelic power. No wonder the three large ‘queer’ angels we will shortly welcome from Lismore’s LIghtnUp project are entitled Courage, Compassion, and Joy. For, as Lismore’s wonderful community artist Jyllie Jackson has identified, Courage, Compassion and Joy are core life-giving elements, not only to Queer Pride. They also, vitally, flow out of the Gospel and Magnificat of Mary, and, as Jyllie suggests to us, they are at the core of what the Way of Jesus, and our particular community, is and can be…

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better or best? - beyond the binaries in Luke 10.38-42

7/17/2022

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Martha and Mary: from the JESUS MAFA archive, from Cameroon, a project of Vanderbilt University

This is a well known but in some ways seriously annoying story, and I blame Luke – to say nothing of centuries of largely male, monastic interpretation - which can basically be summarised as ‘Hurrah Mary’ and ‘Boo Martha’. Or more aggressively as ‘stop complaining and pray harder’! Anyone out there feel like they’d like to muster at least a small cheer for Martha? Hurrah! This is a story that has been used as a means of social control in church and state, and a means of silencing the voices of women. For the very way this story is constructed, tends to make us choose sides. So, whether we are sympathising with Martha and feeling she’s a bit hard done by, or cheering Mary for breaking the gender stereotype, it is hard to remain neutral. The story itself sets up the two supposed sisters in opposition to one another...

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living upside down: sharing the light

1/30/2022

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One of my grandchildren was particularly fascinated when I was in England in December. She was trying to grasp how it was night with me when it was daytime in Australia, and how it was so warm here and so cold where I was. One day, she had it sorted. Speaking to Penny on the phone, she loudly proclaimed ‘GranJo is upside down!’ I am not sure whether she thought that I was standing or walking on my head. However, in more than one sense, she was right - not least spiritually. After all, as Acts of the Apostles chapter 17 reminds us, like other early Christians, Paul and Silas were accused of ‘turning the world upside down’. It remains part of our Christian calling and sits well with the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, otherwise known as the feast of Candlemas, which we mark today. Wherever, or whoever, we are in the world, we are all called to ‘live upside down’ in spiritual terms…

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baptised to magnify love

12/5/2021

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photo from Unsplash

Today's baptism was delayed from the end of June by the lockdown this year. It is therefore long awaited. In another way however, it is especially appropriate to take place at this particular time: as we celebrate hope and the embodiment of love, especially with Mary and her extraordinary cry of liberation, typically known as the Magnificat. For the person we baptise is, in my view, a truly remarkable person, and a wonderful embodiment of love: both gentle and fearless, just like Mary, the mother of Jesus. Like each of us, she is a truly special creation of God. In her case, I am deeply humbled and enriched by the love and kindness of her presence, by the deep courage of their journey in life to join us; and by the possibilities and dreams she bears. For, like Mary, in her life and baptism today, she helps birth divine love anew among us. Like Mary, but in her own particular way, she thereby encourages us to magnify God’s love and help make it real among us…

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hope beyond queasiness

11/28/2021

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Visitación, detail from mural at Casa Ave Maria in Managua, Nicaragua

How do you relate to Mary in our Christian tradition? Even mentioning her name opens up a host of feelings and thoughts for so many. As the Danish literary historian Pil Dahlerup rightly said, in an article entitled ‘Rejoice, Mary’:

No woman and no deity in the Middle Ages attracted the poets like the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ. It is, however, hard to read what the poets write about Mary; we are inhibited by prejudices that block our understanding of what the texts are actually saying. Protestants dislike her because she is attributed divinity. Male chauvinists dislike her because she is a woman. Feminists dislike her because she is a woman in a way of which they disapprove. Nationalists dislike her because she represents an alien element in terms of creed and idiom. Marxists dislike her because they do not see her (in the North) as a figure of the people…

Despite this, we cannot avoid Mary in Christian faith. Not least, although women and their lives and gifts are so few and highly gendered in the Bible, Mary simply cannot be erased. So what do we make of her today?...

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Mary – Mother, Mortal and Magnifier

8/15/2020

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Let’s meditate a little on Mary from these four words. For we live in very unsettled times. Times when everything we have known is being overthrown. And in such times. we need Mary – not just as an archetype of womanhood, but as a living, breathing example of the approach we need to life and faith....

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what is OUR donkey?

4/1/2020

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It is Palm Sunday – the crowds are cheering and waving their palms in the air, and Jesus is riding along on the back of a donkey. Now a donkey is not a horse. It is not an animal that signifies power and authority – and though possibly the donkey in Shrek has done something to rehabilitate the donkey as a figure of wisdom, they are still often ridiculed. Victorious Roman generals rode into Jerusalem, through the other gate, on the backs of tall stallions telling the world of the power of Rome and its generals. Jesus by contrast chooses the humble donkey, beast of burden and the Biblical equivalent of a modern day ute.

The donkey was not glamorous, but my goodness it was useful. Have you ever wondered what the disciples would have done if the owner of the donkey had said ‘no’ to the request to share it? Their ‘yes’ was almost as important as the ‘yes’ of that other faithful disciple, Mary, without whom Jesus would not have been born. And why did they agree? - because they were told ‘the Lord needs it’.

‘the Lord needs it.’ That is a beautiful phrase and one that we should sit with this Holy Week. For we do not often consider that God needs us. We know very well of course that we need God. But God needs us too and cannot accomplish what needs to be done without our co-operation and that’s especially true in such a time of crisis as we now face.

I believe that every single one of us has our donkey – that thing, that possession, that talent, that set of connections, that nest egg of money, that calling that God needs. It is the thing that God has given uniquely to us and that God asks of us. It is our ‘donkey’. At some point – maybe at many points – God is going to say to us ‘I need that now.’ And we need to be ready to say to God, ‘Yes of course, here it is, do with it whatever you need.’

So, between now and Easter, let’s talk to God about our donkeys. Let’s ask God, “what’s my donkey? What’s the thing that I have, that you need? Show me how and when to offer it” And if we all do that God will be able to do all kinds of amazing things among us.

Penny Jones, for Palm Sunday, 5 April 2020
(photo by Daniel Fazio for Unsplash)

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<<Previous

the angels are here! look, hear - here!

breaking and birthing

a rather ordinary miracle

blooming with justice and joy

better or best? - beyond the binaries in Luke 10.38-42

living upside down: sharing the light

baptised to magnify love

hope beyond queasiness

Mary – Mother, Mortal and Magnifier

what is OUR donkey?

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