Category: Mary

welcome to the divinity reveal party

12/24/2024

past Christmas focus in St Luke, Toowoomba

Something is missing here. What do you think it is? I mean, I have been involved in these Christmas Eve gigs for a long time. I’m sure there is something I was typically aware of, on Christmas Eve, in the first years of my ministry, which we don’t see around us here…

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so, what about the Virgin Mary?

12/22/2024

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Our Lady, digital print by Alma López (1999)

So, what about the Virgin Mary? How do you relate to the mother of Jesus? What sacred significance do you see in her? Mary has certainly ignited Christian feelings powerfully down the centuries, prompting both profound spiritual warmth and reaction. This continues today. Back in July, for example, a sculpture of Mary was attacked in the Roman Catholic cathedral of Linz in Austria. The figure, designed by Austrian artist Esther Strauss, depicted the Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus. It was beheaded by protestors, who, with others, had complained that it was blasphemous. It was a dramatic instance both of continuing contemporary struggles about religious freedom, and also, a very striking illustration of how women, and female bodies, are at the heart of conflicts over what is powerful and sacred. In the case of the Linz statue, it is important to note that it was part of the DonnaStage art installation project on women’s roles, family images, and gender equality. As we hear Luke’s account of the Annunciation, let us therefore reflect: firstly, on what we inherit from history about Mary; and secondly, on how we ourselves might fruitfully understand Mary’s role in salvation; including on how we might positively understand the doctrine of the Virgin Birth today. Let me begin however with another true story involving attacks on an art work and differing interpretations of Mary, faith, female power and the sacred…

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Joy in the depths

12/17/2023

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I imagine many of us know the old Gospel campfire and children’s song ‘I’ve Got That Joy, Joy, Joy, Down in My Heart.’ The tune itself is upbeat, catchy, and hard to forget. We might even try singing it now, perhaps responsorially:
I’ve got that joy, joy, joy, down in my heart
Where? - Down in my heart?
Where? - Down in my heart to stay.
The song has other verses too, including having ‘the peace that passes understanding’. One version also has one verse about dealing with spiritual distress. It goes like this:
If the devil doesn’t like it, they can sit on a tack
Ouch! - Sit on a tack
Ouch! - Sit on a tack today
Of course, the song is hardly great poetry. It does however reflect the great spiritual gift of Joy which we celebrate today, and which is central both to Mary and the story of Jesus’ birth, and to the spiritual life as a whole…

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Awakening in Advent

12/3/2023

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Enthroned Virgin and Child (1150-1200 France) & Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara in Water Moon Form/Shuivue Guanyin (907-1125 Liao dynasty) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Wake up! Keep awake! These are familiar injunctions in Advent. What however do they mean to us today? What are we to wake up to? And for what is it that we are to keep awake? At the heart of the Advent and Christmas mysteries, is a call to transformation: an invitation to awaken, to recognise what is really going on in ourselves and in the wider world; an invitation to respond, to wake up, to the divine possibilities latent, or birthing, within us. Whether it be through stories and images of wonder and imagination, as in the Christmas angels and the Magi, or in today’s Gospel challenge to see beneath the changes and chances of our immediate existence, we are invited into transformation: the ever-transforming power of divine love and awakening…

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on bowls, sheep and goats

11/26/2023

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I thought it might be helpful this morning to bring along a favourite bowl of mine. It was made by an artist friend Kerry Holland, whose paintings and bowl sculptures on the theme of The Visitation is currently on exhibition in Pitt Street Uniting Church. She also made this one, which she gave to me as a gift when I came out as transgender, affirming my authentic gender identity a few years ago. It is precious to me for that reason but also because, like all of Kerry’s bowl sculptures it is unique, with its own particular shape, story, and constellation of colours. In that sense, it is like each human being: an exquisitely unique and special divine creation. The more I reflect upon that, and upon the nature of a bowl itself, the more I am also drawn into the love of God. So I would like to share with you some ways in which each of us might helpfully use a bowl as a prayerful way into appreciating ourselves and others and holding together what can easily be misused in the Gospel parable (Matthew 25.31ff) which we heard read just now. For, whilst that passage is in some ways quite straightforward in the challenge it offers us, it is also presents some questions, particularly in the way it divides people into two black and white binary groups, one of which receives blessed things and the other total condemnation…

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the angels are here! look, hear - here!

12/25/2022

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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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welcome to the divinity reveal party

so, what about the Virgin Mary?

Joy in the depths

Awakening in Advent

on bowls, sheep and goats

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

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