The Reason for the Season

I must say I am heartily sick of the whole Jesus is the reason for the season routine that I am supposed to be spouting at the moment. Let's get real! In solidarity with my distant pagan ancestors, I have a decorated tree in the corner of my living room and over the next few days fully intend to indulge in the ancient, pre-Christian practices of feasting, giving gifts and singing carols. What's more, I will be doing the whole darned thing on the Saturnalia, December 25. We humans had been celebrating in this way for centuries before we Christians wandered into the festivities, looked around, liked what we saw and surreptitiously forged our name on the bottom of the ownership papers. Of course it is all a load of pagan nonsense, but that's the point really.

Emmanuel. God with us. God fully present in the human condition, as much in the raucous celebration of the Saturnalia as in the witness of a peaceful sunset. As much in the worried crowds on Christmas Eve combing through the bargain racks on George St. as in the half hour of silent prayer. God is not, cannot be absent. Although, of course, our perception of whether God is present or not may change, that is about us and not about God.

When our Christian ancestors first observed our pagan ancestors making plum puddings and putting holly branches in their homes, and were told that all of this was a celebration of the great cycles of nature in which the new life of Spring invariably triumphs over the death of winter, their reaction was not to try and stamp all that stuff out. It was rather, to recognise that the pattern expressed mistily in the cycles of the seasons derived ultimately from the God who made the Heavens and the Earth; and that it was expressed in its fullness and with crystal clarity in the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is responsible for the patterns of the planet he made, and therefore can be discerned in the celebrations of those patterns. The bit our Christian ancestors added was the flabbergasting insight that God is willing to come and be present with us in both pattern and celebration.

Emmanuel. God with us.

I suppose also, our Christian forbears added one thing more important. That is that God is always Emmanuel. Always with us. The purpose of a celebration is not so much to elevate one day above all others but to remind us that every day is an occasion for God to be present with us. "What separates us from God," says Thomas Keating, "Is the idea that we are separated." The celebration of a sacred day is one more small hammer chipping away at that most foolish and most obstinate of ideas.

Comments

Anonymous said…

Merry Christmas Bishop Kelvin,

It's good to be on a similar page, regarding this topic, I believe.

I'm reading your blog with thanks. Certainly, God is always here with 'All' of us.

Church or Chip shop; Christ is with us, & 'God is fully present in the human condition' (Emmanuel.)

Grace is a gift. Our perception, and our action, can't separate or ensure that gift.

It's a gift, and it's not about earning it. It's a done deal, from birth. It's about thanks for the gift. (in my view)

Only in thanks can we do much of anything that makes any sense.
We can't curry God's favour.
We can be aware of God's vast love.

Merry Christmas,

Julian

25 December 2011 at 04:50

gillian said…

Thanks for this. Refreshing and inspiring. As always, of course, but at this time of cliche it was welcome!!

3 January 2012 at 22:33

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...

Why I Hold the Views I Do

St. Hilda's Collegiate School, taken with my phone after a recent meeting. This picture has nothing whatsoever to do with what follows, but I like the interplay of shapes and particularly the shadow on the wall. My mother is a Methodist, liberal in her theological and social opinions. My father was a socialist, just slightly to the left, in his politics, of Karl Marx. My siblings -there are 5 of us- are all bright, eloquent and omnivorous in their consumption of books and other intellectual fodder. One of my most cherished childhood memories is of mealtimes in our little state house. The food was ingested with copious amounts of spirited, opinionated, clever and sometimes informed debate on whatever subject happened to catch the attention of one of the family that day. Or whatever one of us thought might get a rise out of someone else. So, sex, politics and religion it was then - oh and motorbikes, economics, international relations, demographics, cricket, company ownersh...

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...

2 More Years

An autumn leaf, the evidence of the death whereby the grapevine lives and bears fruit There are 31,102 verses in the Bible, or at least in the Protestant version of it which the conservative section of our church recognises. Of these, there are 6 verses which explicitly condemn homosexual practice. The best scholars in the Christian world have pointed out the ambiguity of even these scraps of scripture, but this does not prevent their becoming the basis of an antipathy to contemporary same gender sexuality which I was repeatedly told, during General Synod, was "First Order". I'm not sure what "First Order" means exactly, but I was told that this is a "Salvation Matter". So, presumably, holding a proper view on homosexuality is right up there in importance with belief in the doctrines I would consider foundational for the Christian faith: namely the Holy Trinity, Incarnation and Resurrection. In any event, antipathy to homosexuality has already ...

Available Light

Search This Blog