Losing and finding…4 – 27 May 2016

If anyone wishes to follow me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For whoever would save their life will lose it; and whoever loses their life for my sake will save it.  [Mark 8:34-35; Matthew 16:24-25; Luke 9:23-24; John 12:25]

Now we come to the crux of it, I think.  What we have from Jesus is another way of living – “Losing” my life, as the gospel writer expresses it, rather than “saving” my life…   I want to say, after a week of pondering this, and at the risk of everyone falling about laughing, that what Jesus does for his followers is readjust our relationship with the possessive personal pronoun.  My life… my lifestyle… my possessions… my feelings… my rights… my opinions… my faith… my church… my dreams… my goals… my safety… my… oh my.  Obviously we use the possessive pronouns in all sorts of ways, some of which are perfectly fine.  But in Jesus’s company we start to see that my needs and preferences are not the point.   As Paul says to the Church at Corinth:  What do you have that you did not receive?  And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift? [I Cor 4:7].  By saving my life, as Jesus uses the word, we mean possessiveness and ownership, as though we have forgotten is that all is gift, not only our possessions, but our very breath, our neurones, our next heartbeat, our ability to love, and the sparkle on the water of Kawau Bay.  By “saving” my life he means me first, my safety and security, defending what I believe is mine.  So it goes with my inability to let go… not only of possessions, but also of opinions and beliefs, of attitudes, of poisonous memories.  Saving is clinging.

Losing my life is the discovery, in Jesus’s company, that I don’t need to take myself all that seriously.  It is a developing inner freedom.  It is a growing willingness to relinquish control, to loosen my grip on people and events.  I find one day I can more easily be happy for people to be themselves, for better or for worse.  My life and my wishes and preferences may be interesting, but never for me definitive or determinative, or even all that important, any more.  

We learn now to live with mystery and unanswered questions.  A man in a Christian study group recently announced, evidently without blinking, I have no problems with the Holy Trinity.  Perhaps there is no mystery in his life at all.  Perhaps he is, as the politicians like to say, substantially satisfied with the main issues.  In the Beatitudes, Jesus blesses the meek, he blesses those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, as though they haven’t found it yet, he blesses the merciful, the pure in heart, and the peacemakers.  It brings us to the borders of contemplative life and prayer, where what we do is follow Jesus, not knowing where the road ends, but knowing that he follows us, day by day. 

The contemplative people I know tend to be normally busy and involved people.  Some are very busy indeed, on all manner of worthy things.  Others who are not able to do much, keep a daily interest in what is happening to others around the world.  What we all have in common is the fellowship of silence and stillness, the place of empty hands and minds quietly paying attention, where Jesus is present.  Our facades are being dismantled and all our chatter is ceasing.  We have nothing to prove and nothing to achieve.  St Paul says: You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.  When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory [Colossians 3:3-4]. 

Losing and finding…3 – 20 May 2016

If anyone wishes to follow me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For whoever would save their life will lose it; and whoever loses their life for my sake will save it.  [Mark 8:34-35; Matthew 16:24-25; Luke 9:23-24; John 12:25]

It’s interesting always to ask, are there ways we can read these ancient words so that they strike sparks in our time and lives, in our language and concepts?  If we don’t at least try to do that, then this utterly central teaching from Jesus simply gets heard as nice religious words, and it changes nothing much.  Two Fridays ago we looked at what Jesus might mean by denying oneself.  Last Friday it was the idea of taking up one’s cross.  Then, he says, Follow me.

Does that mean going to church?  Does everyone at church follow Jesus?  Does it matter which church?  Does not going to church mean not following Jesus?  If an atheist still respects Jesus and his teaching, and generally adheres to that, is he/she following Jesus?  How does following Jesus’s teachings in for instance the Sermon on the Mount, differ from declaring from the heart that Jesus is Lord, my Lord, Teacher, Master and Saviour…? 

The Greek verb akoloutheo [ακολουθεω] means to follow someone, along the road perhaps, or follow your big sister to school – it also means in some uses to obey… and even more than that, it can mean to confirm, agree with, endorse… so that eventually St Paul can write about putting on Christ, as one might put on a garment.  So it seems, when Jesus invited someone to follow he was inviting us to do more than come along and see if it works out.  One celebrity, getting married for the third time, was asked: Do you think this one will work?  She replied that she always liked to keep her options open.  And of course, in her case, that would be only prudent and sensible.  But Jesus was offering one of those scary choices in which you can’t see the end from the beginning.  This choice would initiate a process of serious change -- a change which might begin with the decision to follow, but which would grow (I would say, grow up) and develop and mature down the years.  It means that Jesus becomes the key to life, but certainly not in any arrogant sense, or in any legalistic way – nothing is less like Jesus than Christians booming at others from some moral and religious high ground. 

Jesus is Lord means, in the familiar words of Cranmer: “…for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death does us… unite”.  I think that is what follow means.  It is a quiet, hidden bond of love and obedience which, as Paul writes, survives all our lapses and defections.  As time goes by this bond is tested and matures.  It is not something we normally dissect or discuss.

It is a mutual bond, moreover.  Jesus is committed in love to his followers – although that is the kind of statement that is incomprehensible to many.    In John’s Gospel we find Jesus saying, Abide in me, and I in you.  It is a mutuality, and the bond depends, not so much on dedicated and heroic deeds, as on our stillness, receptiveness and our grateful hearts. 

Losing and finding…2 – 13 May 2016

If anyone wishes to follow me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For whoever would save their life will lose it; and whoever loses their life for my sake will save it.  [Mark 8:34-35; Matthew 16:24-25; Luke 9:23-24; John 12:25]

One of Rowan Williams’ more extraordinary sermons was about a French priest of the 19^th century, the Abbé Huvelin of Paris.  It seems scarcely credible, but this consummate pastor was actually a card-carrying neurotic.  He suffered from gout, migraine, depression and what they called neurasthenia.  He received a constant stream of his parishioners while lying in a darkened room.  He conducted catechism classes and visited the sick.  The Abbé Huvelin was in fact a remarkably gifted pastor.  And Rowan Williams finds in this an example of what it might mean to take up your cross. 

We commonly make that expression mean something like making the best of all our hardships in life, physical weaknesses, big disappointments… whatever it is, we call it bearing one’s burdens, carrying one’s cross.  Well maybe… but it’s a richer truth than that.  We all bear our crosses, inevitably, whoever we are.  The Abbé Huvelin was an injured and scarred man, yet God had given him a ministry.  Rowan Williams points out, each of us has factors in life which cannot be undone or unmade.  Our wholeness and status with God is not some eliminating of all the bad things and their memory, but rather our acknowledgement of who we are and all our truth.  This is the person God sees and knows and loves, and who emerges in a contemplative life of silence and consent. 

I have discovered that teaching about the ego tends to get me into trouble.  The egos of some people feel immediately threatened, and they react dismissively or even with anger.  While the ego has many good and necessary features, in our culture it typically sees its task also as a kind of cosmetic surgeon, hiding the blemishes, excusing the weaknesses and failures, concealing the fact that we do have flaws which may be beyond remedy.  Our growth in grace has very much to do with recognising and befriending our neediness and mortality – bearing our cross -- consenting daily afresh to live (in St Paul’s words) by the Spirit and in truth, meeting and embracing the true self, becoming ever less able to take the ego seriously or to be dominated by its demands, being daily born again. 

Interestingly, when the American Episcopalian Church came to revise their Communion liturgy, and they came to the ancient Eucharistic invitation you will recognise: Holy things for those who are holy… some Americans wanted to change it to: Healthy things for healthy people.   In New Zealand in recent times we even began to talk about “healthy churches”, by which we meant churches in which nothing went wrong any more.  It’s fantasy-land.  “Holy” does not mean everything perfect and nicely religious.   “Holy” is people attending to God, like Moses at the burning bush, people submitting their egos and their future to the Spirit of Christ and to loving grace.   Here it is in St Paul, perhaps too direct for modern taste, but right all the same:  You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self… and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. [Ephesians 4:22-24].

Losing and finding…1 – 6 May 2016

If anyone wishes to follow me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For whoever would save their life will lose it; and whoever loses their life for my sake will save it.  [Mark 8:34-35; Matthew 16:24-25; Luke 9:23-24; John 12:25]

I think this is the heart of discipleship.  I would like to spend a week or two around this theme, Losing and Finding.  And I think it’s as well to note at the start that we find this teaching from Jesus in all four gospels.  It is really beyond doubt an authentic record, the more so that the gospels are in remarkable agreement about precisely what he said.  Secondly, what Jesus teaches here is for everyone.  It is not some private special teaching for his immediate disciples.  In Mark, the earliest written gospel, we read: He called to him the multitude, with his disciples, and said to them…  In Luke, simply: He said to all… 

There are two big problems, it seems to me.  The first is – and we will come back to this repeatedly, I think – that we do not wish to deny ourselves.  I may choose to deny myself excess sugar, or cream… but it is still my choice.  However, none of that is what Jesus means.  Denying self is something altogether deeper and more meaningful than what we might call self-denial.  Even that, now, in our secular, idolatrous culture, is considered silly and unnecessary.  No one is going to stop me having what I want.  That is the first problem.  What Jesus asks of us is deeply counter-cultural and counter-intuitive.

The second problem is that Jesus in his day had never heard the terms which we will need in order to understand this truth.  He had never heard about the Ego or its role in our lives.  He had never heard of psychology or its insights.  What he was, was wise – he saw into reality to where the blockages are.  Out of his wisdom – and I would say, out of his bond with God -- came this teaching, to all.

What then is the self I am invited to deny?  In our day we label it the Ego.  It is the self I present to the world – and, often as not, I am convinced by it myself.  My persona…  One teacher, Thomas Keating, says the Ego is the accumulation of all our strategies to be happy, successful, appreciated, safe… all that.  Laurence Freeman says it is the desire to dominate, the desire to take rather than to give or simply to let be; it is the desire to possess…  It is a lot more also.  The Ego is good and necessary in many ways.  It is our instinctive protection, it includes our genuine desire to be good and useful.

Contemplative understanding is that God dwells, abides, recognises us, somehow behind and beyond this ego.  Steadily, over time, the ego yields place to God.  It is a subtle and lovely process, and (I think) impossible to describe, let alone define.  But as we are still, asking for nothing, simply consenting to God, the ego becomes more and more attenuated.  We cease to take ourselves so seriously.  What is good in the ego is confirmed and reinforced, but even then we sense if once again it is assuming the place that belongs to God. 

We will continue this, I think, for two or three weeks, exploring how we might say in our language and concepts, what Jesus taught in his day to the multitude.