Advent Canticles – Advent I, 30 November 2018

Advent, despite the depredations of the secular world, is not Christmas.  Why not, this time around, I thought, attend to the Psalms in the Lectionary for Advent.  But as it turns out, only for the 1^st Sunday in Advent do we actually have a Psalm.  For the other three Sundays it is Canticles – The Benedictus, a Canticle from Isaiah, and on Advent IV the Magnificat.  For Advent I then it is Psalm 25, the first half of it.  Unto thee, O Lord, will I lift up my soul… That’s from the Coverdale version, 1535.  It is the version used in Anglican prayer books, one way and another, down to the present day. 

My God, I have put my trust in thee; O let me not be confounded,

Neither let mine enemies triumph over me…

The Psalmist turns to prayer.  His or her prayer is heartfelt and personal from the outset.  It is not any formal saying of prayers, although that, as we know, has its important place.  Here however the Psalmist is not hiding at all from God, or from herself.  There is no one else present.  She says, or sings, I lift up my soul…  Her life, in the most hidden depths she knows, she is offering back to God.  And she is deeply aware of what she thinks are its defects.  God may not be seeing the defects she sees… but this is her prayer, and she means every word.  She wishes she had better words.

O let me not be confounded…  The Hebrew means blushing, ashamed, even disqualified.  Her deepest desire here is to be confident and honest before God.  Neither let mine enemies triumph over me…  When we read the Psalms, or hear them in church, “my enemy” is a frequent presence, but “my enemy” may not at all be some attack from elsewhere.  “The enemy” may be within, personal, obstinate, lifelong – an addiction perhaps, an intractable memory, some perceived inadequacy, some failure...  We read the Psalms as what they are, poetry, and charged with meaning we never suspected.  These prayers in all their red-bloodedness give us a voice.  So we linger over them, and love them.  The Psalmist is speaking for us and often movingly.

Shew me thy ways, O Lord; teach me thy paths.

Lead me forth in thy truth, and learn me[1]…

In her stillness and attention in prayer she is reminded that life and the world are not primarily about her.  God’s way is primary, not mine; God’s will, not mine; God’s word, not mine.  Hebrew loves to say the same thing twice with different words – in this case, four times:  Shew me… teach me… lead me… learn me…  The third one is a word derived from the noun meaning a goad, a prod, even a rod of correction.  It is as though we learn, often as not, if we are willing and listening, which often we are not -- by the adverse things that happen, the setbacks, the calamities.  The Psalmist in her prayer submits to leading, or prodding, so long as it is along the path of truth, love and goodness.  And so her prayer goes on… Psalm 25.  You may be able to read it yourself in the First Week of Advent.

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[1] Coverdale authorises us to use “learn” transitively to mean imparting knowledge.

Strangers and sojourners – 23 November 2018

Rabbi Josh Whinston serves the Beth Emeth (House of Truth) synagogue in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  A couple of weeks ago he led a team from his congregation some 2700 kilometres to Tornillo, Texas.  This is beside the Mexican border, and it is where the US government has one of its camps altogether housing now some 14,000 children of refugees, separated from their parents.  The Jews from Michigan were bearing witness to something timeless.  They bore a word from God.   All the Hebrew scriptures, the Law, the Prophets the Writings, stress repeatedly that they themselves, the Hebrews, were more than once strangers and sojourners, and may be again, that they must never forget this, that their constant obligation and privilege, in their security and prosperity, is to welcome the stranger and the sojourner, never to oppress them but to share land and opportunity. 

In Hebrew “stranger” is a little two-consonant word, ger.   Moses in Egypt named his son Gershon, “a stranger here”, to be a sign to the Hebrew exiles in Egypt.  Rabbi Whinston would have read from any of numerous passages – Solomon’s prayer, for instance, at the joyous dedication of the temple: We are aliens and transients before you, as were all our ancestors.[1]  Israel’s judges are warned to judge fairly whether it is for Hebrew citizens or for strangers, aliens.[2]  Job’s righteousness, he insists, is partly that he has never left the stranger out in the street or refused hospitality to the alien.[3]  The Torah repeatedly forbids any oppression of the stranger, the foreigner, the needy, the widow, the orphan… and the reason: …for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.  I am the Lord your God.[4]

Here in New Zealand we are bordered entirely by ocean, too wide and dangerous to be crossed by desperate people in inflatables.  Maybe Iceland is in a similar situation… remote, and safe.  But nevertheless we too were once strangers and sojourners – Maori emigrated here; White Settlers from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, the Balkans, China; war refugees, children from Poland; more recently, South Africans, and immigrants from all over the South Pacific.  That is one reality – that human habitation of New Zealand has been from the outset by strangers and sojourners… as were all our ancestors, said King Solomon.  It is as well for us to be humble and grateful.  The second reality is for mindful and contemplative believers.  It is that, in our prayer, which is where we are most real, boundaries cannot thrive, neither defensive walls nor fences nor searchlights nor guard patrols.  So the land of our prayer is not particularly safe or cosy, or likely to be.  The land of prayer is a land of change, a land of welcome, a land of risk, a land of making room and of expense, a land of understanding.  We enter that land when, in the company of Jesus, we wait in stillness and silence, and in his Spirit, and at war with no one.

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[1] I Chronicles 29:15

[2] Deuteronomy 1:16

[3] Job 31:32

[4] eg. Leviticus 19:33

Paroxysm of love – 16 November 2018

The lectionary, as we come within a couple of weeks of Advent, gets increasingly difficult...  for next Sunday, a ferocious apocalyptic passage in the Book of Daniel, beyond my wit, I’m afraid… the strange Letter to the Hebrews – I have always struggled with it… and the brief record in Mark where Jesus predicts the rape and pillage of Jerusalem and its temple – done indeed as we know with brutal thoroughness by the army of Titus in 70 AD.

But also in my mind have been much more recent straws in the wind.  In conversation here last Friday the erosion of our coasts, cliffs and beaches was mentioned… the whole matter of climate change and its causes, and its relentless inevitability and our seeming reluctance to face facts.  One of last Friday’s group (Eddie) talked movingly about living very much on the edge, the miracle of his day by day by faith.  It was also, in the south, a day of storms, floods and destruction… mayhem in the White House… another mindless shootout, and immense forest fires, in California… a terrorist incident in Melbourne…  Much of our responsible journalism is now daily deploring the breakdown of decency and truth, in biblical terms the removal of moral landmarks…  What do we do?  What do we think?  How do we pray?  How are our children and grandchildren going to live?  What future has a seemingly impotent, divided and compromised church?

Faith, as we repeatedly say, is moving toward the light we can see, one foot in front of the other.  The Letter to the Hebrews, scholars think may have been written quite early to the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem.  Persecution was increasing, and some Christians were returning to their Jewish faith in the hope that they might protect their families.  Next Sunday’s passage is from chapter 10, and one sentence reads:  Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and goodness…  Provoke...?  Provoke to love…?  This is an instance where the translators seem frightened someone will be upset if they say what the Greek says.  It says:  Let us learn together paroxysms of love and good actions…  In Greek paroxysmos (παροξυσμοϛ) the word used here, means an incitement, provocation.  Paroxysms of love, however...?  In medicine, I find, a paroxysm is “a sudden return or intensification of symptoms”.    The advice to the beleaguered Christians in Jerusalem seems to be simply to pick each other up, day by day, and get on with what you know best – caring for each other and doing good… being present and being true.  That is our task in faith when, as G K Chesterton expressed it with the First World War looming, the sky grows darker yet, and the sea rises higher. 

We don’t have special formulae to explain events.  We don’t have secret recipes for peace in the world or peace of mind.  We have the way of Christ and the fathomless symbols of the cross and the empty tomb.  We have each other.  We have a pathway of prayer, stillness and steadiness.  We have, if we know good teachers, a treasury of wisdom from history and literature.  Always ahead is the light which, as John writes, the darkness has never quenched.  In that setting, says this writer, we learn paroxysms of love and goodness.  Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue, the scene of one of the more recent gun atrocities in the USA, in his sermon on Shabbat to his traumatised congregation a week later, said simply:  Follow the path of good.  It is the only way to heal…

All she had to live on – 9 November 2018

The Gospel lesson for next Sunday you may know by the title, The Widow’s Mite.  Jesus is in the temple precincts, and just about everything he sees is making him sad and angry.  This is reflected in what he says, particularly in Matthew’s account – Jesus is in furious grief.  He laments over Jerusalem, the temple, and the apocalyptic events he sees are coming.  He turns ferociously on the rulers and religious leaders… hypocrites, white-washed tombs, blind guides, snakes, brood of vipers, locking people out of the kingdom, full of greed and self-indulgence, loading burdens on people but not helping to lift them with so much as a finger…  

He watches worshippers arriving.  They drop their offerings of money into the temple treasury, thoughtfully situated at the entrance.  Some people drop in substantial sums.  A widow arrives and places there two coins – two lepta in Greek equalled one Roman quadrans, something like our old penny.   Jesus said it was all she had to live on.  Now the normal take on this is… how wonderful!  She gave all she had.  She gave from the heart – the others gave from their abundance.  They could spare it, she could not.  And so, we should all take note of the depths of her love and devotion. 

Well, count me out…  She need never have given all she had to live on.  Neither should the church have accepted it.  The standard interpretation surely misses the point.  She gave all she had to live on because she thought she should.  She had been taught that God expects this and it’s called sacrifice.  People are taught, in some places even today to “give till it hurts”, and that God’s favour will be bestowed in return.  With humble respect to St Paul… I have real problems with his counsel to the Corinthian church, where he certainly claims that the degree of blessing you receive is in proportion to the money you have given (see II Corinthians 9:6-15) -- or more accurately, the magnitude of your sacrifice… Paul writes: The one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.  And so we have, at the seriously shallow end of the Christian swimming pool, what is now called the Prosperity Gospel, that your receiving in life is directly linked to your giving, and perhaps to your righteousness.

God loves a cheerful giver does not mean God loves reckless superstition.  So much that passes for Christian these days is actually a chronic refusal to grow up, as Paul put it, into Christ[1].  What Jesus teaches begins within – treasure in heaven, he calls it[2].  The God whom I expect to reward me for my generosity and my upright years of service – but might withhold reward otherwise – is not the God Jesus called Father, but idolatry.  In contemplative life and prayer we are led by the Spirit through this preoccupation with self.  Our duty, as always, will be to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly… as Jesus knew from the Prophet Micah long before.  The temple’s duty to this woman was to care for her dignity and give her a future… not to relieve her of all she had to live on.  Another of Jesus’s accusations against the pharisees was that they devour widows’ houses – which is, in a way, what is happening here.  Jesus also says don’t bring your gift at all if you are not at peace with your brother or sister.  Always the real issue is within, a quietened and obedient heart – which the Dalai Lama calls, with typical simplicity, a good heart.

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[1] Ephesians 4:14-15

[2] Matthew 6:19-21

Knowing the truth – 2 November 2018

It is good to be clear what we mean, and emphatically do not mean, about the truth.  You will know the truth, said Jesus… the truth will make you free[1].  We do not mean that somehow we possess a body of truth – the bible or our beliefs, or anything else.  We mean that we are finding under grace how to become free of illusion, delusion, fantasy, and from the pernicious untruths of prejudice and violence, hate and fear.  We come to sense an alert when we ourselves are less than true... in Leonard Cohen’s remarkable words:  Going home without my burden / Going home behind the curtain / Going home without the costume that I wore.  Perhaps we became untrue because pride got in the way, or fear of loss of face, or of someone’s negative opinion.  It may even be a generous desire not to hurt someone else – often excused as “white” lies.  It may be that a need to be included makes us in some way untrue to ourselves… or the need to have some power or possession.  With some, often enough, it has become a habit of preferring fantasy-land, living my dream, imagining great deeds, rôle-playing a life that isn’t happening or never happened.

Jesus says truth and freedom go together… freedom from falsity and illusion.  When Thomas Merton finally entered the monastery to become a novice in the Cistercian Order, he wrote his famous sentence:  So Brother Matthew locked the gate behind me and I was enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom.[2]  Merton was finally being true to himself.   Fr Laurence Freeman writes: Impatience and illusion meet their match in meditation.  It is extremely difficult to sit for any extended time, silent and still, attending and consenting, while still hanging on grimly to untruth, covering-up for ourselves, keeping unfair judgements of others.  Love and grace enable us to greet reality and the present moment… gently, as we are able, and with freedom and gratitude.  The truth will make you free.

So “truth” does not mean that we are on one side of a line, a boundary, a trumpian wall, as the “Enlightened”, let alone “Saved”, while others on the other side are “in the wrong”, “unsaved”, or consigned to perdition.  The contemplative does not enjoy the luxury of knowing they are right and others wrong, writes Fr Laurence.  God does not take our side against others, some will be surprised to hear.  If there is any dividing line (Jesus does talk about the sheep and the goats, the wheat and the tares, etc), it is between those who persistently divide in the world, ignore human need, create division -- and those who live to unite and reconcile and build up understanding.  That kind of truth is free of the fear of difference. 

I appreciate that we may nevertheless have genuine fears of insecurity and violence… understandably so.  But in our prayer we are welcoming truth and reality, and therefore at times, it may be, pain and risk also.  The Spirit makes us free for this, more and more, day by day.

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[1] John 8:32

[2] Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, ch. “The Sweet Savour of Liberty”.