Euodia and Syntyche – 29 April 201

We come at this morning’s talk by a circuitous route.  We are again in the Book of Acts, and we learn of St Paul’s missionary journey into Europe – a trail become very familiar, as we speak, to thousands of desperate refugees from tyranny and terror.  Paul winds up at the Roman colony of Philippi, in Macedonia, just to the north of Greece.  As Paul usually did, he sought out the local synagogue.  In Philippi the Jews met by the riverbank outside the city gate.  And here we meet Lydia.  Lydia is a Jewish businesswoman.  She deals in purple cloth – this is the much sought after Tyrian Purple, the colour dye made from a particular shellfish secretion.  It was very trendy, and Lydia was on to a good thing.  One interesting side-issue is that the makers of the purple dye acquired such a pervasive body stench that the Talmud, the Jewish law, eventually provided that a woman could divorce her husband if he entered this trade following marriage. 

Paul founded a Christian church in Philippi, and clearly Lydia was one of its leaders.  He mentions her in his later Epistle to the Philippians as exactly that.  We are only now starting to assemble with much more precision the evidence of what that infant church was like in its structure and life.  It is fascinating.  It was most certainly not the male-dominated, patriarchal arrangement reflected and carried into church law in subsequent centuries down to our own day.  Right at the start, women were totally present in the communal response to the risen Christ. 

Now, in the same letter Paul wrote to that church in Philippi, he makes this wonderful plea about two other women:  I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord.  Yes, and I ask you, loyal Synzygus, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life [Phil 4:2-3].  Euodia and Syntyche are at odds with each other.  There is damaging dissention in his beloved Philippian church, but Paul, uses sensitivity.  He repeats the verb for each of them equally -- I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche… He lists them in alphabetical order.  He praises them…  He asks Synzygus to help these women. 

We have no idea what this was about.  In my experience it might have been because Euodia didn’t want her children playing with Syntyche’s rotten kids...  Or it may have been a bustup in the church choir among the sopranos…  The point is not any of that.  The point is that strife anywhere, anytime, is a choice we have made.  Agreement to live in peace, on the other hand, agreement to understand and respect difference – these are also choices we are free to make.  

In contemplative life and prayer, in a sense, there is no choice about this.  In the company of Christ we are not at liberty to be in enmity with anyone.  Disagreement, certainly, but so far as it lies with us we do not have enemies.  There is silence and peace, shalom, in our relationships, especially in the difficult ones.  And it is all fuelled and renewed daily in the silence of our own hearts, our inmost lives, and our prayer. 

Hindering God – Easter V, 22 April 2016

If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?”  When they heard this, they were silenced.  (Acts 11:17-18)

Hindering God seems a curious concept.  The church tends to assume that it is all the time facilitating God.  Next Sunday we get to hear a story from the infant Christian church.  Peter has been resting, recuperating perhaps, at Joppa, a coastal town.  He falls asleep in the sunshine and he dreams.  In his dream he sees a lot of animals in some kind of sheet let down from heaven.  A voice tells him to kill and eat – but these are animals forbidden for food in the Jewish Law.  I suppose the significance of their being let down from heaven is that, although ritually forbidden, they are nevertheless part of God’s gift in creation.  Peter says there is no way he will transgress the Law to eat anything profane or unclean.  He never has, he says, and he never will.  The voice says, What God has cleansed you may not call profane.  Later, back in Jerusalem, when Peter is taken to task by Jewish Christians for having associated with Gentiles, he tells them this story, and how the same Spirit of God had come upon Gentile believers as upon Jews.  To impede this, by prejudice, by inability to let go of former things, is to hinder God.

Perhaps we hinder God all our lives, in a myriad of ways, some of them trivial and some certainly not.  Our choices at various times, our attitudes, the effects we have had on other people, perhaps needy people, it may be without our ever realising it.  Peter says he refuses to hinder God any more by discriminating between Jewish followers of Jesus, and non-Jewish, Gentile, or pagan, followers of Jesus.  It was the first major test of the Risen Christ’s power to bring down walls and reconcile differences – and that battle, confronted that day in Jerusalem, is being fought still among Jesus’s followers, along the racial divides, whether women may be ordained, for goodness sake!... the status of homosexual people in the company of Christ… and other assorted issues.

It is pretty basic contemplative understanding and experience that it is our egos that hinder God.  It is simply that the ego, however worthy, tends to usurp, even in subtle ways, the place that belongs to God.  The ego may have a heavy investment in the primacy of men in authority, or in the exclusion in societies and families of what seems different or strange.  The ego knows what it likes, and does not like.  The ego may have been seduced by power, money or style.  The ego may have developed desires and ambitions which conflict with the way of Christ. 

In the rhythm of contemplative life and prayer, the ego is constantly, daily, being brought back into submission to God.  This happens gently and quietly, and steadily, in disciplines of silence and stillness.  And one way of seeing it is that we are seeking no longer to hinder God, by our actions, by our attitudes, by our requirements, by our noisy presence in God’s world. 

Easter and chocolate – 15 April 2016

The editorial in the latest Consumer magazine begins with this sentence: By the time you read this, Easter will be a distant guilt trip away.  People who read the Guardian Weekly are probably familiar with the irascible old bloke, Professor Pedanticus, who has a melt-down with every logical fallacy he encounters, or non sequitur.  There is something of the Pedanticus in me, on reading that sentence:  By the time you read this, Easter will be a distant guilt trip away.

Everything is wrong with that statement.  Easter is the high festival of Christian faith.  Easter celebrates the storming of the gates of hell by humility and goodness.  It announces that evil and death do not have the final word.  It proclaims life.  Easter forms and directs our faith and life, day by day, and from here to eternity.  It is never distant.

By distant guilt trip, says this writer Sue Chetwin, she means that we are slowly recovering from our over indulgence in chocolate eggs and chocolate easter bunnies.   Well, some may be.  Others of us may not have wallowed in chocolate to celebrate Easter.  And yet others, who did, are not yet on the road to recovery.  At another level of this – because secularism too has its levels of meaning – she says the real problem with chocolate is not so much sugar, as palm oil, a major ingredient.  So this is now an issue of justice.  The rich world’s hunger for palm oil in all manner of products is destroying ancient rain forests, and so the habitats of many animal species.  It is also feeding widespread political and commercial corruption.  I am sure she is right.  But in the process she has managed to turn Easter from the most sublime moment in Christian truth, to that most tedious of modern clichés, a guilt trip.  In cliché-land that’s right up there these days with adrenalin rush and caffeine fix.

Now of course, I am not being kind here to Ms Chetwin who is simply doing her job.  I am wanting to talk sensibly about Easter.  It is a mistake to expect the secular culture to know or appreciate what we greet and celebrate.  Indeed it seems, there is now a growing anger if “religion” is brought into the secular encounter with easter at all.  Secularism defaults to sentimentalism, to easter bunnies and wicked chocolate – and ploys for keeping your children entertained and not bored. 

In the church’s earliest years, Easter was the reinterpretation of the Jewish Seder, the Passover.  In the most ancient liturgical words we have, Jesus shared a meal with his followers, he gave new meaning to the ritual meal of the Jews, he was then arrested and he died at the hands of the Romans.  On the third day the tomb was empty and the lives of his followers radically transformed.  He has become the Giver and Renewer of Life, making – as the Hebrew prophet said long ago – all things new.  His presence makes possible our contemplative prayer, and all the light we may see in darkness.  Distant guilt trip…?  How sad to be so far from the point.

Being nice – Easter III, 8 April 2016

A Southern Baptist theologian, looking back on the teaching he received as a youngster at church, said what it amounted to was:  Jesus is nice, and he wants us to be nice too.  Certainly there is a widespread assumption that Christians are supposed to be distinctive by being nice.  Church Ministers are supposed to be very nice.  Recently after I had spoken my mind about something, a response came from some people who never go near the church from one year to the next, to the effect that I am not much of a Christian.  But perhaps the real problem with that Baptist chap’s memory of his early years is that he was taught that Jesus was always nice.  And that’s at least dubious.  The myth was typically reinforced by sentimental pictures on the walls or in books of Bible stories. 

The best evidence indicates that Jesus was a man of his time, a man of a violent and perilous time and culture, and that he was a complex person indeed.  We now know that every sanctified image of him -- whether it is the Sunday school picture, or the healthy hero Jesus of young fit manhood, or the cult figure built up by various “high church” devotions, or the authoritarian teacher of high protestantism – every image of him, as one of my finest teachers of long ago said, crumbles to pieces in our hands, is eventually found wanting and is rejected.  We make images and they become idols. 

The real point about Jesus, especially Jesus Risen, is that he eludes us.  That is the point of the strange events in the gospel records of the resurrection.  We do not define him or image him.  We do not recruit him to our cause, possess him…  He finds us, as he found the disciples at the lakeside, and he knows us already, and names us, and calls us. 

The reality about Jesus is miles away from domestic niceness.  Jesus confronts us.  He commands our love.  He commands our possessions – or at any rate the use we make of them.  He requires that we are peaceable, and that we follow justice.  He seeks our consent to daily inner change.  He deeply challenges the prevailing culture of self and of image and style, the worship of power and money and worldly success.  His followers come to understand that truth matters more than respectability or reputation. 

Perhaps it’s worth knowing that the word nice comes from the Latin nescius, which means ignorant, even foolish, stupid or senseless. The English language has taken it over until it means pretty, or normal (like a nice cup of tea), certainly inoffensive… and all manner of other derived uses.  None of that sounds like the call and the way of Christ to me. 

Our stillness and silence is at another level than convention and niceness.  Jesus meets us where we are, once we are paying attention and consenting to his presence.  The initiative is his – we simply dispose ourselves appropriately, as best we can.  So, to those of us able to set our literal minds aside for a while, our contemplative prayer is very much an Easter prayer.  It is a way we encounter the risen Christ, quietly, as it were at the lakeside, but in fact wherever we are.  He is injured, wounded, yet risen and alive in a way the secular mind cannot grasp.  And for us it is enough simply to be present.

Loving God, I – Easter II, 1 April 2016

Easter is a time for compulsory superlatives and grand anthems and huge hopes.  The effect on me is a felt need to slip away to find somewhere a bit of quiet and sensitivity, and an economy of words.  Do you love me? asks the risen Jesus to Peter on the beach at Galilee.  And there follows this puzzling litany in which Jesus asks him three times, Do you love me? … as though this is something we are being asked repeatedly, inwardly perhaps, one way or another, at our different times and seasons, and as the years go by.  Do you love me…?

Jesus was a Jew.  And so he was well acquainted with the command of the Law:  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might (Deut. 6:5).   You shall love…!  It is a command.  It is not as though we have another option.  Moreover, the command calls to our heart… with all your heart… the inescapable part of us, what is deepest in us, and so Jesus comes to our inmost room and asks, Do you love me? 

Michael Casey is a Benedictine monk, and a scholar, and an Aussie – and he points out something about loving God which the church does not always make clear.  It may be that a lot of people simply wouldn’t believe it.   He goes to the teaching of the rabbis on this crucial verse in Deuteronomy which says we are to love God with all our heart.  We are to bless God, say the rabbis, with both our good and (in Hebrew) our yetserim, our evil impulses.  Think about it…  This is what Michael Casey writes:

Even the shadows in our personal history are called upon to bless the Lord.  We are not to exclude our sins… they are not to be banished from consciousness… We never graduate from a state of being utterly dependent on God’s mercy and forgiveness.  In fact the more we advance along the spiritual path, the more aware we become of our impediments… and of the burdens we carry as the result of choices made in the past.  We are not to ignore these liabilities; they also must join in our hymn of praise to the God of grace… We thank God for the darkness in our life, for the mistakes we have made…[1] 

What we might normally wish to conceal, what lies behind our various facades, all of this is brought forward like the recalcitrant, rebellious child at some junior concert.  Our frailty, our fallibility, our woundedness, is all an essential part of our praise and worship.  All of us, in grace, is set free to love God and to love all that God loves.  What is inappropriate in prayer and worship is our falsity, our image, and our facades.

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[1] Michael Casey: Seventy-Four Tools For Good Living (Liturgical Press 2014) p.8.