Several weeks ago, Judy Wrought, my Presbyterian minister friend from Colorado who came and spoke on women in the church, sent me a fax and she said, "I've just run across this text and this has become the axis along which I am going to travel during Advent", and I put it on the bulletin board but in case you have not seen it, and I would like to read it:

I thought there were a number ideas in this text that would be useful to look at on this day, the first day of the year. First of all, this text is clearly Marian. The Magnificat from the Gospel of Luke is quoted, the most astonishing lines of which may be: "He has raised up the lowly and sent the rich away empty". Now, in normal Marian piety, Mary is the classic figure of this kind of supine character in the providence of God. At least that is the way she has very often been presented. But I think if you look at the text of the Magnificat you will find that there is enormous, explosive potential in it. These are not the words of some kind of receding wallflower, these are politically explosive words that announce the kind of general upheaval that God is supposed to work in the world.

It is also important to know who wrote the text that I read a few minutes ago. These words were written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. You may know a bit about Bonhoeffer. He was a Lutheran theologian, with a very promising academic career in Germany. He got a job at Union Theological in New York, probably the most prestigious seminary in North America. The Natzis came into power and he left the U.S and went back to Germany and set up this underground seminary and became part of a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer and his co-plotters were discovered and he was executed after spending a long time in jail. It is important to keep this in mind because this is the same man who is talking about Mary and "lowliness" and all this other business. So his actions were not based, even in the great Lutheran tradition, on a kind of privatized piety, for example, Jesus and I having a sort of private arrangement. No...the beauty of Bonhoeffer was precisely that he saw the political implications of the Gospel and acted on them. And the model for his doing of this was, of course, Mary. This leads me to what I would like to lay out, for myself, as a New Year's program: this whole business of lowliness.

What does it mean to be lowly? Personally, as I understand it, this means that I have to, as Bonhoeffer said, "Lay down all this bravado which keeps me promoting myself so that nobody will somehow be able to get a leg up on me, politically, socially, and economically, and admit my own deficiencies and hypocrisy". In other words, to live honestly, with all those holes in myself. And in consequence of doing that, therefore, to make myself more truly available to other people. It seems to me that this was the genius of Jesus. Somehow, this enormously, universally available man did not scare and intimidate people. And so, one of the things we can do is to try to figure out what concrete and specific forms lowliness is to take for me.

But again, there is a political dimension to all of this, there must be! Too often, we in the church, in all of the churches, have separated private piety from public performance and position. Certainly, if you look at the history of all of the churches this is very clear, and so we have to then, if we are going to do this straight, look at where we are connected with the lowly in society. And here, we have a particularly rich field, and growing richer, of forms of lowliness. For example, there are more hungry children in this country right now, according to Statistics Canada, than there has ever been. There are more homeless people in this country. For the first time the St. Vincent de Paul Society has come to us at little King's College asking for food and clothes for people in this city. As the mental health institutions in this province are closed, who is walking around? And, of course, the key thing is: "What is my connection to all of those people?". And I am embarrassed to say, "I do not know". I am here at beautiful King's College where I do my classes and come and say mass and go home to my corgies, C.D.'s, and African art and I am quite comfortable. And where am I connected to all of these other people? So, I think that this is something we may well think about.

I suggested last Sunday that as a community we need to do more things together. I would like to make some proposals. I would like to suggest that we get together and listen to people in this city who know that there are more people who are homeless, hungry, and without clothes and proper accommodations. I think that this would be useful for us to know. To take another example, to move into something on a worldwide scale, I was talking to one of my neighbours, an international financial adviser who travels all over the world, and he told me that the gap, which I hear over and over again, between the rich and the poor is growing. I hope that we can do something to find out all about that as well because this seems to be crucial. Tutis has also suggested this individual who is going to come next December to talk about ethical investments. So, I think, however idiosyncratic my preoccupation with lowliness is, that there are some useful things for all of us here, and for all of us precisely as a community too.

Where are we going to be put down by God? Where are we going to be exalted in our lowliness? And above all, how are we going to connect with other people? Because this lowliness - unless it is a form of pathology - is simply everybody being able to face everybody on an equal level. This is what lowliness seems to me to be all about.

So, I apologize for the somewhat shapeless form of these remarks because, frankly, I sort of feel overwhelmed by them and profoundly and existentially inept. However, I really do believe that at the beginning of a new year where we are looking for some kind of renewal, where we are looking for a deeper life together, which means a deeper life in our own larger community, you can distil something that is useful for your own thinking and praying and that when we come together again this is exactly about what we can do as a community.