Grace upon grace – 12 December 2014

This Sunday the Gospel takes a short excursion from Mark’s Gospel to John, in order to have Advent blessed once again with these sublime words:

From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God.  God’s only Son, close to the Father’s heart, he has made him known.   [John 1:16-18]

Last week the gospel reading announced good news – and the good news could scarcely have been more momentous.  It was nothing less than a radical shift in our understanding and encounter with God.  John dwells on exactly that contrast here.  The law was given through Moses -- grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.  It is not that the law is set aside as though it is now abolished.  Law and behaviour matter as always.  God however judges us not by the law but by love, by grace and truth.  We know this, because grace and truth are what we encounter in Christ.  They are what we encounter when in silence and stillness we cease our attempts to justify ourselves.  And grace and truth are what we encounter in other people who open themselves to God. 

Grace, the lovely Greek word χαρις, usually goes with truth, as though they are twins.  After the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa they needed some serious justice mechanism to deal with the monstrous crimes of the past.  Under leaders such as Desmond Tutu they constituted the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  This was never perfect, and is still criticised by some, but it has remained a remarkable exercise in grace and truth.  The principle was, if you told the truth about all you had done, and heard the truth and accepted it from your accusers, then, knowing the truth, you might petition to be free of the legal consequences of the past in an act of grace.  Month after month, at immense cost to themselves, the commission heard these testimonies.  Truth and grace went together, belonged together, depended on each other. 

So John can write:  From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.  It is as though God has nothing other to give but grace – love independent of merit or worth.  “Fullness” is a special word in Greek which scholars go on and on about.  It reminds me however of the now frequently heard colloquialism, “like”…  I was like, O my god!  It denotes that everything in me was just that and nothing else.  We can borrow this colloquial adverb – God is like…grace upon grace. 

John goes on to write:  No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.  God is absent from our sight.  The best and primary view of God we have is Jesus.  John informs us, Jesus is close to the Father’s heart… he has made God known.  “I learn of God from nature,” announced the formidable chair-woman of a Garden Club, informing me where true revelation was to be found.  She knew how to fertilise her petunias.  I thought of Tennyson, and of nature “red in tooth and claw”, nature often just as beautiful as she sees, but just as often devouring its young, destroying cities and villages, growing malignant viruses… 

It is Jesus who draws aside the veil.  The view we get is partial, tantalising, perhaps.  But we do see the way to walk, the path to follow.  And to stop, be still and silent, is to check that we are once again, still, on that path.

Good news – 5 December 2014

This year the emphasis in the gospel readings shifts to Mark, probably the earliest of the NT Gospels.  And this Sunday, Advent II, we get the opening words in Mark:  The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ…  In Greek, ευαγγελια – it is colloquial Greek and it means simply that, good news, not primarily religious good news… any good news.  John the Baptist announces this good news.  He appears, not at the holy temple, but in the desert; not as one of the respectable in religion, but somewhat suspect and embarrassing: 

John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” [Mark 1:4-8]

This good news tells of a fundamental shift in our understanding of God, faith and life and what we have to do.  It is so startling and unexpected that some sectors of the church perennially struggle to grasp it, and revert to the old more familiar ways instead.  Once again I need some help from Rowan Williams, who puts this in words I would not have been able to assemble.  He wrote:

A human being is holy, not because he or she triumphs by willpower over chaos and guilt and now leads a flawless life, but because that life is showing the victory of God’s faithfulness in the midst of disorder and imperfection.  The church is holy, not because it is a gathering of the good and the well-behaved, but because it is speaking of the triumph of grace in the coming together of strangers and sinners who, miraculously, trust one another enough to join in common repentance and common praise – to express a deep and elusive unity in Jesus Christ. 

That is the shift and that is the good news – it is about God, not about us or our behaviour.  Jesus is good news because he embodies God who actually loves what he has made, whose love is, as St Paul put it, unfailing, who brings enemies together and heals memories.  That is the good news, that God is not and never was our adversary. 

But we are conditioned to think in good and bad terms, categorising, struggling through the years to be better, to do better, as we think.  We are conditioned to assume we can hardly receive what we are not good enough for.  All of the rest of our life is about qualifying or not, deserving or not, achieving or not, winning acceptance and approval…  In contemplative life and prayer this is set aside because (if I may be so presumptuous) it is extremely boring to God.  The good news is that the transforming power is the Holy Spirit, the power of God in grace and mercy, peace and love.  What is asked of us is our humble consent. 

Knowing and loving – 28 November 2014

After all these years it seems to me that Advent is something near impossible to explain.  God comes into our life and our world, our hearts.  As St Paul puts it memorably in two words: in Christ.  The baby, the young man, the teachings, the death, the resurrection – Advent is our hope and our expectation that all this is so, that it happens and that it is true.  Incarnation is a solid Christian word, although it is outside the vocabulary of most people.  It means made flesh.  That is our flesh and bone.  In St John:  The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us… full of grace and truth.

That incarnation, made flesh, is for Jesus’s followers a haunting and life-changing thing.  We were made flesh.  If Jesus shared and knew, experienced, this mortal, fallible life with all its perils and ambiguities, then it is not really possible for us to be content to do less.  I came across a talk Rowan Williams gave to some ordinands on retreat.  He spoke to them about what he called the terrible threat of knowledge without love.  He is referring to our culture which is obsessed with needing to know, needing to have “the facts”, however distorted through an extremely compromised media, needing “answers”, is a common cliché, needing to see people properly exposed, humiliated and punished, needing to have “justice done”, needing scapegoats, someone to blame – all of this somehow perceived as the “truth”.  This knowledge is power but without love.  It produces typically revulsion, contempt, the illusion that we have the truth about someone or something – and sometimes even amusement at other people’s pain.

Incarnation requires of us something enitrely different.  The Psalmist says of God (Ps 103:14 KJV):  He knoweth whereof we are made, he remembereth that we are dust.   So must we.  The truth about us, the truth about someone else, is not told until we understand how and why with accurate sensitivity.  It is what William Langland, way back in the 14^th century, in Piers Plowman, called “kind knowing” – not just the alleged facts, but the doubt, the agony, the temptation, the darkness and abandonment.  Jesus is represented by St John as saying, I judge no one.  To the woman discovered in adultery he says, Where are your accusers?  Is there no one who condemns you?  Neither do I condemn you.  Rowan Williams writes how Jesus seemed to sense the precariousness of human goodness, love and fidelity… No failure or error could provoke his condemnation, except the error of those legalists who could not understand that very precariousness. 

To be incarnate to another person, as Jesus was, as we are called to be, is the polar opposite of humiliating, ridiculing, condemning and rejecting.  It is kind knowing, kind understanding.  And if it is difficult because we also have been hurt a bit too much, perhaps, or because it seems important to be stern and unyielding, then we may learn incarnation in the stillness and silence of our prayer.  It is the space and the context in which we are simply ourselves, without boasting and without excuses, present and receptive to God and to all truth.  God is incarnate to us and we to God.  Then the Spirit of Christ is able, as Jesus said, to bring us to the truth, the kind knowing, the understanding and love. 

Sheep and goats – 21 November 2014

Next Sunday is the last of the liturgical year, and of course we get the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats.  It’s stark and uncompromising, and I feel it never improves from one year to the next.  Those who had fed the hungry and the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, cared for the sick, visited the prisoners, are at the final judgment set at the Saviour’s right hand in glory.  Those who had neglected these things are consigned, with rejection, humiliation and abuse, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 

The worst way to deal with this parable, it seems to me, would be to rush out and feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick and visit the prisoner – in order to be among the sheep rather than the goats.  It won’t work, and it’s not the point.  One aspect that interests me here is that the sheep didn’t know that they had been doing all these things:  Lord, when did we see you hungry…? and so on.  The goats, similarly, didn’t know that they had been neglecting all this.   Everyone was surprised.  This is scarcely welcome news for the overly righteous, the morally scrupulous, because it seems to indicate that what matters is at a deeper level than our actions and fulfilment of duties.

However, this list of benevolent acts is what Catholics call the Corporal Works of Mercy.  They add one more to make the list up to seven, so we have:  Feed the hungry, Give water to the thirsty, Clothe the naked, Visit the prisoner, Visit the sick, Free the captive, Bury the dead.  There are also the seven Spiritual Works of Mercy:  Instruct the ignorant, Counsel the doubtful, Admonish sinners, Bear wrongs patiently, Forgive offences willingly, Comfort the afflicted, Pray for the living and the dead.  There are actually study guides and work sheets on sale for instruction in all this, if you’re having difficulty. 

The realities in life, as we well know, are otherwise.  If we must have labels, which I find distorting and oppressive, then the fact is that most of us find we are sometimes among the sheep and sometimes among the goats.  And that’s on a good day.  We are unsure, also, about this God who separates sheep from goats, according to those criteria, and consigns the goats to perdition.  Something is badly the matter with that.  Christ is the icon of the invisible God, St Paul teaches, and the picture in this parable does not seem Christlike.

But the parable does give us a very timely urgency about social justice, and it links this directly with God’s purposes.  In our contemplative life we expect to be changed, and for the change to continue and develop.  I may not be feeding the hungry or visiting the prisoner right now, but I will be some way involved in healing a broken world and bringing relief where it is needed.  I may be in a position where I can influence decision-makers. 

What also strikes me about this is that all these works of mercy are equally well done by atheists, Jews, Buddhists, Moslems, or people with tattoos – and many do just that.  These are not uniquely Christian acts.  Jesus in this parable expected his disciples in any age, to do what is simply good and necessary – it may be with Amnesty or with Doctors Without Borders, or it may be in our own neighbourhood, family or churches.  But we do it, we see it done, we feel it and we yearn for it, more and more as our egos and ego-needs diminish.

Going on alone – 14 November 2014

For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his servants and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away.  [Matthew 25:14-15]

…the Parable of the Talents.  The servant who had been lent five talents made them into ten; the one with two talents made four; the one with one talent took fright, buried it, and eventually returned it safe and unsullied to his master.  Parts of the American church have a lot of fun with this parable because it is all about capitalism, about wealth and righteousness belonging together, and Jesus even seems to justify usury. 

I think the key to the parable is in the very first sentences, which I read.  The point is the master’s absence.  This is emphasized.  In Matthew he goes away on a journey (Gr. αποδημων – to another country).  Then he went away, Matthew repeats.  It’s the same stress in Mark.  In Luke he is a nobleman who goes off to a far country.  And that I think is the issue – it’s about going on alone, without the immediate sense or awareness of God…?  It’s grown-up faith.  If we want to be really adventurous with this parable, then we ponder living without the presence of someone we love…?  Living without adequate health perhaps, or money, or faith and hope…?  And when you think about it, there are various other points in the gospels where Jesus explicitly stresses his coming absence, as though the disciples need to understand this.  I think this parable does reflect the early church having to come to terms with the fact that Jesus has not returned as some expected – neither will he.  Life as a disciple, as we know, might well be comforted by the perceived presence of Christ in the Eucharist, or by the promise that he will be with us always, even to the end of the world.  But life is equally marked by the presence of absence. Then, says Jesus in the parable, he went away.

“Talents”, by the way, in this parable, certainly do not mean personal gifts and aptitudes, the kind of thing referred to in the unspeakable TV show “NZ’s Got Talent”.  The talent in Greek (ταλεντον) was a measure of volume, generally the amount of wine in one amphora.  “Talent” here may mean a talent of gold, an unimaginable sum, or silver, or wine.  The talent was a lot of whatever it is.  The parable then is about what we do with what we own, certainly our assets in the sense understood by Inland Revenue, but also what we do with the whole environment we have inherited.  It is up to us, because God is not about to appear and make it all right.

Grown-up faith, then, is about getting on with it.  It is about living, not huddling, in the midst of life and risk.  It is not about measuring everything by how we happen to be feeling at the moment – which is no measure at all -- or rushing for safety as did the servant who buried his talent securely in a hole.  It is about risking mistakes and daring to be vulnerable and fallible.  It is moreover about consenting to being made this way in life, even at our advanced stage or age, by God’s wild spirit of resurrection and new life.  Our prayer of silence and stillness, which you must admit is somewhat sparse of reassurances, is for many of us the best and truest way of being, in this kind of world. 

Oil shortage – 7 November 2014

Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise replied, ‘No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour. [Matthew 25:1-13]

Only Matthew records this parable -- and it bristles with questions.  Who are the bridesmaids? Who is the bridegroom? Is foolishness really a reason for exclusion from the kingdom? Is indeed anyone excluded? Why were the wise bridesmaids so uncaring? Why was the door peremptorily shut and no one else allowed in? What does the oil signify?  This is not my favourite parable.  Is the form in which it reaches us through Matthew the same as the form in which it was told by Jesus?  Or does this form of the parable reflect more the 1^st or 2^nd century church under adversity and wondering how long before the Saviour returns?  I don’t know you, says the bridegroom to the foolish bridesmaids who still asked to be admitted.  He did know them… and that is not my understanding of faith.

It is clearly about being ready when the time comes.  So what time is that?  The time of our need in life, one might think.  Last Friday in our brief discussion, it was mentioned that we experience different seasons in our lives, seasons of experience and maturity which change us, sometimes deeply.  In mindful, contemplative understanding, a major thread which runs through these changes over the years is the constant challenge to our ego.  The young adolescent, we think quite properly, must be thinking about self and the self’s future – perhaps we worry if they are not.  But our prayer of silence and stillness is a daily calling into question of the ego’s requirements of us, examining what we assume to be our needs.  Humility, letting go, relinquishing control, which may have been unimaginable at age 18, may indeed start imperceptibly at first to replace more familiar ways of reacting. 

Nothing stays the same, even if we devote ourselves to control and safety – as indeed some people do.   Change for them becomes our enemy.  But in a climate of prayerful silence, when we have ceased asking for things, and instead are still with empty hands and a consenting heart, the Spirit of God – the oil for the lamp, as it were – is able to continue God’s work of creation in us, replacing fear with love, and making all things new. 

Broad phylacteries – 31 October 2014

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honour at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi. But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven… The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted. [Mathew 23:1-12]

Jesus was clearly exasperated, at any rate on that day, by people practising religion.  By any standards his speech is judgemental and dismissive.  He was angry, and what triggers his anger is his awareness of burdened and suffering people for whom this kind of religion is no help at all.  They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.  And there are examples of precisely that in the Auckland religious scene, and far beyond, today.  That section of chapter 23 morever is tame compared with what he goes on to say.

Jesus calls us to live differently.  It is really a shameful thing when this seems to be understood better by a secular society than in the congregations and councils of the church.   The call of Jesus is a call to live simply and humbly.  Even atheists understand that.  It is not a question of how much or how little we own.  Simplicity and humility become apparent, or not, whatever car we drive and wherever we choose to live. 

Basil Hume was a Benedictine monk of Ampleforth Abbey.  More or less out of the blue he was appointed Archbishop of Westminster.  At his ordination and induction, amid great colour and panoply, the preacher was one of his fellow monks who warned his brother: It will make everything harder for you, including your prayer.  A bishop, said Basil Hume, quoting St Augustine, is a man who knows the weakness, fears and anxieties of all people; who, as well as sensing the presence of God, experiences the darkness of his apparent absence; whose job is not to stifle but to release, not to impose but to draw out, not to dominate but to animate.  Basil Hume wrote a book for children, about himself, called Basil in Blunderland.  He once told his priests, Remember, when you die, someone will be greatly relieved.  These are signs of a humility, acquired in the Spirit of Christ, apparent through all the noise and colour of high church office. 

We learn simplicity in our prayer of silence and stillness.  We have set aside for the present all the things other people might admire us for, and things we do for a sense of justification and worth.  We are not seeking here any huge enlightenment – indeed, as Basil Hume pointed out, prayer may often have more to do with the apparent absence of God.  It is only genuine humility which can bear the sense of evil in the world, and the weight of our own personal history in places.  So our phylacteries, you might say, are diminishing.  We are free because the only requirement of us here is simplicity.

What it amounts to – 24 October 2014

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.  (Matthew 22:34-40)

Steadily, across the spectrum of Christian faith around the world, and across immense obstacles, a huge shift seems to be happening.  On a perhaps superficial view it is a shift from exclusivism – that is to say, the assumption that you ought to believe the right things and in various ways conform – to a need for inclusivism – that we reduce the rules and remove the fences, and remember that God is the judge of people’s hearts and motives.  Exclusivism is a need to protect the faith and the church.  Inclusivism opens us to difference and risk, and often as not, the need to change.

There is another view, one that goes back to the Hebrew prophets.  It is to remember that God works, constantly, sometimes dramatically but usually not, sometimes with us but often despite us – God works to make all things new.  This is the creator tending and loving his creation.  It is the Spirit of the Risen Christ, continually inspiring and bringing us back to the way of Christ. 

The commandment which, said Jesus, is the greatest of all, the commandment which he said fulfils all the law and the prophets, is plain and simple:  You shall love the Lord your God… You shall love your neighbour.  That is the requirement.  It does not say that we must first be morally blameless or at any rate considerably improved.  It does not say that we must believe the right things.  It does not say that we must first fulfil various liturgical and canonical requirements.  It is a commandment to love – as though the love we have received and practise, however feeble, is what God sees and loves.

Neither is this love a matter of our emotions, of how we feel.  Jesus made that plain.  We often have to go on loving despite how we feel.  This cuts right through the terrible mess our culture and our generation has made of the word love.  Love is something I decide, a response to being loved unconditionally.  Pope Francis is one who apparently sees that the church needs to learn to love again – loving God and loving one’s neighbour are inseparable loves, mutually dependent.  When Mary McAleer, the former President of Ireland, who already had one child, found she was now expecting twins, she was as she puts it underwhelmed.  However was she going to split her love three ways?  In the event, she says, each child came with her/his own river of love.  Love is what we receive.  It is what changes us.  It is what brings us to God and to each other, and works all manner of miracles. 

Give to God what is God’s – 17 October 2014

In the Gospel lesson for next Sunday (Matthew 22:15-22) Jesus answers some local Pharisees, who were religious leaders, and Herodians, who seem to have been part of the court of the Roman puppet ruler, Herod Antipas.  They were trying to catch Jesus in sedition.  If he even hinted that the Jews should not be paying the Roman tax he was in big trouble.  As we know, Jesus asked for one of the coins in which the tax had to be paid, held it up to show Caesar’s image on it – and decreed, Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.

…and I remember thinking, as a teenager in church:  Everybody thinks that’s neat and clever, but I still don’t get it.  Presumably we pay our tax – that is what belongs to Caesar – but what belongs to God?  Preachers and commentators seemed to think that was obvious.  It wasn’t obvious to me.  What is God’s? what do I owe God?  Do I owe God my gratitude for good food, for warmth and shelter, for security, for life, health and my next breath, for the love of family and friends, for a peaceful land and all the moods of Kawau Bay…?  No doubt I do – but there are plenty who do not have these things, living in squalor, or danger, or cold.  What do they owe to God? 

And indeed Jesus said this in an occupied country, repressed by a brutal military, to people replete in daily life with misery and terror, starvation and disease.  Perhaps he meant something a bit different… or on the other hand, as old as the Prophet Micah:  What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly…  That is what is God’s, it seems to me, that we do justice, love mercy, walk humbly. 

What does it mean in the attitudes of my heart that I do justice, in my judgements, for instance…?  What has to change in order that I love mercy…?  What might I have to relinquish before I walk humbly…? 

But this is not some rigorous reform of self, amendment of life, which has to take place before we are as we ought to be in God’s sight.  It is what starts to happen in our hearts as we are still and silent, when we set aside the study group chatter, shut the books for a while, give ourselves a rest from worthy activism, and recover the space of waiting and consenting. 

Christian Meditation is the simplest of all disciplines, the spiritual practice which asks us first to cease, for the time of meditation, every attempt to change ourselves and our world, let alone our church.  It asks us to be still, making space for God to do in us and around us what God is always seeking to do, but blocked and hampered by all our best intentions, plans and motives.  What we owe to God is what the Bible calls μετανοια, change, conversion, returning to where we truly belong, consenting to love and grace.

Both bad and good – 10 October 2014

Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests. (Matthew 22:10)  The Gospel for next Sunday is the parable of the wedding feast.  This one should have wide appeal in today’s church – it’s about food.  The story is a bit fanciful, but it images a culture in which all the right people, all the beautiful, successful people, all the privileged with status, all the ones who dreamt of being at George Clooney’s wedding in Venice, somehow, unaccountably, are now so bored and sated with their lifestyle that they can’t be bothered showing up at the wedding of the king’s son.  It reflects perhaps the ultimate tedium of a life spent answering the demands of the Ego, as on a cruise ship.

But all this food is there and ready, so the king sends his servants out to the streets to gather in all the nonentities, the powerless in society, the poor, the ones who queue up at Winz.  The servants collected, says Jesus, all they could find, both bad and good, and the hall was full.  Imagine that.  (In passing, it amuses me that some modern translations reverse what the Greek says; the Greek says both bad and good; the translators make it both good and bad – as though Jesus was deficient in style.  It’s nicer if you put the good first...)

However, the fact is, admittance to the king’s feast is now no longer a matter of who you are, and no longer a question of what you are like.  Nobody disputes – well, I don’t dispute -- that it’s better to be good than bad, although at times it’s not as much fun.  But indeed, each of us is more or less morally compromised, whether it’s in actions or in thoughts, in our treatment of others, in what we have done or left undone, in matters we can’t mend now, in attitudes...  This is called the human condition, and on a macro scale it causes wars and beheadings.  I have seen it cause the breakup of churches and of families and marriages.  Its walking wounded wander the earth, and most of us are among them or could easily be. 

We are invited and welcome at the king’s feast.  Contemplatives dare to believe, we are there already if we stop, are still and silent, simple and accepting, consenting...we are in there, seated, and at the feast, waiting, content, and the main reality around us is love.  The next reality we know is a reminder of a world of injustice and of hideous violence.  So our stillness is both disturbing and upsetting, as well as relaxing and health-giving.   The kingdom we are in is not the kingdom of power and privilege, strength or status, or social safety.  The king has welcomed all who labour and are heavy laden.   It is not winners and losers any more, it is sufferers and lovers, and all of us who have found how to receive humility and simplicity. 

They will respect my son – 3 October 2014

The Gospel reading for this Sunday, Jesus’s parable of the wicked tenants (Matthew 21:33-46) is in all three synoptic gospels, and it is remarkably similar in all versions. The landowner built a vineyard and let it out to tenants who were supposed to farm it properly and productively.  But when the owner sent two successive emissaries to collect the produce the tenants beat up each one and threw him out.  So the owner sends his son.  They will respect my son.  But the son is murdered.  Then we have some puzzling, cryptic statements about the stone which the builders rejected, and so on.  But, says Jesus, the kingdom will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing its fruits. 

There are two compelling points here, it seems to me.  The first is that these people were tenants.  They never owned the place.  But they were treating it as their own.  That can’t be right.  The second is that, as Jesus sees things, the owner – that is God – remember, Jesus's parables are about the kingdom of God – then transfers his kingdom to others who, he says, will produce fruit. 

We don’t own the church.  It is not ours.  We are temporary tenants.  Wanting things to be in the church as we like them to be may be understandable.  Tenants generally arrange their furniture as they want.  But it is not their property to possess.  When we make rules of exclusion, or attempt to decide who is worthy or unworthy, when we perpetuate ancient divisions or start to put a fence around the Lord's Table, we are out of order. 

Neither do we own the world.  We are tenants here.  We are not at liberty to trash God's creation.  Neither may we live in it in ways that plunder natural resources, or that exploit other people, for our benefit.

In the contemplative life, possession in all its subtle forms is instinctively seen as hazardous.  Possession, ownership, which is so often good and necessary, a privilege and a responsibility, so easily mutates into possessiveness.  In God's kingdom then possession is something to be done thoughtfully and with accountability.  Contemplatives come to see possessiveness on the other hand as a burden to be recognised and shed.  All of this is clearly set out in Jesus's teaching, in parables and in what we have come to call the Sermon on the Mount. 

This parable has the desperate owner saying, They will respect my son...  Respect as a word suits the narrative of the parable, but it is a somewhat anaemic word to describe our relationship with Christ. The contemplative life is one of becoming conformed to (reformed by...informed by...) the way of Christ rather than the needs of the Ego, in our attitudes and reactions, in our approach to justice and compassion, in our use of nature and resources, in our treatment of each other and of human fallibility, vulnerability and mortality.  St Paul could say he is becoming conformed to Christ even in his death.

A recess...

Our weekly Christian Meditation group at Warkworth is going into recess until September.

The reasons are mainly that overseas travel (including for the leader) and other matters will make attendance pretty erratic between now and then.

In early September we will decide what happens next, and the group may resume. 

Meanwhile, of course, we know that it is only the weekly meetings together that are in abeyance -- the discipline of meditation continues!

There has been a request that I continue to post "talks" on this blog in the meantime.  We will see about that... 

Shalom to all,

Ross Miller

Growing up – 9 May 2014, Easter 4

One of St Paul’s many valuable insights is in the familiar words of I Corinthians 13:

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.  When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.

Earlier in this letter Paul is critical of the Corinthian church because, he says, they have failed to grow up.  The signs of this of which Paul is particularly aware are their quarreling, their divisions, their hankering after charismatic leaders and spiritual entertainment.  Later, writing to the church at Colossae, Paul describes what grown-up faith is like – rooted and built up in Christ, established in faith, abounding in thanksgiving.  To the Ephesians he actually uses words such as coming to maturity.  We must no longer be children, he writes – and the hallmarks of immaturity include what he describes as being blown around by this or that teaching – the hallmarks of maturity include cordial unity with others who are different, and one of Paul’s most famous phrases, speaking the truth in love.  Speaking the truth in love, he writes, we must grow up in every way into him…

The tragedy in many places is that an infantile form of faith is not only practised and taught, but is vigorously defended.  It tends to be legalistic and moralist.  In some places it encourages the ego, promotes a gospel of success and material prosperity with dollops of self-righteousness.  It confuses prayer and superstition, and dines out on what are perceived to be miracles.  People will remind you that Jesus said we must become as little children – as though Jesus meant deliberately somehow stunting growth and maturity.

One teacher, Richard Rohr, points out powerfully how growth in Christ has a great deal to do with what he calls saying farewell to our loyal soldier – that is the version of us that earned credit from doing as we’re told, presenting an adequate image, being self-consciously busy and admired, using religion as a comfort blanket, being ruled by emotions… or else, its flip side, living chronically guilty because we are not the way we think we should be.  Mature faith comes with the withering of that ego, the simplifying of life, the increase in mindfulness.  A primary discipline on this pathway is the prayer of silence and stillness. 

And so it is that Paul can write …but when I became an adult…, as though there is and must be a change – in a Christian church or congregation just as also in an individual – a change from childish dependence to mature faith and discipleship.  It is tragic when people who may have been assiduous church members all their lives, yet remain infantile in their faith, dependent and superstitious.  As St Paul writes:

…until all of us come to… maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.  We must no longer be children…  But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love. [Eph. 4: 13-16]

Jesus himself came near – 2 May 2014, Easter 3

Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him... [Luke 24:15-16]

This story of the encounter on the road to Emmaus is exclusive to Luke, and it remains one of the most tantalizing of the gospel narratives.  Two of the disciples were walking seven miles to Emmaus – that’s just over 11 km, about the distance from Algies Bay to Warkworth (if you don’t divert to Charlies).  Jesus comes and walks with them.  They don’t recognize him.  And yet one of the major points of this story is to convince Jews especially that the risen Jesus is really him, flesh and blood.  After some three years of ministry, they don’t recognize him…?  Then he seems not to know about all the drama of the last few days – Luke astonishingly portrays Jesus as totally disingenuous, pretending, it seems, that he hasn’t heard all this.  But he still takes trouble to explain the Hebrew prophecies to them.  Even when they arrive where they are to stay at Emmaus, the stranger Jesus makes to continue on, and they have to urge him to stay.  It is only when he breaks the bread at the meal that they recognize him.

I don’t know whether anyone at our schools or in this age of cyber-speak is teaching any more what my generation called literary criticism – how to read layered narratives like this, how to spot the different levels of meaning, how to discern what the writer was actually trying to do, to convey, how to assess a literary construction. Perhaps contemporary prose and verse tends to be so two-dimensional that literary criticism is like trying to fish in a puddle.  Luke is telling us here something vital for us to know about the risen Jesus and about resurrection life for all of us.  He comes to us, wrote Albert Schweitzer, as one unknown… 

We encounter Jesus on our journey in often mysterious, unexpected and oblique ways.  Sometimes it may be that, later, in looking back, in retrospect, we wonder if that had been him, in Luke’s words, coming near.  We encounter him along the way – not so much in standing around singing sentimental choruses or in inspiring studies designed to solve our problems, but in weekday life, moving along the road of our daily journey, experiencing life and other people.  He draws near, as Luke tells us.  Perhaps we don’t see it at the time.  Later, it may be in some holy moment such as at the sacrament, it may be many years later, it dawns on us what actually changed us and inspired us, strengthened and empowered us, at that moment. 

Contemplative people become generally slow and reluctant to make dogmatic statements about these things.  We feel very comfortable with reticence, a decent veil thrown over things we experienced and came eventually to understand.  In our kind of prayer, what we are most familiar with is the humble soul and the grateful heart, and all the mysteries that remain, rather more than the tales of triumph and victory. 

But whatever… each of us in our own ways becomes accustomed to the sense that Jesus has drawn near on our road, and made a few things clearer, and perhaps even broken bread with us. 

Anzac Day – 25 April 2014

Across the top of the cenotaph in Auckland Domain, as also in Whitehall and many other places, are the words chosen by David Lloyd George:  “The Glorious Dead”.  The words may seem noble and fitting, but they have deeply offended some people down the years.  Some poets have excoriated such sentiments as trying to dignify and justify the bloody realities of war.  One of the latest is the scorn and indignation expressed in a vile heavy metal pop recording.  I am not capable of listening to this, let alone quoting it. 

War, however, is as old as humanity (or in the case of war, inhumanity), but war remains to this day what it always was, a monstrous way of resolving differences.  It doesn’t work.  It trebles or quadruples the suffering.  It is blasphemous in its waste of human life, and in its laying waste of the earth and all our resources.  There was a heart-stopping moment in one of those TV costume dramas, when some upper class Londoners were all at a fashionable ball in 1914.  Young men were falling over each other to enlist.  Some older person expressed reservations about this, and one wifely matron in exquisite ballgown with tiara and fan says, “Oh, they’ll be alright, they’re young…”

I don’t know why it is that we eventually default to hatred, rage and violence, except that sometimes more powerful people than us make decisions which leave us with no choice.  But that’s not all of it.  The violence, which resolves nothing, comes from within us.  Violence pervades our society in peace as well as war, in our words as well as our deeds.  It finds massive expression in much of our sport, where it is often ennobled and admired, and considered valiant and manly.  There are plenty of sincere people who wonder what is the matter with you if you object to physical or verbal violence -- to abusive debate, for instance (If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen…), with stomping in football or with brain damaging your opponent in boxing, with keeping firearms and lovingly tending such things.  

The new person in Christ, risen (as St Paul puts it) with Christ, is new and risen not because they have somehow acquired an ethereal life which is different and peaceful, and means everything is going to be alright..  We are new and risen daily, when we daily choose the way of Christ rather than all our other possible choices.  We are new and risen when, in silence and stillness, we consent to God before we consent to anyone or anything else.  We are new and risen when one day it dawns on us that this is something we are not really doing ourselves – it is being done in us, by our consent.  We are new and risen when the possibility of adversity has not stopped us from choosing the path of love and justice, or from speaking the truth.  We are new and risen when we discover one day that we are no longer afraid, that love has cast out fear – when we discover that we do not have to run the world, and that personal image and lifestyle are not of great importance. 

We may know what is intended, we think, by a phrase such as The Glorious Dead, and we can honour that – but we have already admitted into our hearts a gift of peace which is not capable of war and violence.

Reconstituting the Temple – 11.4.2014, Passion Sunday

The temple which Jesus attacked, during that last week in Jerusalem, was once a sign of grace.  It was the place where God had chosen to make his name to dwell, say the ancient scriptures.  In the Psalms, you go up to Jerusalem to see the God of gods in Zion.  It is experienced as pain and humiliation to be cut off from this place by exile or by sickness (Psalms 42, 43, 84).  You might excuse me a Scottish paraphrase of Isaiah ch.2:

To this the joyful nations round,                     All tribes and tongues shall flow;

Up to the hill of God, they’ll say,                    And to his house we’ll go.

 

The beam that shines from Zion hill                Shall lighten every land

The king who reigns in Salem’s towers             Shall all the world command.

 

No strife shall rage, nor hostile feuds                Disturb those peaceful years;

To plowshares men shall beat their swords,        To pruning hooks their spears.

 

No longer hosts encount’ring hosts                   Shall crowds of slain deplore;

They hang the trumpet in the hall,                  And study war no more.

But now, when Jesus comes to Jerusalem, the temple has become something else.  The priests, the scribes and the pharisees are managing a system deeply compromised by its political relationship with Rome and with wealth.  There are now strict conditions of entry to the sacred precinct – what was once for all nations is now only for male Jews and for the ritually pure.  There is a vast stinking animal market and money exchange next door, with all the graft and corruption pertaining thereto,  and it was working at full pitch during these days of the Passover.

My Father’s house, says Jesus, is a house of prayer for all peoples, but you have made it a den of thieves.  What was originally given as a place of grace and peace has been subsumed into the culture of noise and violence, greed and privilege, gatekeepers and status.

And so in the Easter story that temple becomes as it were reconstituted – once again for all peoples, Jew and Greek, rich and poor, male and female, black and white, slave and free, Catholic and Protestant, saint and sinner, gay and straight – the temple is reconstituted for ever in our symbolism as the Body of Christ, crucified and risen.  The veil of the temple, we are told, was torn from top to bottom.  Judaism burst its legalistic bounds, to become what was always its best vision, to be a light to the nations, a way of peace.  The temple is reconstituted now no longer on Zion’s holy hill, but on a squalid and foetid dump outside the holy city, a place in which all human hopes may seem to have perished, but nevertheless the place where God now chooses his name to dwell. 

That now is this place.  It is anywhere we are.  It is especially where we stop and wait and choose silence and stillness.  It is the place where God’s healing creative stillness is very near, where our many unanswered questions tend to recede from centre stage, where life takes over from death, and all is well. 

Are these all just words, perhaps?  (Teaching spirituality can be a dangerous thing if you are good at words.)  But in fact we never know except in a discipline of stillness and silence, a relinquishing of power and control, and a peaceful ready consent to both life and death.  Raimon Panikkar, one of our great contemporary teachers, says that we can’t speak of God any more except from an interior silence.  And so, that is what we do. 

Lazarus, come forth – 4 April 2014, Lent V

The lectionary certainly does not spare us during these weeks of Lent.  For Lent V the Gospel is the long and puzzling story of Jesus raising Lazarus.  After all the years, the only way this story helps me now is to approach it as a paradigm, a picture, of Christian inner transformation.  The story comes to us from the Johannine traditions of the early church, and I am sure it was intended to be read not so much as an account of actual events, which would have seemed to say the least unlikely, but as a coded narrative conveying deep inner truths. 

The home at Bethany, near Jerusalem, was clearly a place of welcoming for Jesus.  The sisters Martha and Mary, and their brother Lazarus, lived there.  It was a loving and luminous circle.  And perhaps this home at Bethany serves to demonstrate something elemental about the church.  Martha comes to Jesus by willing and ready service, preparing food, ensuring hospitality, being available.  That is the way she responds and expresses her love.  Mary is different, she responds to Jesus by her presence and her keen attention, her mindfulness as we might say, and her love for this man.  It is another kind of response of the heart, every bit as authentic as Martha’s, but very different.  I think the reason Jesus said Mary’s response was the better part, was mainly that Martha had been critical of it and Mary needed to be defended.[1] 

But what about Lazarus?  In one of the two stories we have (Luke 10: 38-42), Lazarus is absent altogether.  Not mentioned.  Invisible.  In this other story he is there but he has died.   Jesus, after getting the news that his friend Lazarus was ill, deliberately delayed going to Bethany, and when he arrived he was four days too late.   

Well, in thinking about this I am helped by the Benedictine Cistercian, Fr Thomas Keating.  He sees Lazarus as exemplifying, in the understanding and teaching of the early church, yet another truth of spiritual growth.  Lazarus is one who comes to Jesus, not by the paths of Martha or Mary, but through a Dark Night which will seem like a death.  The night may be quite different, of course, and for different reasons, for different people, but it is always a dark time, a dark experience.  Finally, perhaps long delayed, it is Jesus who calls Lazarus out of it, as it were.  This is a very moving reality of some in the church. 

Of course this is intimately linked with resurrection.  It would be nice if we had a simple untroubled pathway through ever deepening and dignified enlightenment.  We don’t have that.  I don’t know anyone who does.  What we may get is a succession of dark nights and sunrises, mountains and plateaus.  We may follow the path of Martha or of Mary or of Lazarus – or even some variation on those themes.  But it is in the disciplines of silence and stillness that we are steadied, and brought back into the present where we can shed our fears of whatever change is happening.  It is the path Jesus walked, and I believe he knows it quite well.

---

[1] The Greek, την αγαθην μεριδα, “the better part”, awkward in English, is actually not so judgmental.

Now I see – 28 March 2014, Lent IV

This Sunday the lectionary chooses another lengthy and complex story for us --  Jesus’ healing of the blind man, and all that followed.  The man was blind from birth.  The disciples ask Jesus whose fault it is.  Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents…?  Typically we have to know who to blame.  It is very convenient for some to blame God, a tyrant and an arbitrary God who declines to stop cruel things happening.  “He didn’t deserve that… an innocent child…” reactions we constantly hear when things go wrong.  Jesus says categorically, Neither this man sinned nor his parents…  Contemplative, mature understanding does include leaving behind these infantile and idolatrous concepts of God and the world.  It does entail making peace with our own frailty, vulnerability and mortality.

The story then throws up another infantilism in the church.  The man had been healed of his congenital blindness.  That, you would think, is something to be glad about.  But in the church it is seldom so simple – and this story, scholars think, in the way it is told, reflects quite serious problems in the early Christian Jewish and Gentile communities.  People were skeptical and critical of what the man was telling them, but when they demanded to know from him, How were your eyes opened…?  who did it…?  where is he…? the man tells them all, I do not know.  People want answers, explanations, perhaps a reason to show that it’s all a hoax.  The man has not become a disciple. Better people than him have not been healed.   All he knows, he says, is that he encountered the man called Jesus, and he doesn’t know where Jesus is now.  But the fact is, he can now see.

So the Pharisees take a hand in it – and believe me, that is not good news.  What interests them is not so much wonder and gratitude that a blind man can now see, as that it had been done on the Sabbath.  That is against the rules.  The rules must be reasserted and strengthened.  And what follows is a good old-fashioned religious melt-down, an inquiry, an inquisition.  The man himself is interrogated twice, his parents are interrogated, everyone gets exasperated and the Pharisees become pompous and indignant.  It is all set in contrast by the storyteller when the man once again encounters Jesus.  Jesus had heard that he was in trouble with the church, and had come looking for him.  Jesus makes this remarkable statement:  I came into the world… so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.  It was a straight confrontation between those who are sure they see but don’t – and those who may be unsure about many things, but who in their hearts actually see and know, perhaps in irregular or disapproved ways.  That sight, that knowledge – and it is contemplative knowledge – is always humble.  Those who really see are not worshipping law and observance, they are the least likely to assume the moral high ground, they are slow to condemn, and what they are most likely to dislike is judgementalism and lack of compassion.  The eyes of your heart being opened, wrote St Paul, that you may know…  That is contemplative, mature knowledge, the knowledge of the heart.

Living water – 21 March 2014, Lent III

If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink”, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. [John 4: 10]

This complex story is the Gospel lesson for next Sunday.  Jesus is in Samaria, in transit as we would say these days, on his way back to Galilee.  At midday he asks a Samaritan woman at a well if she can give him a drink of water.  The woman is amazed, first because he has spoken to a woman in public at high noon, and also because she is a Samaritan and therefore to the Jew an outcast.  When she expresses her surprise, he enigmatically suggests that she should have asked him, and he would have given her living water – υδωρ ζως – the image is flowing, clear, sparkling, cool water, in contrast to a bucketful of doubtful water fetched up from this well. 

We find the image of living water again in chapter 7.  Jesus is in Jerusalem at the temple.  It is the Feast of Tabernacles, Succot, the harvest festival.  Jesus announces to the crowd, Come to me… and drink… Out of your heart will flow rivers of living water.  The Greek actually says, out of your belly.  I suppose the translators thought heart sounded nicer.  Belly is more earthy, it is what the writer wrote, and I prefer it. 

Rivers of living water, however, does sound a little like hyperbole. It is not the experience of most people, most of the time.  Our inward and deep response to Jesus is generally more hidden and subtle.  But teachers through the centuries have pointed to an inner place, which is there whether we know it or not.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow calls it the Spirit’s secret cell.  Thomas Keating calls it the centre.  St Paul among many refers simply to the heart.  The French Benedictine, Henri le Saux, writes of the cave of the heart.  It is there and it is a place we enter.  It is not a place we build or develop, not something we improve or decorate like our lifestyle or our state-or-the-art kitchen, even with smart spiritual methods.  It is not a place we control. 

It is there.  And the point of contemplative prayer is choosing, consenting, to go to this place, or at least to turn towards it, through all the hesitations, fears and distractions.  It is a place of presence, God’s presence and ours.  And so it is a place of truth, love, simplicity, light – and like the picture given us in the Book of Revelation, far from being static, a river runs through it.  So there is change in this place, constant renewal, God making all things new.  Living water.

This is the polar opposite of the spirituality which places me at the centre, my requirements, my helpful holy thoughts, the saccharine, self-indulgent, spiritual messages which sell popular spirituality without pain to so many today.  The cave of the heart is not accessible to my public ego or to my years of devoted service.  We leave all  that stuff outside.  It is open to me, the person God already knows and invites, and loves.