Being on guard - Advent 1, 27 November 2015

Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man. [Luke 21:34-36]

In one episode of Fawlty Towers, one of the hotel guests dies in his sleep.  Of course, in the morning, when this is discovered by Basil with his unique ineptitude, we get total chaos.  One of the permanent guests, the Major, asks Fawlty, Stabbed, was he…?  No, says Basil, he died in his sleep.  Ah, well, says the Major, you’re off your guard, you see.   

Advent, we are informed in the lectionary, is about being awake, on guard, remaining alert.  It sounds a little tiring to me.  People living in Paris at present might have a better idea what it means to be on guard.  It seems interesting that, according to Jesus, the opposite of being alert and on guard is dissipation, drunkenness and the worries of this life.  So, I am confused.  In our contemporary culture, dissipation and drunkenness are widely seen as an efficient way to forget the worries of this life.  So much so, that the surest and quickest way to have scorn heaped upon you is to say, or even remotely suggest, or even unwittingly hint, that partying and revelling may not be a good and fulfilling life.  It is partly because of the worries of this life – and they are very real – that a culture accumulates useful avenues of dissipation. 

The worries of this life, however, depend on who you are and how you’re placed.  For a refugee family from Syria or Libya, the worries of this life are probably about survival, food, shelter and obtaining a helping hand or two.  For some New Zealanders I can think of, the worries of this life are more likely to flow from being possessed by their possessions – or in other cases simply paying the bills, finding employment, saving for retirement.  Or the worries of this life may be how to keep going in chronic ill health or pain – and we can think of yet others for whom the worries of this life encompass family strife and feuds and ugly memories, and trying to keep at least the illusion of control of life, events and the future.

Jesus suggests here that we can be so preoccupied with ourselves, whether with enjoying ourselves and being entertained, or with our fears about all sorts of things – or more likely, with all the things we have to do -- that we spend our lives missing what God and life are saying.  What actually matters comes from the silence and stillness.  Our very discipline of Christian Meditation teaches that we must be awake and aware and in the present moment.  We teach mindfulness and attention.  The distractions, as we call them, which inevitably come in our meditation are simply an opportunity to return, gently but firmly, to the simplicity of the mantra.  It helps us to continue being fully present and consenting to whatever God may give or change.  If we are on guard, it is against whatever might shift us from life and paying attention.  We are now in a world of frightened people, an ungracious and violent world.  Perhaps it was always so, but now the media leave us in no doubt about it.  It is a time for steadiness and depth and wisdom.  It is still God’s world, and it matters that God’s people know how to be alert and attentive.

Alpha and Omega - 20 November 2015

I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.  [Revelation 1:8]

What is happening in us, when we come to these regular times of silence and stillness?  We know very well, if we are paying attention, that we are in the presence of God.   But also we rapidly find out that we are very much in the presence of ourselves.  We have all sorts of issues that rise up in the silence and space.  So there is a tension.  But it is a perfectly proper encounter, between me with all my memories and fears and hopes – me as I normally am, in other words, not some religious version of me -- and the Spirit of God in Christ the Creator, Lover and Healer.  In this encounter, I have learned to be still and silent, as well as I can.   This is the rhythm of contemplative life and prayer, the diminishing of the ego – that is to say the Me which is the accretion of all the ways I usually try to be happy and secure -- and the emerging of the true self, original, recognised, known, probably much nicer, welcomed and unconditionally loved. 

Contemplatives have made a discovery.  Two contradictory things can be true together.  I am in the presence of God – I am in the presence of myself.  I am loving – but quite often I am unloving.  I am a person of faith – I am a person also of doubt.  Zen Buddhists know how to express this, in what they call koans, contradictory statements which sound like nonsense to our logical and analytical minds, but which invite us to consider that the truth may not be down that road.  I may interpose that Benedictines also seem typically to love unresolved issues.  A story from the earlier Desert spirituality tells us:  A novice brother asked an Elder, “Father, how do I overcome all these problems?”  The Elder asked, “Son, have you had your breakfast?”  “Yes, Father,” he replied.  “Then wash your plates.”  The sublime and the prosaic come together.  Any contemplative is happy with that.  It is not now a matter of whether God and the world meet with our agreement – merely with our consent.  Consent is what we bring to the silence and the stillness, and all the unresolved issues.

I learned the Greek alphabet in (I think) 1954 – age 19, Greek Stage I, at what was then Auckland University College.  Alpha is the first letter, Omega the last.  That became clear on Day One, rather as they teach pre-schoolers with the alphabet across the top of the blackboard, although not in our case with pictures of elephants and little furry forest creatures.  Then came Homer and Euripides, Plato and Paul the Apostle.  At the same time I embarked on Hebrew, and so ventured into the world of the Jews, and yet another alphabet, and yet other ways of talking about the invisible God whose name was unpronounceable.  It was back then, I now realise, that we began to learn a decent reticence in the ways we talk about a God we can’t even name.  Today in the lesson from the Book of Revelation we read some mystic of the early Christian church under extreme threat and stress and suffering, who describes God as the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.  It is not a description or a definition, it is not a name.  It is a statement of the ineffable and of hope.  It is a reminder of whom we encounter when we calm down, and stop fretting about whether we can believe or not.  It may indicate to us that unconditional love is first and last, whatever its cost, and its cost may be total.  At any rate, the Alpha and the Omega God is not available to be enlisted in our cause against other people.  We are best to be still and silent. 

Birth pangs - 13 November 2015

When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs. [Mark 13:7-8]

Jesus has a premonition of the imminent destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.  As the disciples are admiring the great stones and the beautiful building, Jesus senses what lies ahead.  In the year 70 CE, Titus and his Roman legionaries raped and pillaged Jerusalem with hideous effect and suffering.  Jesus gives his disciples a kind of apocalyptic check-list -- you’ll find it in Matthew and Luke as well as here in Mark – and it still applies in our day, 20 centuries later.  Wars?  Yes.  Rumours of wars?  Yes.  Earthquakes?  Yes.  Famines?  Yes.  False teachers?  Yes.  Pestilences?  Yes.  Persecution of religious believers?  Yes.  Betrayal within families?  Yes. 

Then he says two things we might find puzzling.  He says all this is just birth pangs – it is the beginning, not the end.  The analogy of birth suggests that the end might be something good.  Secondly he says:  Don’t be afraid.   There are different Greek verbs in use here.  The one Mark chooses actually means, Don’t panic.  It is a time for steadiness and clarity.  Luke has another word which is more like don’t be dismayed, don’t spiral into despair.  But again we are reminded that Jesus, right through his teaching, frequently says, Don’t be afraid… why are you fearful…?  Living in fear is problematic for Christian discipleship.  Love, writes John, casts out fear.  To have become a person of faith and love is to be taking leave of our fear of life and death. 

Nevertheless, anyone in a sane mental state would be alarmed at what the Romans inflicted on people, or what other tyrants have done through history, or what is happening in our day in Syria, in Libya, in parts of Burma, Burundi, Nigeria…  In our recent memory, in Ireland, in Israel and Palestine, in Iraq, in the Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea…  Abominations and atrocities.  We now have whole peoples on the move across Europe, where sometimes they are welcome and sometimes certainly not, rejected and humiliated.  Ancient Christian churches are being cruelly persecuted and hounded.  The never-ending battle against famine and disease has become desperate. 

Don’t be afraid, says Jesus.  I think we are allowed to be slightly concerned.  Perhaps it’s more that it is no longer fear for ourselves.  It is seeing others suffer, especially children… what this evokes, I find, is not so much fear as rage.  Women being stoned to death in Afghanistan, surrounded by sanctimonious and ignorant men…  Convicts in American prisons waiting years to have their sentences of death confirmed, and being clinically drugged to death so that some victim’s family can feel something called closure…  It is barbarism and there is as much of it as in the days of Titus.  Many forms of racism including the mindless poison of anti-semitism are on the rise again. 

As Jesus said once in another place, It shall not be so among you.  We do not live that way.  We choose otherwise.  We choose Christlikeness, and the strength of the Holy Spirit of Christ.  This is our life, and this is our prayer in stillness and silence. 

Everything she had - 6 November 2015

He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.” [Mark 12:41-44]

Please let’s not sentimentalise this story.  Standing there watching what worshippers give in their offerings is slightly eyebrow-raising, I would have thought.  Moreover, it seems perfectly proper that the rich people should be giving larger sums.  The picture is sullied for me by an early memory of a preacher vividly picturing these rich ones ostentatiously throwing their money into the temple treasury with a clatter, hoping to be noticed.  That misuses the pulpit -- there is not a word to suggest that happened, either here in Mark’s account or in the corresponding narrative in Luke.  They may have made their offerings quietly and decently, as any of us would.  The contrast with the widow, who had only two coins totalling one penny, which she gave -- that is something which might happen in any church on a Sunday morning, unnoticed.  The point is what Jesus said about it: She out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on. 

So, whatever is in this woman’s heart, it has led her recklessly to give all she had.  We would say, I hope, that what is wrong here is her poverty.  No one should be living without the means to buy food and shelter and have personal dignity.  We might even go on to say that the rich Jerusalem temple might have provided her with some help.  Perhaps Jesus and his disciples might have got her some food and shelter – we don’t know what, if anything, anyone did.  I am inclined to take a bleak view of it.  It is not enough to say this wonderful woman’s desperate offering was in fact richer than all the others, which is what I was taught in Sunday school.  The incident depicts a wide social income injustice which remains today.

I think there are two things to be said.  The first is that we don’t know why the woman did this, imprudently to give away all the money she had.  It may be that she thought she had nothing to lose – perhaps she had a superstitious hope that if she did that her luck might change.  Or it may be, as I think Jesus meant, that she was a true worshipper, able to find love and gratitude even in her dire circumstances, and she expressed that in her offering. 

The second thing is what all contemplatives know, or are in process of finding out – we don’t love in instalments.  Spiritual growth means that life is becoming less and less compartmentalised.  There are not gradations of love.  We love or we don’t.  Everything in our journey, one way or another, increasingly aligns us to our love for God and for God’s world.  We give thanks for the possessions we have, as also for life itself, and breath, for friends and lovers, for Kawau Bay and for native wood pigeons (kereru), asparagus and Cadburys Dairy Milk chocolate.  We do not go around saying, “I’ve worked hard for all I have, and it’s mine…”  We have found that all of it, without exception, even when we have very little, we have received.  It is a freedom from ego and ownership, possession and control.  Whatever her actual motives, the woman at the temple treasury is reminding us whom we have to thank.