Rescuing love…4 – 22 February 2019

At this point in Paul’s song of love in I Corinthians 13, he seems to turn more directly to problems and confusion in his beloved Corinthian church.  He writes about “prophecies… tongues… knowledge…”  He wants to say, a lot of things in the church are fleeting shadows, transitory.  “Prophecies”, in our time, is more like preaching, proclaiming, always a dangerous procedure, especially from people who believe they know the answers, or that God has told them the answers.  They know the signs, issue warnings, become manipulative.  “Tongues” refers to those who need it always to be dramatic, ecstatic, at any rate they must never be bored.  Tongues… Paul says will cease, stop, mercifully, as a noise ceases eventually – you can’t be entertained, excited all the time.  Prophecies may be dramatic and timely, or seem so, but they become yesterday’s word – the Greek verb[1] means to be made useless, redundant.  The same word is used for what eventually may happen to gnōsis/knowledge – it is always likely to be superseded, as we certainly discover in our time. 

I think this is pastoral advice for the Corinthian church.  Paul doesn’t want to see them heading down silly, energy-draining by-ways, looking for faith and reassurance in the wrong places.  It is agapē/love that is true, and remains (abides… see v.13), and is the test of the church.  These other things, which can occupy us and drain our energy… bothering about our kind of church, our kind of worship, our understanding of faith, our achievements, our glorious history… all is partial, ek merous  (ἐκ μερους), fragmentary. 

I can interpose here to say something specifically about Christian Meditation.  Since the initiation of the World Community for Christian Meditation, one of the most frequent questions is, perennially, what are its benefits?  What’s in it for me?  …questions arising from a culture of consumerism and egoism.  And the answer from the outset has been:  If we must measure the effects of a practice of Christian Meditation, contemplative life and prayer… it is measured by love.  There may be all manner of health benefits, and of course that is good.  But the work of the mantra, its simplicity (some like to say, its poverty) frees us to receive and to give love.  That is healing, precisely because the ego is being removed from the priority that belongs to God.

In a recent Mediatio Newsletter, Fr Laurence Freeman refers to the diminishing Christian church in the west.  One of my former parish churches is now a mosque – I remember it packed to the doors and beyond, one very late snowy Christmas Eve – and another is now a Coptic Orthodox church, complete with an elaborate iconostasis.  All good, I think… at any rate they are not now up-market apartments or kick-boxing gymnasiums.  Fr Laurence asks, Do we then need a massive PR campaign and advertising blitz to reignite the transmission of the faith as some church leaders desperately think?  That would be exactly what Paul identifies, the reliance on dramatic prophecy, “tongues” and excitement, and on gnōsis, knowledge.  Fr Laurence continues: Or do those who are neither ambivalent nor embarrassed by their Christian identity need to speak less, to deepen their silence.  They then allow the Spirit to turn them, not into salesmen of the gospel but into the gospel itself.  In this tradition the disciple has always been seen primarily not as a promoter but as an alter Christus, another Christ.  To become agapē/love is the point.

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[1] katargeō (καταργέω)… It means to make redundant, surplus to requirements.

Rescuing love…3 – 15 February 2019

Paul has just treated us to a 3-verse hymn in which he insists that however clever I am, or you are, however knowledgeable, however generous, if it is without love, which he calls agapē, we might as well not bother.  And if you or I think he is overstating that, diving into hyperbole, then I should mention that right at the start where he writes, I will show you now a more excellent (or much better) way… that word “more excellent/much better” is indeed the Greek word huperbolēn (ὑπερβολην), hyperbole.  Paul is deliberately “hyperbolising” something the church and its people habitually forget, or simply let lapse:  If we are not reflecting, communicating, God’s agapē/ love, God’s inclusive mercy, or trying honestly to do so, then we have to ask ourselves what we are doing.  But this love is not anything we generate.  We know it and receive it from God.  It is what God is doing in us, as we consent…. as we learn along the way necessary skills of letting go, the essence of love… letting go of infantile images of God, which are forms of idolatry, letting go of possessive or controlling relationships with others, which often masquerade as love, refusing to accept ourselves as loved and lovable.   Agapē/ love is the way we know God.  It is the only way – we love because he first loved us[1].  Agapē/ love then is our credentials, the indication that our hearts are being humbled, changed and brought alive, day by day. 

What follows now in this lyrical passage from Paul is a string of words with which Paul strains to express the inexpressible.  Love, he says, first, is patient.  The Greek word conveys not so much what we would call patient waiting, as in a phone queue, but rather calm and unhurried waiting to understand, suspending judgement, bearing pain it may be – the kind of waiting the Psalmist sings about.  It can also mean persevering.  Then he says, Love is kind.  “Remember to be kind,” said a senior minister to me years ago, when I was a student working in an inner city church.  Love is not envious, or boastful, or arrogant, or rude…  Not envious is a tricky one…  

Agapē/ love does not insist on its own way… does not irritate…  Remember our word “paroxysm”, from near the end of last year…?  Paroxysms of love…?  Here is the word again[2], in a negative sense, this time connoting deliberate or careless, pointless irritating of someone, annoying them.  I think it is a favourite ploy in many families, certainly in politics...  Love doesn’t do that.  …does not tot up wrongs, but welcomes the truth.  The victim culture, so popular today, can sometimes be a matter of carefully cataloguing wrongs, or perceived wrongs, when agapē/love might say it is a burden to be laid down so that life can be reborn, memories brought into order, and we can all move on.

Then Paul gives us a quartet of verbs with agapē/ love as the subject:  Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things… love never fails.  Well, If Jesus came singing love, Paul comes singing hyperbole.  We know, it is equally true that in human perversity love can be betrayed, even destroyed.  But the love from God that animates creation, enlivens and inspires us, the love that Wesley called, all loves excelling, joy of heaven… remains just as Paul describes in his hyperbole.

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[1] I John 4:19

[2] See http://nzccmwarkworth.blogspot.com/  for 16.11.2018.

Rescuing love…2 - 8 February 2019

I may speak in the languages of humans -- and of angels -- but if I do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  I may have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge; I may have faith so as to shift mountains, but if I do not have love, I am nothing.   I may give away all my possessions, hand over my body to be burned, but if I do not have love, I gain nothing. (I Corinthians 13:1-3)

In the previous chapter 12, Paul has been discussing very important teaching about the church, its ordering, its ministries, its gifts, the interdependence of all this – it is here that we find Paul’s great analogy of the body of Christ.  Then he writes:  But now I will show you an even better way.[1]  Church or no church, says Paul, followers of Jesus will live in love, agapē/love.  It will be fragile and variable, even appear hypocritical, but it will be their distinctive characteristic.  Agapē/love will be their charism.  

Paul then supplies a kind of hymn in three verses, each with the refrain, but if I have not love…[2]  Verse 1:  If I speak in the languages of humans and of angels…  Paul certainly knew the languages of humans.  He was a Jew, a pharisee, and a Roman citizen -- he must have been fluent in Hebrew and Greek, in Aramaic and in Latin, and in various dialects.  He ought then to be able to communicate the truth of Jesus.  The language of angels, he mentions… I prefer to think that might be silence… but in any case, without love, he says, in any language, he is a noisy gong or a clanging, reverberating cymbal.  This is strong talk, and it probably makes us uncomfortable because it is uncompromising.

Verse 2 is about knowing everything, and understanding all mysteries.  So… this is for the attention of prophets, seers, professors, politicians, pathologists, pastors, priests, parishioners who read books…  Moreover, he adds, I may have all faith so as to shift mountains…  I suppose this could include the religious miracle workers who prey on credulous or desperate people, or the ones who think that the more people praying for something, praying harder, louder and longer, like the priests of Baal, the more likely God will be persuaded to do what they want… but have not love… well then, they might as well not bother…, I am nothing, he writes.  The Greek[3] means an empty space, a void.  Verse 3 is about giving away all I possess, even my body to be burned… but without love, it is meritless. 

So Paul, in the opening of this chapter, raises a very high banner.  He knows very well that we do not live consistently at the level he is setting.  The church and human society alike are flawed and fallible – the Corinthian church would have exemplified this unmistakably.  The more we continue with Christ and with Christ’s company, and the more we follow the path of contemplative life and prayer, the clearer we find that we approximate rather than attain.  Our best teachers know this, and so we come to learn what faith and grace mean.  We may learn agapē/love, but along with it we learn, as we will see, very necessary gifts of kindness and gentleness, to ourselves and others, gifts of understanding, wisdom and perspective.

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[1] See ch.12:31.  ἐτι καθ’ ὑπερβολην ὁδον – “an even better way”

[2] ἀγαπην δε μη ἐχω – “but have not love”

[3] οὐθεν εἰμι – “I am of no account…”

Rescuing love…1 – 1 February 2019

In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye tells his wife Golde that he has just consented to the engagement of their second daughter Hodel to Perchik, a young penniless teacher they don’t approve of.  Golde erupts.  She is pounding a great lump of bread dough, and you know it is generally prudent to stay clear.  I was not consulted, she says.  But they love each other, says Tevye.  Golde snorts… But Tevye asks, timidly, Do you love me…?  He asks it over and over, it becomes a song.  Finally the bread gets a rest:  For 25 years I’ve mended your socks, washed your clothes, cooked your meals, cleaned your house, milked your cow, had your children…  But do you love me, he asks.  Yes, says Golde…    

When this group recessed for Christmas and New Year, I found myself looking ahead in the lectionary for when we would resume in February.  The Epistle, I found, would be St Paul’s great hymn to love in I Corinthians 13.  So I started to look at this afresh, after most of a lifetime of assuming I know what it means.  I read it in Paul’s Greek, and in English, and in Luther’s German… and I am afraid you will get the humble fruits of this in the weeks ahead.

In the Greek of the Christian Bible, love is agapē (ἀγαπη).  There are other words for love.  Philia (φιλια) denotes the brotherly, sisterly, loyal allegiance/love of the tribe, or the social class or the football club… mateship, in Kiwi terms… a strong and satisfying bond, so long as you remain loyal – so philia is not unconditional.  Erōs (ἐρως) is what love is almost universally assumed to be – a matter of hormones, feelings and ego... changeable, very conditional.  Agapē expresses something else.  In St John’s words, God is agapē.  Indeed, says John, if we don’t know agapē/love, we don’t know God[1].  We may think we do.  We may be most deeply offended to hear otherwise.  But the point, says John, is to abide in love… and we will think more about all that in coming weeks.

Now, my hope overall is to centre on Paul’s teaching in I Corinthians 13, and see what emerges for us in 2019 terms.  I do not want to get into definitions of love or even to approach that kind of precision.  Like the prayer of silence which we practise, love, and any of the cornerstones of faith and life, are things we learn by doing them, by choosing them, rather than by studying or examining them first.  The distinctive mark of agapē/love, we might say at this point, is the diminishing of the ego.  I can set self aside.  We do not practise love from the safety of our comfort zones.  Agapē/love is not about me or what I want or how I feel or what my dreams are…  Love is a robust, even reckless choice, of bringing the other within my defences.  It is what our prayer is all about.  We bring God within our defences.  It is what God does with us and all God’s creation.

Love is from God, writes John.  It is a gift.  It is not exclusively Christian – love may be manifest in atheists and agnostics, Buddhists, Hindus and Moslems – but John makes it clear, to be a loveless Christian is a contradiction, an oxymoron.  For a follower of Jesus, agapē/love is where the pathway leads.  We can obliterate love, deface it or distort it, deny it… but discipleship -- contemplative life and prayer -- is very much a clearing of the decks for agapē/love.

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[1] See I John 4:7-8