Spirit and freedom – 24 June 2016

If the lectionary Epistle (Galatians 5: 1-25) is read in church next Sunday, and of course if you remember to listen to it, you will hear phrases like these:

For freedom Christ has set us free…

You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters…

Through love become slaves to one another…

Live by the Spirit…

If you are led by the Spirit you are not subject to the law…

The works of the flesh are obvious…

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control…

Living in freedom and by the Spirit sounds strange and dangerous, even irresponsible, some would say scary – except that the Spirit Paul is writing about is the Spirit of Jesus.  The Spirit’s “fruits”, he says, are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. 

The freedom he is writing about is being freed to live that way.  Paul sees it as freedom from the law.  He does not mean the law of the land, of course – he means the constraints and expectations imposed on us all the time by our cultural, tribal or religious norms.  He had just had news that in the Galatian church a group of Jewish Christians had started to reinstate circumcision of new converts, and Paul is enraged.  In Christ we are free of all such obligations and expectations.  We are set free by the Spirit of Christ, to live by the Spirit.  It is a new kind of journeying.  Indeed, it is a grown-up life. 

The life that is ruled by conformity and self is what Paul calls “flesh”, the opposite of Spirit.  I think this is a puzzle to many sincere Christians.  The more so when Paul lists what he calls “the obvious works of the flesh”…  but if we bear in mind things we hear daily these days, Paul’s list may seem uncomfortably familiar:  …fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.  The reaction is, well, I don’t live that way and I am unlikely to.   But it tends that way, says Paul.  What Paul calls “flesh”, contemporary spiritual teaching and psychology calls ego, and in Christian spiritual understanding the problem is that we place ego/self where God belongs -- the most common of all forms of idolatry.

We are invited to journey on another road.  Of course we obey the law – Paul makes that very clear in his Letter to the Romans.  But rather than being slaves to convention, to trendiness, to family or tribal requirements, or to the strident demands of ego/self, we are free in Christ to (as Paul puts it) be slaves to one another.  In our contemplative experience, self becomes more and more negotiable.  We are free to know we were wrong.  We are free to change.  We are free of the need to save face, let alone the need to dine out for ever on having been injured.  We are free from the fear of mortality.  In this lovely process, all our fears in life come up for review.  Even ageing can be fun, occasionally.   Paul finds an exhilaration of freedom in Christ.  At basis it is a matter of being made free to receive love and to give love.  And among the many components of this freedom are prayerful silence, stillness and consent.

Our demons – 17 June 2016

The gospel lesson for next Sunday is Luke’s telling of Jesus’s encounter with the madman of Gerasa and his demons.  We find this related in all three synoptic gospels, with much variation.  The story clearly worried the early church – and it is a big problem for various reasons.  My first self-protective instinct was to talk about something else this morning.  But this unpleasant narrative does have a weird challenge about it – how can we talk intelligently and meaningfully in the 21^st century, as people of faith, about demons and madness…?

I think it is worth noting that Luke has sandwiched this story between the dramatic account of Jesus stilling the storm on the lake, and the incidents where Jesus instantly heals a woman with a chronic haemorrhage, and then raises a dead child to life.  So Jesus is being depicted as having supernatural power, over the storm, over the world of demons, and over sickness and even death.  And we have to ask, all the more urgently… How do we approach all this in our day, sensibly, sensitively, without surrendering to naiveté and superstition, in order to hear what these things may be saying to us about God and faith.

Of course the story comes to us in 1^st century terms.  Madness was demon possession.  Jesus could speak to the demons.  The man lived chained up naked in the graveyard.  He had no name but called himself Legion.  And animal rights people just have to endure the fact that Jesus orders the demons into a lot of pigs, which are forthwith drowned in the lake.  Of course, strict Jews would have thought that was appropriate for pigs, unclean animals – rather in the way the Nazis thought it appropriate to torment Jews because they were only Untermenschen, sub-human, anyway. 

Now… The more I think about this, the more I realise that I am not at all ready to wave any light dismissal to demons.  There is a pitch of evil which is not explained by all our science.  We don’t explain it by demons either.  But when we say, for instance, that someone has personal demons, it is a graphic way of referring to a reality.   I wonder, do we teach serious sustained history in our schools anymore?  My teachers were people steeped in the ancient classics and onwards, and they understood in the human record that, like eruptions on the skin, evil simply breaks through into human activity and society, and even the most intelligent of us can default to it and become captive to it.  We have seen this over and over in history, and we are most certainly seeing it in our day.  The evil which compelled a man to murder 49 people and injure as many more, from motives of pure hatred, in a Florida nightclub.  The evil which is compelling thousands of crazed men with guns, around Syria and Libya and other parts, killing people and laying waste to the land.  The evil which drives football fans to turn into drunken mobs, mindlessly attacking others…  And I have no time even to get started on the evils of injustice and inequality, much more complex, which see people left without the utter basics of food, water, housing or safety, health care or education. 

It seems to me, as a Christian believer, that evil stalks abroad.  It seems to me also that in this story of the Gerasene demoniac we have, an ancient picture, of Jesus confronting the evil, bringing light and health, delivering, and creating anew.  It has been and remains true in the lives of many believers.  The deliverer, this Jesus, is whom we encounter in our silence and submission.

Pinning labels – 10 June 2016

We apparently have a serious urge to pin labels on people.  You have only to show up at some event and someone will say accusingly, You’re not wearing your label.  Of course I see why we might need to be labelled with our names, if among strangers. 

But our need to label people is a bit more complex than that.  I was recently labelled publicly as white, male, middle-class, privileged, all of which is true.  They somehow unaccountably missed handsome and genial…  It’s selective, you see.  Moreover, the implication which went with the label was: Therefore what he says doesn’t matter.  Other folks get labelled Jew, or Moslem – as though that’s what you need to know about them – or labelled no-hoper, pacifist, Greenie, vegetarian, religious, red-necked, black, white, gay, lesbian… as though these and all the other labels actually describe anything about anyone accurately, insightfully or with wisdom. 

So what is the alternative?  In the rhythms of contemplative life and prayer we learn and we are constantly reminded how every person is as much a mystery as we are ourselves.  We learn to pause at the threshold of any other person’s life, waiting and listening.  What we may think they are is never as important a question as, for instance, what they have survived, or Simone Weil’s great question in defining loving your neighbour, What are you going through? 

But, practically and realistically… we are obliged quite often, to label people in ways that are not meant to be sinister, simply true.  It seems OK if we decide that someone is a saint, or decent and wise, or a genius, or a hero.  It may be no less true that someone else is a buffoon, or a tyrant, or a liar or a hypocrite.  But in all this the important thing to know is that the label, good or bad, can never be a fair and final judgement.  You remember Nora Batty -- she folded her arms, pursed her lips, looked up to the sky and said, “Well, that’s what I think.”  Do you know anyone like that?

St Benedict has a chapter in his Rule headed, Restraint of Speech.  It is partly to stop monks chattering, but also to ensure that what they do say is true and kind and wise.

There were times when Jesus pinned labels.  I imagine, on the whole, they were richly deserved.  In Matthew 23 – and I am well aware that passage may reflect later issues in the early church, than strictly what happened at the time – Jesus labels the scribes and pharisees, the Jewish church politburo you might say, as hypocrites, blind guides, whited sepulchres, brood of vipers…   I find it hard to know what to say about that, except that it may have reflected more the early Christian church’s harsh experience of being expelled from the synagogues.  In the Book of Acts, by contrast, we find at least one pharisee, Gamaliel, who was quite different.  That should warn us not only about labels but about generalisations – how often do we hear, Oh, they’re all like that…  It is best to allow God’s Spirit to develop in us the contemplative willingness to listen and observe, we hope with kindness and wisdom.

Falling in love with God – 3 June 2016

After the weighty stuff of the last four weeks, I wondered, whatever will we think about now?  The advancing years bring a risk of becoming tedious and making Jesus’s gospel, which is always fresh, seem predictable, boring or out of reach.  Then arrived, from the NZ Community for Christian Meditation, a flyer for a meditation retreat this very weekend.  It seems this retreat had not attracted all the enrolments they hoped for, and so they sent a last-minute notification.  It is to be led by a Canadian, Sister Christina, and the theme is:  Falling in love with God.

Now, my wife reminds me that I am eccentric... however, for some reason that theme rattles me.  Falling in love with God… something about it is not right, and my initial instinct is… embarrassment. 

I don’t fall in love with God.  With Moses in the desert, at the sight of the burning bush, I come to a stop.  I remove my shoes.  I am still, I am quiet, I wait, and listen.  It is never that I am bestowing upon God the benefit of my love.  All love comes from God.  If I am loving – if I can fulfil the Great Commandment, to love God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength -- it is that God has made me so. Read the First Letter of John, which may be among the last and most mature writings to make it into the Christian Bible.  The writer is lyrical:

Beloved, let us love one another.  Love is from God.  Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God…  God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them… [I John 4:7ff]

Love, it says, is what I receive.  God is the fount and giver of love. 

But also that phrase, “falling in love”, is a problem.  In modern ears, it has become a sentimental, vapid concept.  People fall in and out of love all the time – it is what the culture expects.  It seems inevitable. 

Love in the rich terms of Christian faith is not that.  It is responding Yes, from our depths, to what we find in Jesus, in creation and in Christ.  It is saying Yes, de profundis, from the depths, to life with its light and also its darkness.  It is weeping with those who weep, as St Paul put it, and rejoicing with those who rejoice.  God was never not in love with me. 

I am sure, I hasten to say, that Sister Christina is well aware of all this.  Her brochure does actually reassure me somewhat.  But I took my initial hesitation at her theme title, Falling in love with God, as an opportunity to work out why it was I heard a distant alarm. 

John writes: Herein is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us… [I John 4:10]  That is the mystery and wonder of it all.  Thank you, Sister Christina.