Fruitless fig tree – Lent III, 26 February 2016

Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’” (Luke 13:6-9)

Here is a very intriguing thing.  If you read in Mark or Matthew about Jesus’s encounter with the fig tree, it’s much briefer and somewhat more startling, and it is not a parable at all but an actual alleged event.  It happens when Jesus is on his way into the Temple.  Life has become very fraught by this time.  He would have liked some fresh figs, but there are none to be had, so he curses the fig tree – and on their return it is withered and dead.  In Luke it is all quite different.  It’s a parable.  The owner of a vineyard (generally a metaphor for God) loses patience with his barren fig tree.  Dig it up, he orders, it’s cumbering the ground.  But the assistant pleads, give it another year; I will dig around it and give it manure.  If it still doesn’t bear fruit, we’ll dig it up. 

You remember last week’s word… teleios, fit for purpose…?  The tree is pointless if it’s not producing fruit.  Now, this could be a very harsh lesson indeed, but I instinctively want to avoid treating it that way.  It may indeed be true that there are some Christian churches and some Christian believers who are, as we say, a waste of space.  There are also some who appear to be producing poisonous fruit.  I think however, as a metaphor, the fruit we have to produce is a rather more subtle thing than shining good works and visible, measurable, quantifiable results.  You don’t assess Jesus’s kingdom in the way a secular culture wants to measure success.  It does not have annual performance reviews or a Budget or declare a dividend.  Every now and then someone says, I give to the Salvation Army because they roll up their sleeves and get things done.  And what they do is admirable.  Much the same gets done also by non-religious organisations and secular aid agencies. 

In Jesus’s kingdom we certainly care for the widow, the stranger and the orphan; we certainly care about justice.  But Jesus equally insisted, the kingdom is within.  The fruit is in real inner change, what the Greek scriptures call µετανοια, metanoia, daily conversion to the way of Christ, which is not the way of the world, turning back to him, turning away from ways and attitudes, opinions and actions, that are not of him.  It is what St Paul calls the fruits of the Spirit, and he lists them:  Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22).  These are the fruits that ripen, by the work of the Spirit, in us, as we learn how to be still and silent and consenting to be changed.

Those of us who are mature – Lent II, 19.02.16

I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.  Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you.  (Philippians 3:14-15)

It is that phrase, those of us who are mature, which catches my attention.  Obviously, if we talk that way, we may be in danger of elitism, of thinking rather highly of ourselves – which in NZ is right up there with treason and being critical of sport.  There is also the clear danger of deciding for ourselves that we are “mature”, when that might be something better decided about us by others. 

So we have a closer look.  That word “mature” in its biblical sense needs some clarity.  Plenty of people are of mature years, as we say, but their grasp of Christian truth and allegiance remains naïve, even childish, sentimental and superstitious, fragile and very easily shaken.  The Greek word Paul uses is teleios (τελειος).  It is the same word used in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus enigmatically says, Be perfect (teleios) as your heavenly Father is perfect (teleios).  It certainly does not mean morally “perfect”, stainless, guiltless.  It means fit for purpose, being what it is meant to be, and doing that well and simply.  A person who is “teleios” in the Christian sense is not a know-all, in fact he/she has become keenly aware of what he/she doesn’t know, doesn’t understand, and knows how to embrace mystery.  Now we know in part, writes St Paul, but then (he means in a later, fuller life) we will know, even as we are known.

I would think one distinguishing mark of this mature believer is that he/she is not afraid.  Love and humility have replaced fear... I mean fear for oneself, the need always to protect and defend one’s choices and opinions, and constantly to garrison and sanitise life lest something go wrong.  The person who is “teleios” is quite at home with mortality and human frailty and error.

He writes: Let those of us then who are mature (teleios) be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you.  Being of the same mind does not mean being in agreement about everything.  It means understanding each other, listening to each other, respecting difference.  If you think differently, he adds, this too God will reveal.  God will sort it out.  The mature believer trusts that truth will emerge. 

Well, contemplative life and prayer is the life and prayer of ‘οι τελειοι, the mature – and of those who are tentatively setting out on this path.  Its pillars always are silence, stillness, consent. 

Beautiful feet – Lent I, 12 February 2016

For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”  (Romans 10: 12-15)

(At the risk of skiting… that last sentence after all those rhetorical questions is a textbook example of the figure of speech called metonymy, or perhaps synecdochy.  I don’t think anyone ever teaches these things these days.  And human feet are not normally depicted as beautiful.)

This is the Epistle for this Sunday, Lent I.  In a world such as ours is, and is becoming, relentlessly splitting between rich and poor, Moslem and Christian or Jew, white and coloured, lawful and lawless, right-wing and left-wing, old and young, and still in places male and female, St Paul’s insistence to the Roman church of his day seems clear enough if you profess to be a Christian.  In the faith of Christ such distinctions, divisions, are out of order.  You cannot proclaim Jesus, you cannot teach the way of Christ, you cannot live authentically as a Christian, in partiality or discrimination.  There is neither Jew nor Greek… refers to the major religious distinction in Paul’s day.   Paul stresses this in two or three places.

And that, he says, is good news.  Of course, it carries all manner of risks.  People who prefer to eliminate risk from their lives therefore find ways to ration the indiscriminate grace of God.  The favourite course is to say in subtle or unsubtle ways, you need to be righteous, or you need to be like us.  The corollary is often:  If you do what we say you will become like us… happy, wealthy, successful...  The good news is that God in Jesus pulls down these walls and requirements, supersedes the divisions we have made and so often fiercely defend.

A discipline of contemplative life and prayer alters our attitudes to fences and boundaries, walls and self-protection.  We may not have the slightest idea how myriads of people, all different from each other and from us in all sorts of ways, can live together in community in peace and respect.  But we nevertheless find the fear of difference being removed from our hearts by grace.  We find ourselves increasingly open to the new, while being at the same time as grateful as ever for the past and the old and the familiar.  The Spirit of Jesus, who seemed never to hesitate to cross boundaries and befriend outcasts, whose closest friends included women and tax-collectors and social riff-raff, is the Spirit we consent to in the stillness and silence of our prayer.

Following Jesus – Epiphany 5, 5 February 2016

When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him. (Luke 5:11)

It is one of those many New Testament narrative pictures which requires our gifts of imagination, however unused they may normally be.  Literalism, naivete, credulity will never get it.  I can remember, as a youth, wondering how realistic it actually was – these Galilean men, hovering always just above the poverty line, needing to earn livelihoods to house and feed their families and themselves, men with skills and responsibilities, suddenly now dropping it all to follow Jesus.  Occasionally we have encountered someone who did exactly that… I knew a trained nurse who chose to go off more or less penniless to an Asian country to bring people to Jesus.  They didn’t want to be brought to Jesus.  In about six months she was back, disillusioned, defeated and ill. 

We now know that God honours the life we already have, where we are, with its achievements, failures and commitments.   Our understanding of Christian vocation and the call of Christ is that it will be, most likely, or at any rate will start, within the life we are living.  Our discipleship will be exercised and grow in situ.  When I made a bright-eyed decision to become a minister, and show the world what ministers should be like, I was working as a journalist.  My first action was to write to my uncle, a minister in the USA, to announce to him this important news.  He replied, “I get a little tired of youngsters who don’t know much, announcing I’m now going to be a real Christian -- I’ll become a minister…!   Years later when a whole class of us finally qualified and graduated from theological college, and were about to go forth and be ordained, the acerbic and wonderful Principal of the Theological Hall addressed us.  Gentlemen, he said, I beg you, do not delude yourselves that the church and the world have been waiting with bated breath for this moment.

So, what did Peter and Andrew, James and John, really do back then in response to Jesus?  Certainly, it looks as though they didn’t do much fishing, any more.  It does look as though they became fulltime disciples in Jesus’s company – which we now are learning was much wider and more varied than just those twelve men.  Then, as the church tells it, they became apostles who witnessed around the world to the resurrection and the life.  But the fact is, most people whose hearts became captive to Christ worked it out and lived it right where they were – and they still do.  The primary shift in us is not geographic, or irresponsible.  It happens over the years ahead in our inmost being, where we are most ourselves, where love is born and sometimes can die, the most deeply sensitive part of us God knows and loves, the place Jesus called where your treasure is. 

That is the door we open in Christian Meditation.  It is safe to open the door in the silence and stillness, and in the company of sometimes very different people doing much the same.