Sursum corda – 30 September 2016

The poplars lining Sandspit Road are now well on the way into leaf.  Last week was the Spring Equinox in the southern hemisphere, so that’s a kind of milestone each year.  At the South Pole the sun rose above the horizon, where it will stay for six months, day and night so to speak.  So Mother Nature is looking up.  In last Friday’s talk, centred on the lectionary gospel for last Sunday, I touched on gloomy issues about faith and the world, and we went home chastened and puzzled.  Then during this week I looked at the gospel for this next Sunday, and… oh dear.  It’s all about duty and not getting above ourselves.  The Old Testament reading is from the Book of Lamentations, and the Psalm is 137, the one about weeping by the waters of Babylon and hanging up our harps. 

I decided it was time to remind myself where the light is shining, to rejoin the world of spiritual fun.  A useful ploy in this spiritual circumstance is to consult Rowan Williams, one of the luminous Christian teachers of our day.  Dr Williams did not let me down.  I found a sermon of his commemorating John Wesley.  Rowan Williams describes John Wesley as a hugely passionate but deeply fallible man, with his muddle and silliness, false starts, disastrous misjudgements, wrong turnings… and that’s just the start of what we may celebrate about John Wesley: 

Wesley’s gospel is that our first task is to trust God…  Our identity before God will come from God, insofar as we simply go on with him, patiently opening ourselves to his patience with us, and patiently staying with each other in our risky and muddled lives.  This is not a Christianity without struggle, without discipline, and without judgement.  It is hard to keep that openness, that habit of trust – we need disciplines for that, silent listening for God, standing before the Christ of the gospels, joining in the church’s act of praise.  We need to learn real repentance and honesty, to accept our mistakes as real, and never to be so paralysed by or ashamed of them that we are afraid of ourselves and our own perceptions and choices…  Beyond this stumbling and confusion… God still holds a future for us in his hands.

Thank God for a saint who had to live his life so embarrassingly beyond the conventions…  Thank God even for the 18^th century Church of England, so clueless about how to handle a man so irresponsibly devoted to God that it forced him into wandering and exploration, folly and blundering – and unshakeable witness to free and full grace.

There is much more in that sermon…  There is no safe place, there is no safe life, there is no safe and sure religious belief and practice.  What there is, is faith, hope and love, as St Paul put it.  If we are concerned to change this desperately cruel and sad world, the only pathway is the change in ourselves brought by God, in our attention to God.  We become women and men of peace and love and justice.  We become unafraid of change because we know change in our own hearts and lives.  We do not have enemies and we do not resolve disputes with violence of any kind.

That is gospel, good news.  We are free… to weep with those who weep -- in Syria we see a fraction of their pain and bear it with them -- and we rejoice with those who rejoice.  We set aside the need to appear otherwise than we are, and we have set aside also the fear of mortality.  Death is the final mystery, and we will be invited into it by God in love and trust. 

A Jewish tale – 23 September 2016

There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table…  [Luke 16:19ff]

…and what follows is the tale of the rich man and Lazarus the very poor man.  They both die.  The rich man is tormented in Hades because of his life of self, while the poor man, it says, lies in Abraham’s bosom.  This is what Jews call a midrash, a graphic commentary on the law, and to me it reads like a cautionary synagogue tale.  The rich man says well, if you can’t send Lazarus with some water for me, at least send him to warn my brothers about the perils of wealth.  And Abraham replies: They have Moses and the prophets… if they don’t heed Moses and the prophets, they’re not going change whatever happens.

Now, in order to have informed and credible faith we need space to ask questions.  The day is surely gone when faith was taken to mean virtuous subservience to biblical or any other authority.  And some questions certainly do arise about this Jewish tale.  Did Jesus actually tell this story?  It seems to be uncomfortably out of step with the general spirit of his teaching.  This tale is found only in Luke.  There’s not a hint of it elsewhere.  But it does make sense in the Jewish context… Abraham’s bosom… fortunes being reversed… Moses and the prophets…  If Jesus told this tale, then perhaps he was wryly recounting a story they all knew anyway as Jews. 

In the Jewish sense, Moses and the prophets, the Law and the Prophets, in Hebrew the Torah and the Nevi’im… are the two pillars of Jewish love and response to God.  The Law of Moses and the teachings of the prophets regularly warn that wealth carries obligations.  You care for the widow, the orphan and the stranger.  In the Law this is not negotiable.  You are not to be scrupulous to harvest the grain from the corners or right to the edges of your fields – you leave grain for the poor.  Every seven years you remit all debts.  Moses and the prophets were quite enough to alert this rich bloke to the peril he was always in, and they will suffice to warn his rich brothers.  That is the Jewish teaching in this tale.

Jesus says rather more, however, although you don’t find it echoed in this story.  He himself identified himself with the flawed and the failed, the sinners and the needy.  He bridged what the story calls the great gulf fixed.  He directly challenged the religious élite and the power of wealth.  He taught it is a matter, not of social status, privilege and power, but of the heart… Where your heart is, there your treasure will be also… to invert his equation.  Our life and prayer are a bridging of what that story calls the great chasm fixed, between us and them, between privileged and needy, between power and poverty, between appearance and reality, between safety and love – to say nothing of black and white, male and female, deserving and undeserving...  We can’t live, as it were, on the other side of a great gulf from other people.  So far as it lies with us, which normally isn’t very far because we are not among the great and good, in our silence and stillness we consent to the changes in us brought by the Spirit of Jesus.  And our hearts are changed, and to that extent our world is changed. 

Balm in Gilead – 16 September 2016

The readings for next Sunday include this passage from Jeremiah.  The prophet is sunk in inconsolable grief at the state of religion and the people.  I was tempted, as I’m sure others were, to consign this to the Too Hard basket… but then my attention was caught by its raw reality and poetry…

My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land: “Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her King not there? The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored? O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people! [Jeremiah 8:18ff]

You might say that there are two broad ways of living a faith, in our case Christian faith.  They differ from each other, and yet in some ways you can have bits of each.  The most popular attitude, at any rate in western Christianity, is that it is mainly about me.  Although I know I am to love God and my neighbour, and quite often do, my faith, my satisfaction and my happiness are not negotiable and are the test, my security and assurance, my church and its fellowship, my growth and development…  This overall prior assumption with all its variations is scarcely questioned, and it can be formed to merge peaceably at least with the now dominant secular culture and people who probably want nothing to do with religion.  Faith is for me, obviously, and so plenty of people now say, “I have no need of it.  I can take better care of myself, myself.”

The other way is the road less travelled… in which…  I am not the centre of life and faith.  That self is finding itself displaced (replaced…?).  In prayer and quiet discipline I am attending to what Jesus taught and presides over even now – a life which is challenging my securities and boundaries.  Jesus asked, Why do you call me Lord, yet don’t do the things that I say?  The balm in Gilead, we discover, is not a soothing balm, it is a healing, re-creating balm.  It is not about how I am feeling, but about who I am becoming, in Christ.  This way of faith is by its nature open and vulnerable, it sees no need of fences or walls.  It has been called in history the Via Negativa, because God whom we love and worship is best described by what God is not – God is not what we think.  What we have is mystery, holiness, justice and love, with the veil somewhat lifted for us by Jesus.  So we are not loud, and we do not imagine we are saving the world.  We live by the Spirit, as one of the great biblical images puts it – the wind of God.  The Spirit, taught Fr John Main, is Jesus living in us, and among us, and joining in our prayer. 

Which God? – 9 September 2016

We seem lately quite often to find ourselves meeting aspects of Christian belief we perhaps generally took for granted, but which seem suddenly to have become possibly childish or questionable.  One of these came up last week.  It is our apparent need for a so-called interventionist God, a God who may reach out and do a miracle.  Does God specially intervene to help me…?  This is a troubling one because as soon as we start talking about it we risk shaking the foundations of good people and their unexamined assumptions.  Quite often the events of life do that for them without any help from us.  I am in favour of being gentle and understanding, which life often isn’t, but it may be that the foundations of some belief need shaking.  Or if we don’t like shaking things, perhaps a gentle invitation to bring faith and reality closer together, to try standing where the wind is blowing.  Either way, a contemplative discipline of silence and stillness will tend to achieve just that.  As St Paul put it, we need to grow up into Christ. 

Centuries before the time of Christ, the Hebrew prophet Elijah had a dramatic confrontation with the priests of Baal on Mt Carmel.  This was a showdown between Elijah’s God, a stable, caring, God of justice – and the popular religion, Baal the capricious, the unpredictable, needing always to be flattered, propitiated and cajoled.  When Baal appears to ignore their sacrifice, Elijah ferociously mocks these priests:  Cry aloud! Surely he is a god… perhaps he is meditating, or he has wandered away, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and needs to be wakened…  But what we see here in the priests of Baal uncomfortably resembles much that is quite familiar to us, both within and beyond the church, even today.  God is perceived as pleased or not pleased.  God rewards or chooses not to reward.  God punishes.  God may respond to fervent prayer, with a miracle – or he may unaccountably not, and we’ll never know why.  God may heal someone because everyone prayed, but not heal someone else because they didn’t or couldn’t or didn’t know they should, or thought they weren’t good enough…

None of this was ever Jesus’s understanding of God, whom he called Father.  And indeed Jesus explicitly rejected such cargo-cult, retributive understandings of God.  God, he taught, makes the sun to rise, and the rain to fall, on good and bad alike. St John reports Jesus saying: Whoever has seen me has seen the Father…  So Paul can write that he, Jesus, is the icon of the invisible God – in Jesus we glimpse fleetingly through the mystery, the nature of God.  And what we see is stable, loving, welcoming, inclusive – but also wounded, suffering, dying and rising -- the Word made flesh, in John’s incomparable words.  It is all a world away from the Baalism and superstition of much that remains in the church to this day, popular as it is, even lucrative, in some surprising places -- and it is rightly rejected by more and more people of faith who know that can’t be right. 

We are to grow up in faith and in Christ.  There is nothing of freedom or dignity living in dependence on a god we must always please, or persuade somehow, like some parent who won’t otherwise let me have what I want.  If we follow the story of Elijah, we read next how he fled from the religion of Baal and found himself eventually at Horeb.  There was a violent storm, some cataclysm… and, we learn, God was not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire…  The word of the Lord came for Elijah in the sound of silence.  God is at the meeting place, the place where words don’t matter half so much as our heartfelt, steady presence and consent, our willingness to be mortal, to bear pain and burdens and to set self aside.  Growing up, in other words, into Christ.   

At the potter’s house – 2 September 2016

So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel.  The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.  Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. [Jeremiah 18:3-5]

One of the cosy assumptions of much popular Christian piety is that God has a plan for me.  It follows that I will be happy in life if I carry out God’s plan for me, and presumably miserable if I don’t.  So a major task of fervent earlier years was to discover what God wants me to be, what God wants me to do.  I met young people in more or less permanent indecision because they couldn’t be sure that what they were doing was what God wanted.  It could extend to whom God wanted me to marry – presumably nowadays, whom God wants me to move in with… 

This level of faith and understanding is egocentric, all about me.  One of the signs of maturity in faith is discovering one day that it’s actually not all about me, or my spiritual life and development, or my happiness and fulfilment.  We then start to learn that the real task of faith is letting go of the demanding ego, constantly needing to occupy the space which belongs to God.  This is a very large freedom.

Moreover, when Jeremiah visited the potter’s house, and watched the potter at work, he saw that God can sometimes start all over again, as it were.  This should come as quite good news.  As the lump of clay was being formed into a pot, the potter decided that for some reason it wasn’t right, so he crumpled it down and started again.  And we should carefully note that it wasn’t the clay’s fault.  It was the potter who hadn’t got it right.  The task of the clay was always simply to consent, to allow itself to be formed – and in this case, reformed.  Benedictines call this conversatio, the reminder each day that God’s Spirit is at work, challenging and changing us, and making all things new.  Usually the changes are subtle and long-term – sometimes they may be more dramatic. 

It might be silly to extend this metaphor of the potter beyond what it can bear… But I can’t resist suggesting that the divine potter, perhaps, does not have an outlet shop somewhere where you can buy the seconds cheaply, a shelf of flawed pots getting hocked off for half price.  This potter corrects his mistakes, and will bring all his creation to perfection, in ways we certainly don’t see or understand from where we are, and which lie for us wreathed in mystery. 

Our YES to God, in the stillness and silence of our prayer, is holding open the door by which not only we ourselves, but all God’s suffering humanity and ecosystem, all that is not yet right, is being remade. 

So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel.  The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.  Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.