Today we celebrate Matariki, the festival bequeathed to our whole nation by the tangata whenua o Aotearoa. An important part of the celebration, and linking with the star constellation Matariki, known by the Greeks as the Pleiades, is remembering our dead, and particularly those – who like the stars, guide and (it’s nice to imagine) watch over us.

In my reflection today I’d like to recall some of the ancient stars who guide me in my faith.

And I want to begin with Jesus. Not Jesus the Christ, second person of the Trinity, King of Heaven, and all those other accolades. But Jesus the Jewish story-teller, who endeavoured to live out the message of those stories.

I realize of course, like with all the historical figures I will mention this morning, what comes down to us, what we know about these people, is a blend of fact and fiction, myth and magic, often telling us more about the biographers than those the biographies are about.

Jesus had a big life, and told lots of stories. One of which likely was the parable of the man with two sons, often called the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The story may not have originated with him, or it might have been adapted by him. It only appears in one gospel. Regardless, this story is worth remembering and repeating because I think it captures the essence of his worldview.

Luke tells us the story was a response to criticism that Jesus was welcoming ‘tax-collectors and sinners.’ Such welcoming meant not only listening to and conversing with these societal and religious undesirables, but dining with them. And such dining, given the personal purity laws of the day, meant that Jesus was tainted by their taint.

Every society, in every age, has its equivalent of ‘tax-collectors and sinners’. They might be people who have broken the law, or people who have acted in immoral and hurtful ways. They might be people with addictions, or diseases, or mannerisms that make us uncomfortable. They might be people who are from a different culture, look different, speak differently, and have customs that we are wary of.

The word ‘welcoming’ (manaakitanga), though referring to actions, is firstly a worldview. One in which no matter who you are, what you’ve done, what you will do, you are connected to me. Like me, you are part of the human race. And somewhere, way back in Darwin’s kitchen, your ancestor was my ancestor, and we were kin. You can put a religious overlay on that worldview and simply say ‘we are all God’s children’. Which means we are all related, connected in a fundamental way.

But the worldview behind welcoming isn’t just that we are all connected, but that compassion is needed to make this family, this kinship, work. (A working definition of compassion might be a blend of kindness, love, acceptance, and empowerment).

So, I would suggest to you, that Jesus – knowing that stories are wonderful memory tools that embed guiding values – told a story about kinship and compassion. The younger son (the ‘sinner’), the one who insults the mana of his father, leaves the farm taking funds that jeopardizes its ongoing financial viability, who blows his money on ‘the good life’ and comes to grief, is firstly, always and always, a son. He’s part of the human family. And secondly, he is the recipient of the extraordinary compassion of his father (the person who is this story’s exemplar of faith).

The older son, who also engages in actions that insult the mana of the father, who thinks such compassion towards a sinner is unjust, who therefore doesn’t understand the very essence of the father or of kinship, is firstly also, always and always, a son. He too is part of the human family.

And the father, rather than regulate him to some god-like figure as Christians have often done, needs to be seen too as part of the human family, and secondly as one who embodies the task of weaving the human family together, with those powerful but weak threads of compassion.

As an aside, but critical to my faith development, has been to come to understand God as those threads of compassion. Not the weaver (that’s us), but the threads themselves. As Eckhart (another star) once said: “You may call God love, you may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion.”

So, this is why Jesus is my brightest star. For whether you’re a thuggish tax-collector, a colonising Roman Centurion, a Syro-Phoenician woman, a beloved disciple, a dying girl, a mentally ill man living in a cemetery – firstly, you belong. You are family. Your taint is our taint. And secondly, together – the good, the bad, the ungrateful, the rich, the poor, the bright, the inspirational, the needy – together we must weave, with the goodness of compassion, always and always, the human race together. For the forces pulling us apart are strong.  

The second bright star from whom I draw encouragement is St Brigid of Kildare, born around 450. The oldest surviving texts we have for Brigid, a mix of history and hagiography, were written about a century after her death, and to get some semblance of her extraordinary life one has to dig beneath the layers of incredulousmiracles that shroud her.

In an age when women normally held no power, Brigid was an exception. Her abbey, which she founded and led, where monks and nuns lived in parallel but did not mix (but she was the leader of both men and women), became a centre of Irish Christianity. There she dedicated herself to helping the poor, healing the sick, tending her cattle and performing the occasional miracle. The abbey drew many pilgrims and much revenue, and thus had political influence. They also kept a perpetual flame burning at the abbey, allegedly for centuries.

Early Irish law appears to recognize the abbess of Kildare as able to “turn back the streams of war,” indicating the abbey’s possible role as an arbiter between warring parties. Kildare also became renowned as a centre of literacy and s cribal production.

The historian Elva Johnston calls her the “patron of the poor.” Johnston goes on,“(Brigid was) the very first Irish person that Irish people write about. Once writing is introduced and people begin to write narrative texts, it’s not Patrick they write about to begin with, it’s actually Brigid.”

Central to her charm was her championing of everyday people. Other saints, including the more famous Patrick, aligned themselves with the elite. Despite the power her abbey would later hold, Brigid was antiestablishment. Johnston’s favourite example concerns a fox: A man accidentally kills the king’s pet fox and is sentenced to death. Brigid, overcome with pity, has a wild fox take its place and perform tricks for the king. The king is satisfied, and the prisoner is released. But Brigid, also is concerned for the fox, and lets it flee. Justice is served; only the king is left unhappy.

She was an Irish saint for the Irish (even Irish foxes) and they loved her for it.

Although I’m influenced in my affection for her through my ancestry and its mythology, I find inspiration in Brigid’s love for common people, those outside of the halls of power, and of wanting to find faith, and affirm faith in their lives. A faith, not to condemn, but to encourage. A faith that finds God already with the people: in land, forests, streams, and animals, and around the fires of family, community, and tribe. A faith that is inseparable from the wellbeing of people, and a wellbeing of people that is not separate from the wellbeing of the earth. A faith that is poetic, artistic, that can be sung and woven, rather than a faith confined and constrained by doctrines, creeds and overlords.

Lastly, for today, there’s the star called St Francis. He of Assisi; born in the late12^th century. Who also, like Jesus and Brigid, comes to us filtered through his biographers and their needs.

In the early Church and through the Middle Ages, there was a belief that every created being could praise God in its own distinctive way. But there were strict hierarchies, laid out in a structure known as the Great Chain of Being. This Chain descended from God and the angels to humankind, then through the ranked animals, birds and fish down to plants and minerals. And there were hierarchies within the hierarchies. Just as the king was alleged to be designated by God to rule other humans, so the lion was the highest among animals and the dolphin superior to all other fish.

And then, in the early thirteen century, Francis challenges all that by saying ‘Sister Water’; ‘Brother Wolf’. Instead of placing humankind on a God-ordained pinnacle above the rest of Creation, he is entering into a new relationship with the lives around him, in order to affirm kinship – sisterhood, brotherhood– and to enter into new possibilities of mutuality, respect and love. And note Francis writes poetry to express this theology.

In the gospels we don’t have clear stories of Jesus extending his worldview of kinship and compassion to animals, land, forests, waterways, and other planetary life. With Brigid, however, there are myths about her blending Christianity and Celtic folklore, taming and tending animals and the environment. Her understanding of kinship and compassion does seem to extend beyond the human race.

Francis’ biographer, Thomas de Celano, completed his work just three after Francis died, and is very explicit about the extent of Francis’ understanding of kinship and compassion. Kinship extended to not only to the poor, including the ill and contagious (like lepers), but also to those outside the Christian faith, like the Sultan of Egypt. Kinship also extended to birds and animals. There is the story of Francis preaching to the birds, celebrating their distinctive avian qualities. There is also the story of the wolf who had terrorised the town of Gubbio. Francis befriends the wolf and negotiates a peace where both town and wolf have their needs met.

Francis seemed to understand the connection between how we treat people and how we treat animals. He was reported as saying, ‘if you have people who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have people who will deal likewise with their fellow humans.’ 

Francis also, like Brigid, and I suspect Jesus, saw that one of the enemies of kinship and compassion is the desire of those who hold political power to maintain it or expand it by waging war. Another enemy is the desire of the wealthy to keep accumulating wealth to the detriment of the poor.

So, these three – Jesus, Brigid, and Francis - are part of my cluster of faith exemplars and encouragers. Three people who understood that kinship is not something restricted to those we are closely related to (in terms of our family and tribe), but is a broad concept of the whole human race being related, and needing each other, and looking out for each other. And not just the human race, but all planetary life.

The way, the path, to such an understanding is that of compassion – compassion towards those in obvious need, but also towards those who seem not. Compassion towards those who are different or excluded. Compassion towards the earth and all its creatures. Compassion towards even our own selves.

Blessings to you all this Matariki.

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