KEEPING IT SIMPLE – 6. The mind of Christ

 (Lenten series VI, Friday 8 April 2022)

St Paul has an expression I have never heard any preacher or teacher deal with… “those who are mature”.  Paul certainly thinks that, in the church, there are those who are mature, and those who are… presumably immature?...  In a way it is what you would expect, but saying it won’t win you friends… our egalitarian Kiwiland is not keen on tall poppies…  and we have all met super-Christians, spiritual gold-card holders.  Paul observes that the community and fellowship of Jesus always includes some he unapologetically calls unspiritual[1] -- and of the unspiritual Paul writes: Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness[2] to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned…^[3]  Martha and Mary, perhaps…?  Paul makes this uncomfortable distinction.  Alongside the psychichoi , the “unspiritual”, are the teleioi, the mature.  And of these he writes, somewhat unnervingly:  (The mature)…have the mind of Christ:  …among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age… we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden… none of the rulers of this age understood this… but as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him…” these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit…  Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.  And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. 

Now, I don’t want to be talking about two types of people… because, of course, human society is more complex and nuanced than that… and in any case, Paul includes us all in the church, in Jesus’s company, just as Martha and Mary belonged equally in the home at Bethany with Jesus.  These days, the “mature” in Paul’s terms find it easier to think of ourselves as contemplative – because, for instance, we are less and less motivated, activated, by our variable feelings and emotions; we practise silence and stillness, contemplative prayer; we know how to wait and pay attention, we know what it is to live by faith, to live with mystery and unresolved questions; we consciously, each day, walk the next steps in the way of Christ… Contemplative is the way we are inclined to describe ourselves, knowing that anything we want to say about it, even by way of careful explanation, as Paul points out, is likely to seem foolishness to the ones he describes as unspiritual.

You may have been startled at Paul’s statement, that the mature “have the mind of Christ”… but it is not, and is never likely to be, any cause of spiritual elitism, or thinking grandly of ourselves as mystics or whatever.  In the silence and stillness of prayer, we distance ourselves daily from the ego’s occupation of our lives... this is the daily and lifelong process Jesus called leaving self behind -- a prospect that frightens the life out of those Paul calls unspiritual. Our teachers tell us there is in any case only one prayer in the universe – in prayer we are joining the eternal prayer of the Risen Jesus… a prayer reflected for instance in chapter 17 of John’s Gospel, a timeless prayer of love and unity, mercy and peace.  We are joining what Fr Richard Rohr sees as an immense River of Grace and Mercy.  To the Samaritan woman at the well Jesus described this as a spring of living water within.[4] 

So here we are… living and practising faith in a time of deepening global crisis… climate crisis, hideous warfare and mindless social violence, pandemic and its accompaniments of paranoia, assaults on truth and decency, corruption in politics, refugees by the million., and children being terrified, lost, starved, killed…  Here we are, just about helpless in any practical sense.  KEEPING IT SIMPLE, then , the title I gave this Lenten series, does mean recognising when we are at the limits of our personal resources and wisdom.  The mature however do know a way forward in this desperate space…  Whether or not we can save the planet, I will continue doing what I can, so far as it lies with me, to keep the planet’s temperature rise below 1.5°… but first and in any case I will go on practising, day by day, what St Paul called the hidden wisdom, doing justice, loving mercy, walking humbly… loving God, our neighbour, and ourselves… abiding in Christ.

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[1] Ψυχικός (psychikos).  It can mean “natural” – it is what we are when we are being driven, motivated by feelings and innate reactions… “It’s just the way I am…”

[2] Mōria (μωρία), foolishness. Nonsense…

[3] I Corinthians 2:6-16

[4] eg. John 4:10-15

KEEPING IT SIMPLE – 5. Not being afraid

(Lenten series V, Friday 1 April 2022)

We are thinking about life and faith in a time of crisis, and so we do have to talk about being afraid.  Jesus, in several instances, asks his disciples why were they afraid… as though they needn’t have been.  Have no fear… he says. And in the Sermon on the Mount we find the piece that causes nervous shuffling in the pews… where Jesus says:

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.  Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?  Look at the birds of the air… Can you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life… It is the gentiles who strive for all these things…  So do not worry about tomorrow. For tomorrow will bring worries of its own.  Today’s trouble is enough for today.^[1]

But we can’t help it.  Basil Fawlty is told, don’t panic, and he yells, What else is there to do…!  More seriously, to watch Ukrainians fleeing their homes, towards any western border, wherever the train they scramble on is going, women and children, parting from their menfolk who have to stay and fight… fear has occupied and dominates their lives. 

Sarah Bachelard makes a pretty obvious distinction between fear and anxiety… although the distinction can get a little blurred.  Fear tends to render us helpless and confused, even paralysed for action… like the disciples in the storm on the lake.  I freaked out, you have to tell the media… I was like, O my God!  When fear takes over, reason tends to go out the window.  Anxiety on the other hand is more when we find ourselves lying awake still more or less in our right minds… but our right minds are the problem, we’re seeing worst-case scenarios, dire possibilities, at 2 in the morning.

The Apostle John, as we know, says that love casts out fear… there is no fear in love, he writes.[2]   Well… tell that to countless mothers in history who have watched their sons go off to war.  But if we look at the text we can see what he means.  Fear, he says, has to do with punishment.  The fear cast out by love is the fear of an arbitrary God.  Ultimately it is a fear of life and death itself.  There is no fear in love, writes John, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.  We love because he first loved us…  To be perfected in love, as John puts it, is to know the God Jesus called Father, of whom we have no need to be afraid, who punishes no one, who sends his rain, says Jesus, on good and bad alike.[3]  It is to live, to abide, in the love Jesus knew, in which he lived and died.

In contemplative life and prayer we do find ourselves, as time goes by, less frightened of life and all its risks.  We find ourselves more ready to accept life as fragile and precarious, unfair in many respects.  We are more in love each day with goodness and truth, with beauty and wonder, with mercy and justice.  It is not that pain and sorrow suddenly become somehow acceptable… or that adversity doesn’t matter any more… It is more that, as St Paul puts it, love never fails… love abides.[4]

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[1] Matthew 6:25ff

[2] I John 4:18

[3] Matthew 5:45

[4] I Corinthians 13:8, 13

KEEPING IT SIMPLE – 4. Downsizing

 

(Lenten series IV, Friday 25 March 2022)

If you decide to move into a retirement village to live, almost certainly you have to downsize.  At Summerset Falls one day I saw some slight difficulty with downsizing – this couple had just moved in to their retirement unit…or tried to… and goods and chattels were spilling out of doors, out of the garage, out the windows, out to the road.  They had brought it all, but there was nowhere to put it, and things were already getting tricky with the neighbours.  I mention it here because, by analogy, downsizing is a serious part of growing up in faith. Not only goods and chattels…one of the aspects of talking with people about faith these days is seeing what we “always thought” but can actually part with without taking leave of faith in God… indeed, enhancing faith in God… seeing someone discover how simplicity, travelling light in faith, discarding excess baggage, may open doors of freedom and fresh understanding.

To be able for instance – and I admit for some this can be anything but simple -- to take leave of the God who might be angry with us, the God who keeps account, who watches that we have been good, who punishes, who has therefore to be besought and placated…  A dear parishioner I will never forget, deeply wounded in his earlier years, one morning was waiting for me at church with a copy of Lady Julian of Norwich.  He had her writings opened where she says, Jesus will never ever leave the place he occupies within our soul, for in us he is completely at home and we are his eternal dwelling-place.[1]  “Is that true, Boss”, he asked (Tom called me Boss).  “Yes Tom, I believe it is.”  Lady Julian had reached out from the 14^th century and helped Tom lay down the excess baggage of guilt and sorrow. 

For some people, downsizing may mean, in the words of the Serenity Prayer, finally accepting what I cannot change… or more likely, being content now for God to change it, or not, in God’s time.  Hands off…  There are plenty for whom downsizing in faith may mean letting go of rigid attitudes to the Bible, or to aspects of moral behaviour, or to hallowed teachings which are plainly not in accord with the way or the spirit of Jesus.  It may mean, and often does, shedding attitudes to someone else which have poisoned life for years... learning to forgive, or to relinquish control, to unload the burden, to move on.  In this time of crisis we are discovering afresh what it means if the way of Christ is going to be as Jesus taught, and as that might be applied in our lives in the 21^st century.  When Jesus sent his disciples out he instructed them: Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money – not even an extra tunic.[2]  I hasten to say, there’s no need to get literal about that! For each of us as Jesus’s disciple it is quite salutary enough to have thought honestly and clearly about all our possessions, our attitudes and opinions, appreciating what is good there, knowing why we have it all -- but also asking ourselves what would be left were it all removed.  Simplicity, in possessions, in beliefs and attitudes, clears space and helps to focus attention. 

In these times of crisis, moreover, we people of faith need to downsize our words -- we need to take care with the labels we pin on people, avoiding hyperbolic abuse and silly overstatement in conversation… and the judgements people express as though everyone would or should agree.  Downsizing pays more attention to silence instead of words, to thoughtfulness and a willingness to listen… Benedict calls it restraint of speech.  And I imagine the ultimate restraint of speech is contemplative prayer itself – we downsize to the mantra, we shut down our speech and thought and imagining and fantasies, memories and regrets… simply, for a period, to renew and air the space for God.  As the Psalmist so simply puts it: Be still, and know…[3] 

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[1] Revelations of Divine Love, the 16^th Revelation, chapter 67.

[2] Luke 9:3.  See also Mark 6:8;  Matthew 10:10.  In Mark he does allow them a staff.

[3] Psalm 46:10

KEEPING IT SIMPLE – 3. Truth and lies

(Lenten series 3, Friday 18 March 2022)

One reality in the growing portfolio of crises these days is the retreat from truth and from rational discussion.  To many people it is evidently now acceptable to exploit language, to grossly overstate what they feel strongly about… some think it permissible to be openly abusive, including foul-mouthed, or obstinately unreasonable…  There is a rising culture of misinformation… and evidence that misinformation is now being deliberately assembled, and used to weaken decency and order.  That is now called disinformation.  We have conspiracy theories… and a sort of obligatory paranoia… a radical abandonment of trust in the media, in the police, in the government or any authority or officialdom… and allegations that good and intelligent people are in fact being duped, or even in bad faith are choosing lies and deceit.  Science and scientific method get airily dismissed.  So, many people seem to have opted simply to be in denial of reality...  and this at a time, oddly enough, when we are having to cope anyway with the mysterious rising tide of dementia in it various forms... people losing touch, involuntarily, with reality  The one phenomenon, I know, has nothing to do with the other… but it all adds up to a crisis in our understanding and our discernment as people of faith.  And violence is now prevalent in the ways people think issues may be resolved… verbal violence, actual violence.

I have to say that these waters are muddied all the more because so much religion also has taken leave of sense, become distorted, in the horny hands of the devout, and aberrant versions of Christian faith, fundamentalism, superstition, the misuse of power in religious communities… make it difficult to know where we are.  Numerous people have found they can’t be bothered with it any more… a plague on all your houses…  Jesus is not the author of confusion.

The best wisdom, it seems to me, is that we know how to stop and simplify.  It is always good to withdraw, to shut down for now the worrying, debating, swapping ain’t it awful stories.  We are not going to put the world right, we don’t have solutions, and our opinions sink from sight in the morass of everyone’s opinions.  It is the first rhythm of contemplative life and prayer… to be still, to cease the chatter, to be open to God.  The gospel records tell how Jesus, at times of stress, followed such a pattern.  It is important to recover steadiness… It does not mean that we know everything now.  It means we take time and space to connect with that area where we are not confused, or panicky, or full of anger, or in danger of being led astray.  

In the simple, gentle processes of contemplative prayer, as time goes by, we move beyond our comfort zones, our need to shore up our defences, to shield ourselves from calamity, from being misunderstood… This was always largely the care and feeding of the ego, the self we hope the world sees and respects.  All that quietly becomes surplus to requirements.  The self that’s waiting there is the self God made, always knew, and loved.  This self, moreover, is in good order – it is the ego that has problems.  Go into your room, says Jesus, and shut the door…^[1]  The self that waits there is truthful, and loving, and is in company with Jesus in all his simplicity, the way, the truth, the life^[2].  We don’t emerge with any set of solutions – we emerge knowing humbly and gratefully whose we are and whom we believe.

 

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[1] Matthew 6:6

[2] John 14:6

KEEPING IT SIMPLE – 2. Community of Love

 

(Lenten series 2, Friday 11 March 2022)

What we call the First Letter of John, near the end of the Christian scriptures, is part of the last writings to make it into our Bible.  Here, then, we have teaching and wisdom from part of the early Christian community, perhaps the second generation of them… a community under recurrent persecution and constant crisis… and in this extraordinary letter we have the benefit of their mature experience.  The writer insists repeatedly they are a community of love.  That is the central issue – the loving quality of their community is their authenticity as Jesus’s people.  But in our day love is a desperately damaged and exploited word.  This writer says, God is love.  Love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God; whoever does not love does not know God…  God is love.  Those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.  Then he says: There is no fear in love… perfect love casts out fear…  Those who say, “I love God”, and hate their brothers and sisters, says this writer, are liars…[1]  He doesn’t mince words.  Love then, however shaky or inconsistent… some would say, airy-fairy and unrealistic … is the defining characteristic of God’s people, the followers of Jesus.  Love is the sine qua non.  

St Paul takes up that point in the lyrical chapter 13 of I Corinthians:  I may speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but if I do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  I may have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge… I may have all faith so as to remove mountains, I may give away all I possess, but if I don’t have love, I am nothing.[2]  Well, it is interesting to note there what Paul thought actually isn’t love… what people and churches may default to, perhaps unwittingly, instead of love… and what he lists is… words… knowledge… demonstrations of faith… all perennial temptations for the church… powerful words, great sermons, knowing everything, fundamentalist certainty and dogmatism, strident moralism… but without love, says Paul, what we have is clanging cymbals.  Tertullian, a Church Father from the early 3^rd century, had a pagan friend who commented in amazement about the Christians, Look how they love each other!

But much that masquerades as love is nothing of the kind.  God is love.  All love, says John, is from God.  We don’t generate love – we receive love from God, and each other, it may be.  Love is the first of the fruits of the Spirit, writes Paul.[3]  It is in love that we learn to do what God requires – to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly.[4]  Love is the product of a changed and submissive heart in which ego is ceding its place to God.  Love flows in us, not from the hormones, but from the heart and the will in which, as Paul puts it, God’s love has been poured into our hearts.[5] 

And love identifies the church.  That may somewhat reduce the dimensions of the church, you might think in life’s more judgemental moments.  If love is not the wellspring, then what we have, however admirable, is not denoting the company of Jesus… it is something else... and yes, I do not need to be reminded that the church even in its decrepitude still includes some good people, and they mean well… I am reminded of the old Latin hymn, Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.  Where there is love, there is God.  The secular culture will always be able and ready to detect what are seen as hypocrisies.  But we are at our best, as Jesus’s disciples when, in prayer and contemplation, we are seeing the ego relegated to where it belongs, which is not in control… we are free within ourselves to attend to truth, to reality, to the present moment, to what needs to happen.  I think however Paul’s finest account of a Christian community ruled by love is in his Letter to the Colossians... again perhaps one of the later writings.  Every detail here would be the product of contemplative life and prayer.  Paul writes: As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience.  Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other…  Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.  And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body.  And be thankful.[6]

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[1] I John 4:7-21

[2] I Corinthians 13:1-3

[3] Galatians 5:22

[4] Micah 6:8

[5] Romans 5:5

[6] Colossians 3: 12-15

KEEPING IT SIMPLE – 1. Time of crisis

 

(Lenten series I, Friday 4 March 2022)

In this series, overall, we are thinking about where we currently find ourselves… living in a time of crisis… environmental crisis, with all its immediacy in increasing occurrence of natural disasters and their effects; pandemic crisis, affecting our lives in so many ways; deep crisis in the church, so that at times we scarcely recognise the company of Jesus in the world; crises in politics and the conduct of public affairs, with warfare, naked unprovoked aggression, refugees, and all the attendant disruption of homes and cities; crises in morality and the effects of secularism and godlessness, so that lies become truth, decency is pulled apart, public order is scorned…  This is where we are now called to love God and our neighbour, and to follow Jesus. It is these realities that thoughtful Christians and congregations need to get our heads and hearts around.  There are a couple of primary concerns for this series – one is just that, our awareness of continuing crisis which is already upon us, because it is possible to live in denial and pretend it’s not there.  The other is our need to simplify.  Jesus spoke plainly in his teaching… it is his followers who get selective, complex and confused.  So, these two things over the weeks of Lent – our time of crisis, and our need to simplify.  Crisis, as it happens, is a Greek word and it means decision… it is a time for making good decisions, learning discernment.  And that word time… in Greek, kairos… you remember kairos?... kairos is God’s time, God’s moment, time to be sitting up and paying attention.^[1] 

I found it very useful to turn to Sarah Bachelard.  Crisis, Sarah reminds us, is nothing new.  It may be something we repeatedly encounter in life… illness perhaps, breakup of a marriage, bereavement and grievous loss… but painful and all as crises may be, life does go on, the world we inhabit is still there afterwards as it was before.  It is possible still to find meaning.  If you know the Hebrew story of Job, you will remember how, first, he was deprived of his family and his livelihood – and Job’s response is: Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return there; the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.  Job is still able to find meaning. Then he is afflicted with loathsome sores; he sits outside on the ash heap; he has lost everything now including his self respect.  His wife incites him to curse God, and die… but Job replies: Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not the bad?  He can even yet find some meaning, however flimsy.  It is when his friends come to sit with him for seven days and nights – the parish pastoral team, we might say – with their wordy counsel, that Job crosses a line; he finds he can no longer make sense of his life or beliefs.  He curses the day of his birth.  Now we have crisis of another order. Simone Weil describes this as affliction, different in kind, she says, from pain and suffering.[2]  Job’s world cannot now and will not be the same.  This crisis, says Sarah Bachelard, is a turning point; life is not going to resume as it was.  Do you find that disturbingly familiar…?

Of course the crisis may be a “good” crisis – a new relationship perhaps, a truer vocation, the relinquishing with relief of old plans or dreams.  Either way however, good or bad, there has been the loss of the narrative we knew and relied on.  Our task now is to find God’s meaning in God’s moment, God’s kairos.  Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old, says God through the Prophet Isaiah.  I am about to do a new thing, now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?  I will make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert…  And that, I think, is our task as the company of Jesus, onwards from 2022, amid the collapsing of much we knew as familiar.  Life and faith are not going to be reinstated as we knew them.  So what matters?  What is essential for us to see, as Jesus’s followers?  That is what I expect to pursue in these Lenten weeks, remembering that if we are able to keep it simple, then it’s possible that we are not straying too far from the way of Jesus.  Simplicity rules!  With that in mind, next Friday, we take a look at what the Apostle John tells us is the one indispensable mark of Jesus’s company, the essential resonance of Jesus’s followers. 

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[1] Greek’s two words for “time” – chronos (χρόνος) is simply the time of day;  kairos (καιρός) is “God’s moment”, the special time when something is happening.

[2] The French word is malheur.  She writes movingly: Affliction is the uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death… The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least to go on wanting to love… (The Love of God and Affliction).

Advent IV – The Stranger – 17 December 2021

 

The Sunday morning hymn session on TV1, a few weeks back, featured the much-loved old gospel song, Blessed Assurance, Jesus is Mine, sung with fervour.  And I was left wondering about the awkward possessive pronoun, “Mine”…?  Jesus arrives as does any new-born, as a stranger, even to his parents.  They have to find out who he is… and good luck to all parents in that task… hopefully they are not assuming their child is to be some faithful replica of them.  But at a deeper level, in this “Jesus is mine” statement, there is the strong note of possessing, and from the outset, with Jesus, it seems inappropriate.  Jesus is mine…?  “Mine” places ME firmly at the centre.. my faith, my happiness, my spiritual life…  That is not the way the gospel story tells us about all this.  There is a persistent note of strangeness in it from the outset.  About the only accounts of his life until, in Luke’s words, Jesus was about thirty years old…[1] are the stories of devout Simeon, and the prophetess Anna… and the very odd story of how the family went to Jerusalem for the Passover, and returning home they were a day or so on the road before they realised he wasn’t with them – he was back in the temple debating with the teachers there.  Understanding any of that may indeed be over to contemplatives like Anna or Simeon… and his mother, we are told, who treasured these things in her heart.[2]  And onward through his life Jesus is, in the Latin expression, sui generis, defying classification.  He appears, he disappears, his closest followers constantly misread him…  He defies labelling, and you certainly can’t possess him or domesticate him to your own personal happiness or your panacea in life.

In contemplative life and prayer we encounter true mystery as an open door, or perhaps even better if you think about it, an open window… at any rate not some impediment, or problem to be solved or explained, or a question to be got to the bottom of.  The baby lying there, an utterly dependent newborn, open to disease or injury, subject to fallible parents… is to the eye of faith God’s word of love.  We don’t explain this word – we receive this word, in faith and love, in awe and gratitude.  This is, as the Apostle John puts it, the word made flesh, pitching his tent among us… full of grace and truth.[3]  In good Benedictine fashion, you pause at the threshold of the stable, and you’re silent…  Paul says this stranger brings a new world:  If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation; the old has passed away; see, everything has become new![4]  Our priorities have shifted.  We are not thinking and reacting the same any more.  The things Jesus taught seem now to make a vital sense.  We are not so frightened… of life, of death, of tomorrow, or of others…  we can go on about all this, and plenty of preachers will, but the best gift now is to know how to be still and silent… as the carol puts it, O hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing.

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[1] Luke 3:23

[2] Luke 2:51

[3] John 1:14.  “…lived among us…” The verb is literally “pitched his tent”, from the Greek verb skēnoō (σκηνόω) meaning to pitch one’s tent. (Epidemiologists may be interested that the second-to-last letter of σκηνόω is Omicron... but perhaps not.)

[4] II Corinthians 5:17