Tag: Fortitude Valley

Annunciation to BVM
Holy Trinity Church, Fortitude Valley
14 April 2024

[https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/4942823]

On this principal Marian festival—Lady Day—we celebrate Mary in both Scripture and Tradition.

One of the key principles for hermeneutics that I seek to inculcate in my students is the idea that we do not mortgage truth to history. 

That is a particular weakness of Western thought since the Enlightenment, but it does serve us well when we are seeking spiritual wisdom for everyday life as we are in this liturgy, and indeed every time we gather at the Table of Jesus.

We would like to know what really happened, but we rarely can do that.

However, what we need to know (as distinct from like to know) is to live now in ways that are holy and true.

MARY IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

Our shared memory of Mary, mother of Our Lord, is grounded in Scripture. But on closer examination is has a very narrow base within the sacred texts.

Gospel of Mark – just a single episode in which Mary and the siblings of Jesus are participants in a scene (Mark 3:21–35 with parallels in Matthew and Luke). Here, Mary and her other children are so concerned about Jesus’ wellbeing that they have come to Capernaum to rescue him from the crowd and bring him home for some R&R.

Gospel of Matthew – a revised and enlarged edition of Mark released perhaps 25+ years later. Matthew preserves the same incident from Mark 3, and famously adds the Bethlehem birth narratives. But in that story Mary is almost absent. All the action is with Joseph, the wise men, and Herod. Indeed, we are not even told of Mary giving birth to Jesus. Matthew’s birth story is all about Jesus as Moses 2.0 character, with Joseph being given instructions via dreams just like his ancient namesake. Mary sis simply the mother of the child whose birth is not even mentioned.

Gospel of John – here we shall find two stories in which Mary is a participant. But in this gospel, we are never told her name. She is simply “the mother of Jesus.” In fact, in John 6:42 we even find the crowd saying: “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” The two episodes where Mary does appear in the action are the wedding feast at Cana and then at the crucifixion, since John has Mary present in Jerusalem for her son’s death.

Gospel of Luke & the Acts of the Apostles – almost everything that we think we know about Mary comes from the Gospel of Luke. But it is also true that almost everything Luke tells us about Mary is found in the first two chapter, where he provides us with a beautiful infancy narrative for Jesus. This is not just a birth story for Jesus, but a set of intertwined stories about the birth of John and Jesus. Where Matthew wanted to portray Jesus as Moses 2.0, Luke wanted to present Jesus as the child chosen by God to be saviour of the world. Luke had his eye on Rome with its legend of Romulus and Remus, as he tells a new tale of two boys, one of whom is destined to be ruler.

The rest of the New Testament – nothing at all is said about Mary and not even her name has survived.

LUKE’S PORTRAIT OF MARY

Unlike Matthew, Luke is interested in Mary, and he represents her in very positive terms. Joseph fades into the background and Mary is an active participant in the story that Luke tells.

• The angel Gabriel comes to Mary
• Mary responds with humility and courage
• Mary spends time with her cousin Elizabeth out of the public eye
• Luke crafts the prophetic Song of Mary (Magnificat) for her to sing
• as an observant Jewish mother, Mary takes Jesus to the Temple
• Mary is an anxious parent when the 12-year-old Jesus goes missing
• Mary is reflective (she ponders these things in her heart)
• Mary is at the cross and comes to the empty tomb (an idea borrowed from John?)

This is the biblical portrait of Mary, and it is a sacred gift to us from the pen of Luke.

What is the ratio of Lukan imagination and historical detail? 

We can never know, but to spend time on those questions is to miss the point and also to miss the opportunity to grasp the spiritual wisdom that Luke is offering us in this beautiful account.

God does not just send Gabriel to Mary. 

The annunciation is not a once-off event, but a process that recurs across time and in every place, indeed in every human heart.

God comes to each of us and seeks to engage us in the divine mission to transform creation and bring the kingdom (rule) of God into our lives, our villages, our workplaces, and our churches.

In the character of Mary, Luke offers us a template for how we might offer a humble yes to God’s amazing invitation. Like Mary, we can be God-bearers. May her prayers assist us to say yes to God, and to be people who ponder these things in our heart.

Trinity Sunday
Holy Trinity Church, Fortitude Valley
4 June 2023

IMAGE: Holy Trinity Church, Fortitude Valley, 8 January 2007. Photograph by DBHKer.

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It has been a long time since I last stood in this pulpit!

As I recall, it was in July 1989 when I came back to Brisbane—from Adelaide where I was teaching at St Barnabas’ Theological College—for the conferral of my PhD at the University of Queensland. So that must be about 34 years ago. I was 37 years old at the time. You can all do the Maths.

I remember various Trinity Sundays from my time here. Like your current Rector, I usually invited a special guest to be with us for the occasion. They were days when we enjoyed all the smoke and bells of the great tradition.

However, the Trinity Sunday that stands out most strongly in my memories was one year in Jerusalem. I think it was 2009 and I had arrived in town from the airport. I was just in time to join the congregation at St George’s Cathedral for the Feast of the Holy Trinity.

As I listened to a sermon on the Trinity, delivered in alternating Arabic and English, it struck me that day just how important this doctrine is for the Christians in the Middle East, and especially in Jerusalem.

While this day is also the feast of title for this parish, for most faith communities this is that day of the year when the local clergy try to explain the Trinity, or perhaps avoid the topic as best they can. 

Others, would you believe, invite guest preachers for this day. Some even go so far as to dust off retired clergy and past rectors from time immemorial to fill the preaching slot this morning.

Of course, that is not the case here this morning. It is simply that Fr Rodney could not think of a finer preacher to speak about God on this feast.

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For our brothers and sisters in Jerusalem and throughout the Middle East the situation is totally different.

For them, this is one of the great days of the church year where the very essence of their faith—our faith—is made plain.

The affirmation of the Trinity is not simply an abstract theological puzzle for them. It is a live question that impacts every aspect of their existence. 

The people in the congregation at St George’s Cathedral that Sunday in 2009 (and again those in the Cathedral this morning) are Palestinian Christians living in a Muslim-majority society and also under Jewish military occupation since 1967. Ever since the Nakhba, the Catastrophe, of 1948, they are largely displaced from their homes and their hopes, irrespective of their formal citizenship.

The trinitarian faith defines who they are, and how their neighbours view them. In many cases it determines where they live, what occupations they follow, who they can marry, their family inheritance laws, and where they will be buried. 

They may be targeted by their Muslim neighbours, if the latter fall under some extreme version of Islamic ideology. They might equally find themselves targeted by Jews who consider them blasphemers and worse, with no right even to exist in the Eretz Yisrael. 

Their churches might be vandalised, their houses marked for future violence, or their cars tagged.

Clergy and religious may be spat upon as they walk to the holy places in the Old City or in other parts of the country.

Thankfully, most Jews and most Muslims do not act in these ways. But the extremists on both sides do, and the threat of hatred and violence is an ever-present reality for Christians in Jerusalem and the Middle East.

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It could not be more different here.

Our neighbours do not care what we believe about God, and for the most part they would have no idea.

Despite what the extreme fringes of the faith might claim from time to time, Christians in Australia are not persecuted for our faith in the Trinity, or indeed for anything else. 

What we mostly experience is apathy.

And perhaps condescension.

In the past, Christians have fought over the precise words to be used to express the doctrine of the Trinity. We have consigned each other to hell, and even killed those who disagreed with us.

Religion that kills is not unique to Islamic extremists or Jewish settlers, nor to Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, or even Hindu fundamentalists in India.

Religious violence is the dark side of religion, and the shadow is especially dark in monotheism as our binary understanding of reality seems especially prone to violence against those with whom we disagree.

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On Trinity Sunday we are reminded that the truth which matters most to us is far from simple, and certainly not an invitation to draw circles around those we love and those we hate.

We affirm that God is one.

We also affirm that Jesus participates in God’s eternal reality, and that the Spirit of Jesus active among us and within us and between us is nothing less than the Spirit of God.

The affirmation is straightforward, but the explanation is rather more complex.

But here is the thing … no one outside the church (and many of us inside the church) are not in the least bit interested in all the fuss about trying to make sense of this central Christian belief.

Where we once killed each other over homoousios versus homoiousios (yes, there is just one letter difference in those two terms), none of our neighbours and almost no one in our families cares about these internal Christian arguments over how to define the indefinable and express the inexpressible.

The religious debate in Australia today is not about the Trinity, but about God.

Is belief in God even a reasonable option for most Australians?

As the world teeters on the edge of an ecological catastrophe that may see humans extinct within 250 years, what does our theological fine print matter?

For millions of humans living on islands and in low-lying delta regions that will be submerged by rising sea levels in the next few decades, can belief in God make sense?

As AI threatens to make humans redundant, what is the point of religion?

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Our mission is not to discuss the Trinity, but to live the vision of God—and of humanity—that Jesus both taught and practised.

If people are to glimpse that there may be more to life than gadgets and status—if they are to embrace the call to compassion in everyday life—then they need us to be people who embrace the call of Jesus to imagine a world where God’s dream is realised. 

Our fancy religious words for that are “the kingdom of God” or the “reign of God,” but it is as simple as saying: imagine if the life we live reflected the inner character of God’s own self?

Indeed; imagine that!

We are called to celebrate God as the ultimate reality, the meaning beyond every explanation, and the profound love that calls everything into existence.

We are called to walk the way that Jesus walked. Read the gospels. Practise doing what Jesus did. Jesus got it right. We need to imitate Jesus. Better still, we need to be Jesus for those around us.

Those who first walked the way of Jesus—and they called their religion, “The Way”—discovered that Jesus was still present with them, and that his Spirit was the same as the Spirit of God in previous times.

They discovered the truth of the Trinity.

They lived the reality of the Trinity.

And we can do the same.