On café loyalty cards

There comes a time in a man’s life when he understands that he can never again use a café loyalty card. Nowadays every self-respecting coffee retailer in Australia has its own loyalty card. Buy ten coffees get the next one free. The economics of the thing is excellent. A saving of thirty-five cents on every cup. The sociology of it is excellent. Producing one’s well-stamped loyalty card at the counter, one is able to enjoy a certain sense of entitlement, of belonging. I have seen some gentlemen swagger impressively, hands on hips, while their cards are stamped. They survey their surroundings with satisfaction. “Good, very good indeed, everything here seems to be in order,” you can almost hear them say. The theology of it is excellent too. There is a certain irrational pleasure that comes from getting things for free. Even if you know that you have purchased that eleventh coffee, that its cost (plus the cost of producing your loyalty card) was distributed evenly across the previous ten cups of coffee, even then you cannot help smiling, cannot help feeling that small tingle of religious gratification when the fellow at the cash register announces with surprise, “Well now, would you look at that, your next one’s free!”

I have used these cards, why should I deny it? I have crammed my wallet with documentary evidence of my loyalty to cafés around Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane, Byron Bay. I have collected stamps across four states. But there comes a day when you find you have grown weary of belonging to things. When your loyalty is spread too thin. When too many belongings seems the same as not belonging at all. When producing your loyalty card, watching them stamp it like a passport, sliding it back into the anonymous folds of your wallet – there comes a day when you cannot bear it anymore, when it is wrong and no amount of good economic sense can make it right.

In a moment of clarity – I nearly said a moment of righteousness – I unburdened my life of all these loyalties. I dumped them, all the cards and all their crooked little stamps, in the bottom drawer of my desk, down there with the bits of crumpled paper and broken pens and used envelopes and receipts from years ago that have faded back to their original virgin white. Down there I laid my loyalties to rest. It made me light and free, the way you feel sometimes after sex or church.

Tomorrow, I told myself, tomorrow I will empty the drawer into the rubbish bin, tomorrow I will throw it all away.

Today I lined up for coffee, I handed over the money, I took the change, I gave the card to the boy behind the counter. While I waited for him to stamp it I put my hands on my hips and swaggered rather impressively, surveying my surroundings with an air of satisfaction so that nobody would see how unhappy I was, how defeated, because of my loyalty. 

Five-year old cosmology

Five-year-old Jamie: "The stars! Just think of it! All the stars are little suns."

Christmas with Rachel

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

It’s been a wonderful year for babies born to the daughters of people we know. Working backwards, in July to a girl we know very well indeed – her name is Katie – she’s my daughter – she gave birth to a girl named Scarlett. Angie and I – grandparents finally. I can’t tell you how much I can’t wait to begin undermining everything her parents tell (though from the single-mindedness she is already demonstrating daily, I suspect I will be surplus to requirements). Then in April, a boy named Mason was born to Lisa Gammon. And back in February, Carla, née Cavali, the daughter of two close friends of ours, had a little girl, Sophia Marie. But there was an even earlier arrival this year, earlier in February: Rachel Hamlyn, née Beynon – yes, our organist’s daughter – she gave birth to James, who was baptised here exactly two weeks ago.

But it’s not that Rachel I want to talk about this morning. The children of Katie and Lisa and Carla and Rachel, I am quite sure, will grow up surrounded by a tonne of TLC, and there is every hope that they will blossom and flourish. But of the children of another Rachel, and mothers like her, we can have no such hope. For this Rachel there is only a grief that refuses all consolation. As St Matthew records it, quoting the words of the prophet Jeremiah: 

A sound was heard in Ramah,

weeping and much lament. 

Rachel weeping for her children,

Rachel refusing all solace, 

Her children gone, dead and buried.

(Matthew 2:18, The Message)

We first hear of this Rachel in Genesis 29, when Jacob meets her by a well where she is watering a flock of her father Laban’s sheep (vv. 16-20). She is stunning. Boy meets girl at well, it’s love at first sight, and after courtship and marriage they will live happily ever after – it’s a venerable folktale, and we wait for the story to develop in the ensuing narrative. But it is not to be. Jacob works for seven years for Laban to get the girl of his dreams, but on their wedding night, under cover of darkness, Laban slips Rachel’s older sister Leah into the nuptial bed. Leah is veiled, and it is not until morning that Jacob recognises the deception. He confronts Laban, who re-promises Rachel to him, on condition that he works another seven years on his father-in-law’s farm. Done – such is Jacob’s passion for Rachel.

But the newlyweds’ problems are just beginning. They try and try, but Rachel, unlike Leah, is unable to bear children. “If I do not have children I will die!” Rachel cries. God finally hears her cry, and eventually she conceives and bears a son, Joseph, her husband’s favourite child, who will become the link between the origins of Israel in Canaan and the liberation of Israel from Egypt (not to mention becoming a West End stage star with an “amazing Technicolor dreamcoat”!). Rachel will go on to have another son, but this birth will not be the subject of a musical: Rachel dies in labour. With her last breath she names her boy Benoni, “son of my sorrow”, which Jacob changes to the more hopeful Benjamin, “son who will be fortunate”. Jacob then buries his beloved and sets a pillar by her tomb, which, the Bible says, “is there to this day” (Genesis 35:20). And Genesis makes a further observation, more than salient to the Christmas season: the tomb is “beside the road to Ephrath, now known as Bethlehem” (Genesis 35:19).

But Rachel’s role in the Hebrew Scriptures does not end in Genesis. There is another Old Testament reference to her, the one Matthew cites from Jeremiah. Here again Rachel is a figure of pain, but not the pain of death in childbirth. In Jeremiah, Rachel symbolises another kind of suffering, the suffering of injustice, the suffering of those who lose their freedom at the hands of violent power. When Babylon conquered Israel, Israel’s leaders and intelligentsia – the people most likely to cause trouble – were taken into exile. The captives were paraded along the highway that led past Rachel’s tomb. It was a road of humiliation and sorrow. Jeremiah has just prophesied Israel’s ultimate return home from Babylon, replete with anticipated scenes of singing and dancing, rejoicing and rebuilding. “I will turn their sorrow into gladness!” says the Lord. But then, in the next verse but one, the Lord says, “A sound is heard in Ramah” (Jeremiah 31:15) – that sound, the sound of inconsolable weeping and grief.

Finally, biblically, we hear that sound a third and conclusive time, Matthew’s recapitulation of Jeremiah’s lament, yet again near a town called Bethlehem, in yet another time of tears and trauma. “Perhaps no event in the gospel more determinatively challenges the sentimental depiction of Christmas than the death of these children [at the hands of Herod]. Jesus is born into a world in which children are killed, and continue to be killed, to protect the power of tyrants” (Stanley Hauerwas). In Genesis, Rachel is an icon of the suffering of childbirth. In Jeremiah, Rachel is an icon of the mother of victims of oppression. Here in Matthew, Rachel combines both traditions. How grim can grief get?

But hang on. Is that it? Is there no hope? There must be, surely. Surely there is a future. Look at Benjamin: he will have ten sons, and generations hence from his line will spring the apostle Paul. Look at Rachel’s post-exilic children – they will indeed finally return home. And look at the one Herod was after, the one who evades his mass murder, Jesus of Nazareth himself. Yes, that is true. “There is hope for your future,” as the Lord says to Rachel (Jeremiah 31:17).

Yes, that is true. But it is not true as repression and cover-up. It is not true if it means that the desolate can simply forget their heartbroken past. It is not true if it suggests that immense loss does not irretrievably determine one’s very identity – it does. For the wretched of the earth, everything becomes a potential reminder of the eye that will never be dried, and the tear that will never be mended. Sorrows that were once the potholes of life now become the main road – the one that winds its inexorable way past Rachel’s tomb, bang into a stable in Bethlehem. Thus Martin Luther rightly saw in Rachel’s story a link between the Nativity and Good Friday.

Rachel refused to be consoled – and God blessed her in her refusal. God promised Rachel hope – but not a hope on which she might count on the basis of reason or resourcefulness, experience or expectation. That would be a false hope. True hope is always hope against hope, inexplicable, unjustifiable, and unsecurable. True hope is always but a razor’s edge from despair, because it cannot and will not close its eyes to the anguish, or shut its ears to the screams, that constitute the sordid story of the world – the murdered children, the massacred victims, the millions of tortured and disappeared. No, as the poet Emily Dickinson understood: “To relieve the irreparable degrades it.” Even Christ does not relieve the irreparable. Our Lord’s identity too is irretrievably bound to his wounds. His resurrection does not remove them. His scars mark him eternally. How should it not be so with all God’s children? 

The crib and the cross of Jesus are our hope – Rachel’s hope, the mothers of the infants of Bethlehem’s hope, the hope of the mothers of the twenty children murdered at Sandy Hook School – the hope of the mother of the murderer too – and the hope of the mothers, always and everywhere, of slain or suffering children. But the hope of the crib and the cross does not mean that the victims are any less dead, or their parents and families any less grief-stricken. We betray the Christian hope if we lie about the world of death and grief, for it is precisely this world that the born, crucified, and risen One has redeemed and is redeeming – this slaughter-bench of a world that he redeems. And for his followers that means that we do not live in denial of the one, even as we do live in affirmation of the other, and that we both accept that we do not know what the future holds – it is beyond our control – and insist that we do know who holds it. And it also means that we live in opposition and resistance to all that would demean and destroy any of the creation that God once pronounced good, and stand protectively but peacefully beside Rachel and her children. It means we cry, “Lord, have mercy!” – and then take responsibility. 

“Seeing ourselves honestly, seeing the world differently. That’s where faith begins,” as Rowan Williams put it on Wednesday. Thus may we go into to the New Year with two echoes resounding: the cry of those who will not be consoled, and the voice of Jesus who, on the precipice of despair, which is yet the brink of glory, says, “Fear not, take up your cross, and follow me.”

O boy, it’s Christmas

And God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God observed them closely, these lovely creatures he had made, his masterwork, his image-bearers. God watched them reasoning and deliberating, laughing and weeping, falling asleep and falling in love, writing stories, building cities, inventing religions, feasting and drinking, making laws and making music and making love – and God loved it, loved all of it down to the last toenail and the last pubic hair.

And God said, Behold, let us go down among them and unite ourselves to them. Let us become like them in every way, just as they are in every way like us. For God wanted to show these image-bearers how closely they resembled him, how easily he could put them on like a familiar suit of clothes (and never take them off again: for so God loved them). Let us become bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh (said God), to show that human flesh and bone are not far from us but are our likeness, a perfect perambulating replica of our joy.

But what sort of human being should God become? That was a tough one. God inspected all the different stations and species of human life, trying each one affectionately, scrupulously, the way a person tries on many pairs of shoes to find the perfect fit.

Butchers and bakers and candlestick makers,

graphic designers and stolid bricklayers,

doctors and lawyers and unemployed surfers,

earnest young men and old women in burqas –

God saw them all and loved them. Each one of them was suitable. Any one of them would do fine. But somehow it was still not – quite – the thing God had in mind. God scratched his head, or would have, if God had had a head.

And then God spied them. A glorious little huddle of them. They were squatting in the dirt with dirty limbs and dirty faces, faces rapt as they hunted about for bugs, dug for worms, farted and belched and made agreeable little grunting noises. God watched them a long time, scrutinised them, sized them up and studied them from every angle, and God was very pleased, for this was just the thing. Yes, this would fit like a glove.

And so it was that grace was added to nature, creation was sanctified, the whirling worlds redeemed, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well and all that jazz. For it was on that day that God, the Lord, the master of the universe, became – a boy.


Merry Christmas.

Yes, it is true: sermon for Advent 4

by Kim Fabricius

Each year we hear again the ancient Christmas narrative. Each year we retell the story of how, almost unnoticed, God snuck into the world of Augustus and Herod, the “the movers and shakers”, to re-make history from below. We are astonished, touched, tickled, by our humble God’s predilection not for nabobs but for nobodies, for oddballs and outliers, for those whom the system chews up and spits out, the poor, the sick, the sad, the bad, the old. Something unimaginable and unpredictable happened, something original and fresh was revealed. God in his kindness decided to break the silence of centuries by giving himself away in the Word-made-fragile-flesh, whose first utterance was the hungry cry of a helpless new-born, whose last would be the desperate howl of a crucified misfit.

The mysterious Advent of God was focussed in a child; the breadth and depth of God’s love was expressed in a mite in a manger. God chose to visit the world not in Whitehall or Wall Street but in weakness, through an ordinary birthing by a peasant teenager in troubled times and awkward circumstances. The maker of galaxies and solar systems, mountains and rain forests, blue whales and dancing daffodils, revealed his glory in a bairn in a barn in the back of beyond.

Yes, the Christmas story we hear each year is the same, but our worlds, private and public, are always different. Joy and sorrow, success and failure, health and sickness – there are always annual alterations, good and bad, and, if we’re lucky, not cut down before time, we develop, decline, and die. But no matter what changes we negotiate, what achievements we celebrate, what losses we mourn, what tragedies overwhelm us, the Christmas story speaks to us again of The New – new birth, new life, new purpose. It tells us that things can and will be different, that the past need not and will not determine the future, that the God who met us once in Jesus will meet us again in Jesus, that the God of surprises is working even now, with unpromising material, in hidden ways, to create a new heaven and a new earth.

Angie and I had our first grandchild in July, and in a very real sense that we all feel intuitively, viscerally, the birth of every child is a small protest against the tired, cynical view that we are condemned to live lives of the same-old same-old, locked in a system of one-damned-thing-after-another. But in the birth of this child, a new adventure of faith begins, a new way of being human is disclosed to us, a new way of relating to each other is asked of us, and a new power of living is imparted to us. The Christmas story is an old story that is forever young, a story that constitutes a radical challenge to the trivial, the odious, and the squalid, a story pregnant with the possibility of meaning, decency, and beauty. Danger is not denied, threats are acknowledged, stupidity still stalks, vanity struts, and violence strikes. Nevertheless, because in Jesus grace and truth have pitched a tent, established an outpost in the world – indeed a colony: the church – the glorious advent of the peaceable kingdom is no longer in doubt. So as followers of the Wee One we can be confident and courageous, strong and tender. 

That is why we make the journey back to Bethlehem each year: to go back to the future by rediscovering our roots in this gift of God wrapped in a nappy. It is the time we relocate where we come from so as to re-orientate ourselves to where we are going. It is at once a time of homecoming and of setting out, of affirming the already and anticipating the not-yet. It is a time of deep, deep gratitude, magical joy, and indestructible hope.

In a famous Christmas poem John Betjeman asks, with deep, urgent longing:

And is it true? And is it true,

This most tremendous tale of all,

Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,

A Baby in an ox’s stall?

The Maker of the stars and sea

Become a Child on earth for me?

Yes, it is true, it is true. For me, for you, for everyone.

Dharma doodlings

by Kim Fabricius

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ τὐεετος, καὶ ὁ τὐεετος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ τὐεετος. οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν. πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ ἐγνετο, καὶ χωρ

Six Christian koans

What is the sound of one happy-clapping?

Why a Vatican spokesman when he spins?

What is Menno Simons?  Three pounds of pax.

If Mark Driscoll shouts in a forest and (unbelievably) no one hears him, is he still wrong?

Why doesn’t the bearded archbishop have a beard?

Why can’t a penisless bishop?

Speaking with the authority of recent experience, the Church of England sends its Yuletide message to the nation: “Don’t take the Christ out of Christmess.”

Here is a picture of Rick Warren, from the cover of his new book The Porpoise Driven Life:

A Methodist friend of mine asked me if I would help him with a talk he was preparing on Arminianism. I said, “Only if it’s a eulogy.”

A Calvinist friend of mine asked me if I would help him with a talk he was preparing on double predestination. “Sorry,” I said, “I’m opposed to assisted suicide.”

With Proverbs 26:11 (cf. 2 Peter 2:22) as my text, I occasionally recycle sermons.

Deep down, every critic wishes they were an author. This explains both the pathos and the pathologies of that guild of textual parasites known as theologians, universally condemned to be producers of secondary literature.

What do you say about a genius like Tolstoy when he opines that King Lear is “beneath serious criticism”?  —“Marry, here’s grace and a cod-piece; that’s a wise man and a fool” (King Lear, III, 2).

And how do you respond to someone who doesn’t get Moby-Dick? —Be cool, count to ten, keep schtum, for as Starbuck said to Ahab, “To be enraged with a dumb thing … seems blasphemous.”

Have you ever noticed that Hamlet begins as a knock-knock joke in medias res? (Interestingly, in Macbeth, written 5-6 years later, a porter delivers a comic monologue which follows the form of a knock-knock joke [II, 3].) Or how its unfolding tragedy could have Romans 12:19 as an epigraph (cf. Anna Karenina)?

In Europe, God is dead. In the US, he’s in even worse shape.

A born-again Christian named Burke

Boasted, “No one is saved by their works!”

Ha! His faith served him well

When he found out in hell

That they make an exception for jerks.

What can one say of creationists but OMG (On Misreading Genesis).

Jesus was leading an Ethics 101 class which included Socrates, Buddha, David Hume, and Stanley Hauerwas.  Jesus said, “You must love your neighbour as yourself.”  Hume said, “Which self?”  Buddha said, “What self?”  Socrates said, “What is ‘love’?”  And Hauerwas said, “Who the hell is Niebuhr?”

The Sermon on the Mount without the resurrection is empty. And the resurrection without the Sermon on the Mount is – empty.

“Ought” implies “bought” (cf. 1 Corinthians 6:20).

In Christ we learn that it’s not “Where there’s life, there’s hope”, it’s “Where there’s death, there’s hope”, and “Where there’s hope, there’s life.”

Do you want to see your soul? Shave.

We have nothing to fear but nothing itself.

The problem is not that we are out of touch with our emotions but that we are in the grip of them.

The clever would rather be right than wrong; the wise would rather be kind than right.

A recent survey by the British Heart Foundation of the elderly finds that only 11% of the men regretted not having slept with more women. I suspect it would also find that that these 11% are either lying, gay, or suffering from severe memory loss.

A very good blogger recently ran a series on “The NFL and Christian Theology”. I kept waiting for a guest post by Screwtape.  (By the way, you know the guy, ubiquitous, who stands in the crowd behind the end zone waving the John 3:16 placard? That’s Wormwood).

“They are the custodians and initiators into felt intimations of open horizons, of well-springs of recuperation and self-surpassing for a constricted and worn humanity.”  That’s George Steiner on Gehrig, Williams, Mays, and Koufax. (Or was it Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven?)