Made flesh – 23 December 2016

Christmas is upon us now.  I did my best to keep it at arms’ length during four weeks of Advent.  But I am asking, what does this Christmas mean to me, at my age and stage, and in a world increasingly strange to me.  I fixed on two quotes.  The first is from the Gospel for Christmas:

And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us… [John 1:14]

The other comes from one of the medical staff in what was a week or so ago the last actually functioning hospital in Aleppo:

Aleppo is a place where the children have stopped crying.

We are acquainted with the journey from Auckland to Wellington.  Bethlehem, where Jesus was born, is about that distance from Aleppo where children have been starving, living in terror, shot at in the street, barrel-bombed and gassed.  I have been trying to think whether any culture, any society, any religion, really ever has had a good record with children over the centuries.  The harshest words Jesus spoke were for those who harmed children.

God’s definitive Word to us was not a command or instruction, carved into stone or copied down on sacred parchment.  It was not that the heavens opened and anyone heard a voice.  It was not a sermon or a papal edict.  God’s Word was a baby, born to a peasant couple, and as vulnerable, as frighteningly dependent, as any baby newborn in the Middle East or anywhere else. 

And if we are to hear God’s Word, it will be by receiving and loving this child.  So God is speaking first to our hearts, to that part of us that immediately knows the cost of such love – that were it required we would unhesitatingly take that child’s place in suffering or death.  God appeals to the best in us, at another level altogether than all our thoughts and ideas and religions and prejudices, all our possessions, plans…  This Word, if we hear this Word, takes precedence.

It’s not a word we speak or read.  This Word is made flesh, a baby, unique and irreplaceable.  We understand that, in the mystery, this child is the icon of the invisible God.  This is God’s Word.  It is not a word of power, but it is a word of rebuke.  It is a word that calls us to silence, and to hearkening, and to humility. 

Google Maps would not give me a route to drive between Bethlehem and Aleppo, presumably because no one in their right mind would try that.  So I asked for a walking route instead, and got a trail up around the hills which, they said, I could do in 6 days if I kept walking and if presumably I was a mountain goat.   But all the way I would need to hide from men of violence, men assuming that disputes are resolved by killing and maiming, men who have known no other life, and no other way of remedying things.  Far away from there, as far as you might want to go… to the USA, to South America, to Africa, to South-East Asia… there are more and more men and women who assume violence is the way forward, including inevitably the exploitation of children, of women, of the needy. 

I do hear, from where I am, recognisable echoes of that Word from time to time, sometimes from surprising places.  But there is also now all the din of secularism that has no time for the church, in any of its variations or reformations or presentations.  The Word is clearest and nearest, it seems to me, where the simplest aspects of Jesus’ teaching are known, humbly and quietly, not stridently, and followed… where people are friends with silence, and refuse to have enemies… where grown-up faith can be strong and wise for others as well as ourselves… where fear is conquered because our lives are hid with God in Christ… 

Muddled, I know… but those are my thoughts this Christmas.

Awake in Advent…4 – 16 December 2016

Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God… to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles… including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, to all God’s beloved in Rome… Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. [Romans 1:1-7]

You may have noticed the phrase, the obedience of faith…  It is surely a curious expression.  If obedience means doing what we’re told, straight away, then in the spirit of the 21^st century it sounds unlikely – although sometimes, as we know, what we might call simple unquestioning obedience is necessary.  But in biblical use this word is much more nuanced.  Paul does not mean doing what you’re told, or any slavish obedience to church precepts or rules of faith.  The Greek word he uses here (hupakoē, υ͑πακοη) is much closer to the old English word hearken… it is a particular quality of listening, attending to someone, or to some task, or to some duty or obligation…  It is the attention necessary to master a skill, a profession, a language or a science.  Often it is the attention needed to understand, rather than simply assuming we understand.  My private bête noir is the person who interrupts you, mid-sentence, with some banality, and then says, “Sorry… go on…”  This person may be listening in a way, but is not hearkening or attending, and is more present to him/herself than to you.

So Paul writes of the obedience of faith…  This obedience is attending to God, so far as we can, with the whole self.  In contemplative life and prayer we use various words for it such as being present, and consenting...  In our wider lives it develops into an awareness of God everywhere around, and even when we are giving our attention to other matters altogether, as we often are, this consciousness of a listening and attending heart, and awareness of God, is never far away. 

So the obedience of faith has much to do with the great watchword in Advent… awake!  Wachet auf! in German, and the subject of one of the greatest hymns of Christian faith:

Zion hears the watchmen singing,

And all her heart with joy is springing;

She wakes, she rises from her gloom…

Obedience of faith then is hearkening, listening for a word, bearing pain, discerning the time for change, or even suspecting that the time may be near, turning to a neighbour, asking in love (as Simone Weil put it), What are you going through…?  Obedience of faith is consenting to change in ourselves, as the Spirit of Christ may ask.  It is claiming freedom from habits and rules and requirements which inhibit fresh understanding.  It is stability, confidence in the way we are being led, especially when the way ahead is not clear.  Obedience of faith is recognising our fears, and in prayerful disciplines of silence and stillness seeing them eroding and losing their power… all from hearkening, from the obedience of faith. 

Awake in Advent…3 – 9 December 2016

Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord.  The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.  You also must be patient.  Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.  Beloved, do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged.  See, the Judge is standing at the doors! [James 5:7-9]

I’m a bit embarrassed to come over all lyrical about yet another couple of Greek words – but there are two of them here, and they matter if we are awake in Advent.  This time we are not in St Paul, we are in the Letter of James.  I enjoy James, partly because some of the big names have had problems with it.  Martin Luther allegedly called it the epistle of straw.  So my rebellious and contrary spirit alerts me that James must have something going for it.  Also, here in James we are back among Jews, Jewish Christians.  Maybe we are even in Jerusalem. The writer of this letter is traditionally James, the brother of Jesus.  It’s possible, but nobody knows for sure.

The first of our words is patience… be patient…  They are impatient for Jesus to return.  So here we have the first teaching of a quality of heart and mind which mature Christians will have learned in any age.  God has not intervened to make everything right, and may not.  Some might even say, it is not typical of God to intervene.  We are to learn a faith, taught by Jesus, which is not hanging around for everything to come right.  The writer repeats being patient three times in three consecutive sentences.  The Greek word is makrothumia (μακροθυμια) -- in 21^st century idiom it is something like being in for the long haul.  Our faith needs to be formed and suited for reality as well as hope.  Once we have accepted that, we begin to see how truthful and liberating it is.

But more than that, we need the contemplative quality St Paul expressed when he wrote, I have learned to be content… [Phil. 4:11]  In adverse circumstances we may indeed suffer but we choose not to become victims.  Being patient is having decided that Christ’s risen life is now, not later when everything may be as it should.  So it also entails seeing what I can do to make things better.  And it is never forgetting how to give thanks. 

Then, the writer drops into his letter something utterly practical and immediate:  Beloved, do not grumble against one another…  The Greek word originally means what medicine calls a narrowing, stenosis.  Grumbling constricts life.  Gossip tries to derive life out of other people’s hardships and sorrows (Schadenfreude).  Grizzling simply unveils our own inner poverty.  In the Christian community all that behaviour is deeply destructive.  Benedict forbad grumbling from his congregations.  His Latin word was murmuro, murmuring (wonderfully onomatopoeic), muttering in complaint and criticism – and nothing constricts and poisons a fellowship quicker. 

So be still, and silent, and centred in reality, and in the present, and in the presence of God who is always in our presence.

Awake in Advent…2 – 2 December 2016

May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. [Romans 15:5-6]

In 1944, a senior American federal judge with the unlikely name of Judge Learned Hand was administering the oath of citizenship to a group of immigrants in New York.  He spoke to them about liberty, and this is what he said:  What then is the spirit of liberty?  I cannot define it.  I can only tell you my own faith.  The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit that weighs their interests alongside its own without bias… the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten, that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.

Paul is writing to the Christians at Rome.  Being a Christian in Rome was illegal, or very soon became so because Christians typically refused to join in the compulsory Emperor cult – and various emperors starting with Nero made their lives perilous and uncertain.  And so Paul refers to God as the God of steadfastness and encouragement…  A couple of rather nice Greek words in there.  “Steadfastness”, in 21^st century English, we might be more likely to render as “steadiness”.  The Greek hupomonē (ύπομονη) means staying put, not running away.  It’s one of the three classic Benedictine vows, the vow of Stability.  As always, this steadfastness is firstly God’s steadfastness towards us – but then likewise, in a confusing, tempting, often abusive secular culture, the followers of Jesus are to learn quiet steadfastness.  This is not obstinacy or any refusal to change.  It is knowing humbly but surely, and gladly, to whom we belong.  And it is a product of having come to terms with mortality, fear and the fact of an unfair world.

The other attribute of God Paul cites here is “encouragement”… the God of steadfastness and encouragement.  This time the Greek word ought to sound familiar:  paraklēsis (παρακλησις).  Paraclete – it’s usually translated in the English bibles as Holy Spirit, or Comforter, or Advocate.  The paraclete is the person who comes and says, you are not alone… the person you most want to see arrive.  It is the one who says, I can join my resources to yours.  That is what God does, the God of… paraklēsis. 

Grown-up faith has discovered that freedom is not and never was freedom to have things the way we might want, even in religion.  It is an inner freedom within the circumstances we have been given, whether Rome of the 1^st century or the bewildering facts of 2016 and the looming perils ahead.  Judge Learned Hand saw it as a freedom to live without walls of our making – actual walls or social walls or religious walls.  Paul writes:  May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ… he writes to the Church at Rome.  Well certainly, silence and stillness teach us that lingering divisions and disputes, ancient memories and resentments, fears and hatreds, may be set aside.  They have no power over us, and they have no place in the kingdom of Christ.