SERMONS

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Sean Gilbert – 13/12/09

Christ Church  Luke 1:39-54                       
“Paying attention to what has heart and meaning.”

If I am able, I want to make a link or two from that short, memorable encounter between Elizabeth and Mary, and a more recent Christmas story, Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”. I offer no guarantee that I can pull it off, but I’ll do my very best.

Ebenezer Scrooge is so well known that his name is part of our vocabulary, but until this week, I at least, didn’t have much clue about the story line. A beautiful children’s story book, complemented with an excerpt from the full text I was sent, which came my way have filled me in a little.
     
And it’s that short excerpt I want to read. It forms part of the encounter between the young Scrooge, (now old), and Belle, his first love. Scrooge has been taken in his imagination back in time by the Ghost of Christmas Past, where he sees himself and Belle together once more. And I only ask one thing in the listening, that we let go of the details and perhaps see a bigger picture; in my mind Belle is the voice of God and Scrooge being a wayward, yet very needy humanity (like our own).

                              Scrooge was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair girl in mourning-dress: in whose eyes there were tears, which sparkled in the light which shone out of the Ghost of Christmas Past.

                              “It matters little,” she said softly. “To you, very little. Another idol has displaced me, and if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve.”

                              “What idol has displaced you?” he rejoined.
                              “A golden one.”

                              “This is the even-handed dealing of the world!” he said. “There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”

                              “You fear the world too much,” she answered gently. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrossed you. Have I not?”

                              “What then?” her retorted. “Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then? Am I not changed towards you?”
                              She shook her head.
                              “Am I?”

                              “Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were both poor and content to be, until, in good season, we could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You are changed. When it was made, you were another man.”
                              “I was a boy,” he said impatiently.
                              “Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you are,” she returned.

Pay attention to what has heart and meaning…

For Angela Arrien, such paying attention to self and others is the grand path of healing. The greatest remorse in life, she suggests, is love unexpressed, and certainly that is Scrooge’s remorse which finds thankfully finds the grace needed to change that.  The healing art then (something we are called to express) is to encourage and draw out; To affirm, so as to help bring back home.

I think what I see in Belle therefore in the voice of God is that gentle, yet persistent and strong invitation to return to “nobler aspirations”, to deepen wells of being, to a poverty of spirit even, where new life can continually grow and flower: where there is no displacement of faith by way of idols, however grand and important. A return to simplicity, where God and life are not separate entities at all, indeed when God and the quality of relationships are one and the same thing.

And I would tentatively suggest at this point, why the story of Mary and Elizabeth is so endearing and powerful because the very leaping presence of God, is not found externally, but is recognized to be the quality within humanity; a presence and beauty to return to over and over again in our life time, even to bow down before.

The miracle of Ebenezer Scrooge is that he did find his way home. He did finally pay full attention to what has heart and meaning, which ironically meant letting go of everything accumulated and striven after or proud of. It seems always to be authentic way in life, does it not?

In her wonderful journal, Etty Hillesum likens her life to a well cluttered and filled in with rocks, her prayer being that over time and by virtue of her yearning prayer, these rocks would one by one be removed revealing not only clean and good water, but the very reality of God within her. As her life would suggest, from such a conscious place of simplicity and attention paid to Spirit, she gave herself wholly and freely, even unto death at Auschwitz  on behalf of her people.

What will be our prayer this Advent and Christmas then? What will we turn our full attention to? What is in need of attention so far as our heart and it fulfillment is concerned?

A prayer of Rilke to conclude:

            I love you, greatest of Ways, who ripened us as we wrestled with you.
You, the great homesickness we could never shake off,
you the forest that always surrounded us,
you, the song we sang in every silence,
you the dark net threading through our lives.