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.

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