Dear Friends
Advent
Our new Church
Year has begun with our celebration of Advent Sunday last week. We have begun a
new journey of Faith on a well travelled road; a journey of reflection and
expectation. We will journey this year with the Gospel of Mark, a book built
around the arresting conviction that there is no keeping God at a distance. The
writer of Mark’s Gospel asks us to reflect on where God is to be found, and
suggests that God is not to be found in the expected places: in heaven, in church,
in special and magical events. It is not that God is not in these
places, but that God is not confined to these spaces, and that these may not in
fact be God’s favourite spaces. Now there’s a thought!
Mark’s Gospel, the Good News, is that God is in
the ordinariness, the everydayness of life.
I am not sure I want to meet God in the everyday;
I suspect I’d be more comfortable keeping God for those special moments in life,
when I need God to be GOD. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with God being in the
midst of a family disagreement, or in the intimacies I share with my wife. I am
not comfortable with God being around when I succumb to road-rage, and share a
few choice thoughts with the taxi driver who has just – suddenly – stopped in
front of me. Am I comfortable with God being “around”? I’m not so sure.
But I find myself asking, “God, where are you?”
Where are you when the person I love is murdered violently? Where are you when
I NEED you? Where are you when my loved one is ill? Where are you when natural
disasters kill thousands? Where are you when war wracks our world? Where are
you when the collapses of national economies make the world sneeze and catch
cold? Where are you when famine and civil war overtakes our continent? WHERE
ARE YOU, GOD?!
“I am around ...”
Hope and Expectation
God is around, in our midst, incarnate, with us. Advent is
lived in the expectation that God will act because God has acted. The
incarnation (God born in human form in Jesus) took place over two millennia
ago, and seemingly paradoxically – believing as we do that God is already with
us through the presence of the Holy Spirit – we prepare for his return. Our
Church Year is based around the re-enactment, the remembering of the restoring
acts of God in history. It will again, but unique to the present context,
remind us that God is with us. And so as we prepare this Advent: what are our
expectations; what is our hope? There is always the temptation to demand that
God act as we want him to act. The challenge is to allow God to truly be God,
and to open our lives to that reality, and to seek God in the brokenness of our
lives and society, in the everyday, in the ordinariness of life.
Christmas & New Year
If the speed with which this year has sped by is any
indication, Christmas will be here in a blink of an eye! And the New Year will
be in swing before we know it. Our Parish Christmas Tea was a huge success last
Sunday: a little early, perhaps, but an opportunity to come together as a
community before we all head off in different directions for the Christmas
break. For those who will be around, please join us for our Christmas Carol
Service on Sunday 18 December 2011 at 6pm where we will explore something of
the history lying behind some of the better known Carols. There will be the
traditional Crib Service at 6pm and Midnight Mass at 10pm on Christmas Eve,
followed by a said Christmas Mass at 7am and the Christmas Family Eucharist at
9am on Christmas Day. If family or friends are visiting, please bring them
along! For those travelling over this period, please drive carefully and responsibly;
and return safely to us in the New Year.
A very blessed Christmas and New Year to you all!
Blessings
Mark
