‘Tree of Life’ (2009), Scott Rasman
https://artaugratin.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/new-works-tree-of-life/
Ezekiel 17:22-24
22-24 “‘God, the
Master, says, I personally will take a shoot from the top of the towering
cedar, a cutting from the crown of the tree, and plant it on a high and towering
mountain, on the high mountain of Israel. It will grow, putting out branches
and fruit—a majestic cedar. Birds of every sort and kind will live under it.
They’ll build nests in the shade of its branches. All the trees of the field
will recognize that I, God, made the great tree small and the small tree
great, made the green tree turn dry and the dry tree sprout green branches.
I, God,
said it—and I did it.’”
* * *
Luke 1:39-55
39 In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in
the hill country, 40 where she entered the house of
Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. 41 When Elizabeth
heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled
with the Holy Spirit 42 and exclaimed with a loud
cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. 43 And
why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? 44 For
as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for
joy. 45 And blessed is she who believed that there
would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
46 And Mary said,
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
48 for he has looked with favour on the
lowliness of his servant.
Surely,
from now on all generations will call me blessed;
49 for the Mighty One has done great
things for me,
and
holy is his name.
50 His mercy is for those who fear him
from
generation to generation.
51 He has shown strength with his arm;
he
has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
52 He has brought down the powerful
from their thrones,
and
lifted up the lowly;
53 he has filled the hungry with good
things,
and
sent the rich away empty.
54 He has helped his servant Israel,
in
remembrance of his mercy,
55 according to the promise he made to
our ancestors,
to
Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
A
‘cutting’ of tree wisdom: ‘Deck the Halls’ (Genny Tunbridge)
In the Christmas story,
trees don't appear - unless shepherds sheltered beneath windswept trees on the
hillside, or the manger-crib was made from rough logs, eyed critically by
Joseph the carpenter. Yet for most of us today (Christians as much as anyone else)
it's hard to imagine Christmas celebrations without a tree. What do they mean
for us? For some it's about memories and family traditions - decorations
brought out every year, some gifts, some hand-made reminders of children now
grown up; or the expedition to select and bring home the tree.
The tradition goes back a
long way. Fir trees with baubles are a relatively modern import (brought from
Germany 200 years ago), but for many centuries before that in Britain and
Northern Europe evergreen branches, particularly holly, were brought indoors to
decorate for the midwinter festivities ('Deck the halls…') and great Yule logs
(real ones, not chocolate-covered cakes!) were burned in fireplaces throughout
the 12 days of Christmas. Evergreen leaves, and the light and warmth of burning
wood, were both valued symbols in pre-Christian times representing the life and
light of the sun, beginning to conquer the darkness after the winter solstice
was past. When the early church adopted the winter festival to celebrate the
birth of Jesus, these symbols of winter comfort and joy took on added layers of
meaning as reminders of God's evergreen love and the light of Christ come into
the world.
The holly
bears a prickle
As sharp as any thorn;
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
On Christmas Day in the morn.[1]
Real Christmas trees have
a lower carbon footprint than artificial trees, particularly if locally sourced
and responsibly disposed of. The National Trust #TreesUp campaign is inviting
anyone to share photos of their decorated tree (or houseplant) and make a
donation towards planting new trees: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/trees-up
‘The unchristmas tree’, by Rosie Miles & Nicola Slee
The unchristmas tree has no lights
except what filters through its spaces
no tinsel
except its own astringent needles
no star
except those caught in its branches
no presents
except the gifting of itself
The unchristmas tree costs nothing at
all
except the grace to notice where it grows
Introduction
to the theme (Al Barrett)
We’ve almost got there! Three weeks of Advent down, and
Christmas is in sight. We’re also on Week 25 of our ‘Trees of Life’ journey of
exploring and deepening, together, our Christian discipleship – the words we’ve
used to describe the many different ways in which each of us, individually and
collectively, tries to respond faithfully to God’s call to ‘seek justice, love
with kindness, and walk humbly with our God’ (Micah 6:8). We’ve reached a
natural stopping point – which is also an exciting new beginning!
Without regularly gathering all together, it’s been almost
impossible to know what impact these reflections – written and spoken – over
the last 9 months, have had on each and every one of you reading them and
listening to them. I’ve had some feedback along the way, which has been really
encouraging – but much of what we’ve shared has been a leap of faith, trusting
that it will turn out to be helpful, in all kinds of ways that are hard to even
imagine, let alone predict!
In the new year (starting on 3rd January), we’ll
take up the journey once again, taking the time between Christmas and Pentecost
(in late May) to walk with Jesus from his birth in Bethlehem, to his death in
Jerusalem – and beyond death, on the freshly-trodden paths of resurrection
life.
But for now, we’re on the cusp of that birth. Advent, the
time of waiting and watching, is nearly over. The one we have been longing for,
hoping for, is nearly with us, again and anew. The kingdom that, as the poet
R.S. Thomas puts it, has for so long seemed ‘a long way off’, is within
touching, breathing distance – and with it, perhaps, the possibility that our
other deep hopes and longings might also find their fulfilment, even if not
now, then in a time that is bearable – in God’s good time, we might say.
We have heard a lot, in the last few weeks, about both
judgment and hope: both the cutting down of the ‘high and lofty’, and the
raising up of tender, new, green shoots – even from tree stumps that seem dead
and beyond hope. Today, those visions come within a hair’s breadth of becoming
reality. For the prophet Ezekiel, the little cutting becomes a majestic tree,
full of life – what begins as God’s promise (‘I personally will…’) turns into a
done deal (‘I, God, said it – and I did it.’). And likewise, for the
spirit-filled, prophetic Mary, what the prophets of her ancestors so often framed
as a future coming, she (like her foremother Hannah many years before) announces
as a present reality: ‘He has brought down the powerful from their
thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good
things, and sent the rich away empty’). The world has been turned
upside-down. The kin-dom of God has arrived.
As the poet Jan Richardson puts it: ‘Mary knows that some
things are so outrageous that sometimes we have to talk about them as if they
have already happened in order to believe they could ever come about. And so if
we believe that God has brought justice to the world, we live that justice, and
we share in making the world more just. If we believe that God has brought healing
to the world, we live that healing, and we share in making the world more
whole.’
And how does Mary know? She knows because she has come to
visit her cousin Elizabeth, and even as she calls her greeting, the child in
Elizabeth’s womb has leaped for joy. She knows because the same Spirit that
surrounded and brooded over her, has filled Elizabeth too: cousin greets
cousin, prophet encounters prophet, unborn child recognises unborn child. The
Holy Spirit, the breath of life, the wind of creation, the ‘Go-Between God’,
stirs within fleshy bodies, between blessed and beloved servants of God, and
for a moment, at least, the kin-dom of God has taken flesh, and joy abounds!
Jan Richardson again: ‘Hope starts small, even as a seed
in the womb, but it feeds on outrageous possibilities. It beckons us to step
out with the belief that the action we take will not only bear fruit but that
in taking it, we have already made a difference in the world. God invites us,
like Mary, to open to God’s radical leading, to step out with sometimes
inexplicable faith, trusting that we will find sustenance.’
As we approach this Christmas – feeling separations sharply,
longing for a ‘more’ that is, for the moment at least, out of reach – may we
feel the wind’s breath on our cheeks, know the Spirit’s connecting power
bridging our distances from each other, feel Mary and Elizabeth’s joy bubble up
from deep within us, and find ourselves, if only for fleeting Moments, walking
‘haphazard by starlight’ (to use U.A. Fanthorpe’s breathtaking phrase) into the
kin-dom of heaven.
Reflection (Gloria Smith)
In school, one of the skills
small children are asked to do is to put a story into the correct sequence. It
demonstrates understanding of the story but also an ability to remember in the
correct order. If I asked you to put the Nativity story in order, I wonder what
you would say? I think generally there is a recognised order to the story and
it starts with today’s reading from Luke. But I wonder if you realise this is
an amalgam of two versions, one from Matthew’s gospel and the other from
Luke’s. I would suggest that for today’s theme of ‘God’s upside kingdom-coming in Jesus’ the differences in the two
versions is really significant, not only for then but also for us today.
Matthew’s account begins
with the genealogy of Jesus, identifying that it can be traced back through the
prophets and kings to Abraham demonstrating not only his Jewish lineage, but
also his connection to royalty and power. We have to remember scholars believe
Matthew was written from a Jewish perspective as that gave authenticity for the
claim Jesus was the Messiah promised in the Hebrew Scriptures. This is then
followed by a visitation of an angel to Joseph, the birth of Jesus and then a
visit by the Wise Men who visited them not in a stable but in a house. The Wise Men gave gifts fit for a
king and Mary and Joseph escaped to Egypt after Herod threatened to kill Jesus
as he saw him as a threat to his kingdom.
Luke’s version has a
different feel to it. It is almost all in an upside-down world. After the angel
visits Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, the angel visits Mary in
Nazareth. A small inconsequential village ‘up north’ you might say, of no
significance to anyone other than those who live there. Gabriel tells her she
will be having a baby and how special he will be. In those Jewish times the importance
of women was generally in providing children, not receiving such a message from
God. Only when Mary has agreed does the angel visit Joseph. Another upside-down
moment. The angel gets Mary’s agreement before
he visits Joseph, suggesting very much Mary is a willing participant. The story
then moves to a visit by Mary to her cousin Elizabeth who is also having a
baby, John the Baptist. This results in a long conversation between the two
women where Elizabeth recognises Mary as the mother of ‘my Lord’. Mary responds with the Magnificat, stating what God is
intending to do. Another upside-down moment, as it involves a long conversation
between the two women about worldly matters, but we will return to the
Magnificat later.
When Jesus is born, it is
(in Luke’s version) in a stable as we traditionally know – but this is the Son
of God! This continues this upside-down account and is more so when Luke writes
about a visit from shepherds. A choir of angels appeared to the shepherds in
the field and they were told to go and visit the new baby, the Messiah. In
those days, shepherds were loners spending much of their time in the open
spaces with their sheep and were not particularly welcomed by village people.
But, interestingly again a message from God, not to the rich and powerful but
to the marginalised.
All of this narrative
begs the question: Why did God use an
ordinary young girl from a nondescript
northern village in Galilee to give birth to the Son of God, when he could have
been born of a wealthy rich Jerusalem family and had a much easier and safer
start to his life?
I think the answer lies
in the Magnificat that you heard today. Mary talks of God bestowing upon her
this great honour because she is ‘lowly’.
According to the feminist theologian Jane H. Schaberg it is ‘a personal, social, moral and economic
document’. It begins by vindicating Mary by honouring her as she says ‘all generations
shall call me blessed’. Mary then goes on to say that God ‘scatters the proud’ and ‘brings the powerful down from their
thrones’, ‘lifts up the lowly’
and ‘fills the hungry with good things’
and ‘sends the rich away empty’.
Radical, subversive ideas. It is precisely because of whom she is that God
chooses her. Not a rich daughter of a powerful politician or religious leader
but a young girl from an inconsequential place betrothed to a carpenter. Out of
the mouth of Mary came this earth-shattering statement about God’s mission in
our world. These words that she speaks are huge upside down, world order
changing words that signify the reason why Jesus came in human form. To be
alongside not the rich and the powerful but the poor, the marginalised and the
oppressed. Karen O’Donnell, another feminist theologian, says the Magnificat is
‘a radical declaration of the mode of
God’s interaction with the world, in which God is on the side of the poor and
oppressed.’ She goes on to say that every time it is said at Evening Prayer
it is reminding us of ‘God’s intention to
disrupt the established order’. In effect it declares right at the
beginning of Luke’s gospel what God intentions are in sending Jesus into the
world. And I would say if we only had Luke’s version of the birth of Jesus,
where all the players are poor and where the message of God to the world is
given through this young girl it would become really obvious about God’s
purpose and longing for our world.
Reading the Hebrew bible
from Ezekiel, this message is re confirmed:
‘I bring low the high tree, I make
high the low tree,
I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish.’
The metaphor is really
clear. Commentators write of a message of hope when a new king comes, the
messiah, and a new kingdom will begin, and that kingdom will raise up the lowly
and bring down the mighty.
So if it is true that God wants to disrupt the world order
then does that mean as followers of Jesus that is what we should help to bring
about?
I think it does. Mary
speaks to us today as much as she spoke to Elizabeth back then. We have to hear
the message anew. As I was brought up Anglo- catholic I used to know this off
by heart but it is really important that we listen to what Mary is saying. Not
just listen and say the words, but to take them into our hearts and help to
bring about their reality. We need to become God’s agents in the world to
challenge, to disrupt and to turn this world upside down with messages of God’s
desire – to re-create an upside-down kingdom that was always her intention.
Reflection (Ruth Harley)
Some years ago, I was at an event where, as an
ice-breaker, we were asked to tell each other what our favourite passage from
the Bible was, and why. I wonder what your answer would be to that question? My
answer was – and is – the passage which is part of today’s gospel reading: the
Magnificat, the song of Mary.
For me, this is, one of those pieces of scripture
which has made its way deep into my bones. It has somehow become part of me,
and it has shaped who I am and who I am becoming in all sorts of ways. It has
done that partly through repetition. I have said or sung or heard it almost
every day for most of my adult life as part of the liturgy of Evening Prayer. I
first got into that habit when I was a student at Oxford. In my college chapel,
Choral Evensong was a daily occurrence, and the words of the Magnificat, in the
older translation of the Book of Common Prayer, would rise toward the vaulted
stone ceiling: “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in
God my saviour…”
It was, perhaps, an ironic setting in which to
fall in love with the Magnificat: an Oxbridge college, the very epitome of
entrenched privilege. For 500 years, that chapel has rung with the
revolutionary words of Mary: “he hath put down the mighty from their seat, and
hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he hath sent empty away”. And yet, in that place as in so many
places, the privilege of the rich and the mighty has always been obvious. For
hundreds of years, the students who have sat in that chapel and heard that
song, day after day, have been predominantly white, predominantly wealthy and,
until very recently, all male, and have been schooled to perpetuate an
inheritance of privilege, the extent of which most of us can barely begin to
get our heads around. And yet, daily, that education is punctuated by Mary’s
vision of a very different, God-shaped world. It’s a strange contrast.
At the other end of the sociological spectrum,
the Magnificat is much loved by activists, especially those of a more catholic
persuasion, myself among them. It is read by many who strive for a more just
world as a mandate for action, a manifesto for what that world could look like:
the powerful brought down, and the lowly lifted up; the poor fed, and the rich
sent away hungry. That sounds like good news for people living in poverty, good
news for people who feel powerless, forgotten or excluded. And it is, as the
Good News, the Gospel, always should be. It is easy to see how the Magnificat
has become the touchstone of liberation theology, which declares God’s
preferential option for the poor: that God is on the side of those who are
oppressed and excluded, in solidarity with all who seek justice.
But notice something about the text. Notice the
tense of the verbs: “the mighty one has
done great things”, “he has brought
down the powerful”, “he has filled the
hungry”. Past tense. God has done it.
And yet… and yet we have only to look around us, or turn on the news, to see
that the powerful remain powerful, and the hungry – too often, despite the best
efforts of many – remain hungry. So what are we to make of that?
And notice something else about the verbs in this
passage – notice who is doing them: God. God is the one who lifts up the lowly
and brings down the powerful. God is the one who overturns systems of privilege
and brings justice. The Magnificat is not, primarily, a manifesto for human
action. So where does that leave us?
To say that God has done these things is not, of
course, to deny the persistent reality of injustice in the world. The kin-dom
of God is an eternal reality, already established, but not yet full realised.
It is that now-and-not-yet which is the essence of this Advent season. We catch
glimpses now of what has always been and will always be. And we are called to
find ways to expand and magnify and – most importantly – share those glimpses
of the kin-dom in ways which make them real and tangible.
To say that the verbs in the Magnificat belong to
God is not to say that we should be passive, any more than Mary is passive, in
response to what God has done and is doing. We are invited to participate in
the life and work of God’s kin-dom. We, like Mary, are invited to say ‘yes’ to
whatever part God is calling us to play. But the work is not ours to begin or
ours to complete. Certainly it is not ours to control. We are not called to
build the kin-dom. God has already created it. We are called to receive it, and
to reveal it, which is precisely what Mary does in the Magnificat. And in
receiving and revealing the kin-dom of justice which God has already
established we, like Mary, praise and glorify God.
The Magnificat is more than a manifesto for
justice.
It is a statement of who God is.
God is the one who disrupts privilege and
overturns injustice.
God is the one who is on the side of people who
find themselves on the underside of the unjust systems in which we are all
caught up.
God is the one who has already – in Jesus, whose
coming and coming again we now await with eager longing – overcome all the
powers of death and destruction which now distort our troubled world.
God is the one who, by the life of the Holy
Spirit in us, invites us to participate in a different way of living, to live
in ways which reveal the kin-dom of God among us.
“My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit
hath rejoiced in God my saviour.”
Rejoice in
knowing that God has been, and is, and will be establishing a realm of perfect
justice throughout the whole creation.
Rejoice in
knowing that God is tearing down every form of privilege and division and
oppression which separates neighbour from neighbour.
Rejoice in
knowing that we are invited to participate in that work.
Rejoice in
knowing that even in the bastions of power and privilege a different song is
already, even now, being sung.
“As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever
shall be, world without end. Amen.”
There is something here about time. The kin-dom
of God, which Mary is describing in the Magnificat, is an eternal reality. But
it is one which is not yet fully realised. We catch glimpses now of what has
always been and will always be.
Questions for reflection / discussion
As I read / listened to the
readings and reflections for this week…
·
what
did I notice, or what particularly stood out for me?
·
what
did they make me wonder, or what questions am I pondering?
·
what
have they helped me realise?
· is there anything I want to do or change in the light of this week's topic?
Poems / prayers for this week:
‘The Kingdom’, by R.S. Thomas
It’s a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.
‘BC:AD’, by U.A. Fanthorpe
This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.
This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.
This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.
And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.
‘For Joy’, by Jan Richardson
You can prepare,
but still
it will come to you
by surprise,
crossing through your doorway,
calling your name in greeting,
turning like a child
who quickens suddenly
within you.
It will astonish you
how wide your heart
will open
in welcome
for the joy
that finds you
so ready
and still so
unprepared.
[1] Strangely the carol The Holly and the Ivy mentions
the blossom, berry, thorn and bark of the tree, but not the green leaves!
