23 August 2019

Coming to Zion – 23 August 2019


But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Hebrews 12:22-24)

…part of the Epistle next Sunday.  All those rich phrases may however have a soporific effect -- people assume they are not likely to understand all that, and wonder indeed if the reader does.  But, as often is the case, it repays a closer look.  What we call the Letter to the Hebrews is a bit of an enigma.  We have no idea who wrote it – Origen in the early 3rd century famously wrote that God only knows who wrote Hebrews.  It certainly reads as though it was written for Jewish Christians of the Diaspora, some of whom, when the Messiah did not quickly return, were being tempted back to ancient and familiar Judaism. 

But that is not us, and this is not the early church or the Middle East. This passage is the writer’s colourful way of explaining where we are who belong to Christ… who we are, and what we’re doing here.  It is reassurance, intended back then for people once Jews, part of an ancient identity with ancient laws and practices – but now exiled, adrift, Christians now, in a new spreading faith of often warring factions, the old familiar landmarks gone…  Does this ring a bell?  In our day this writer’s message is more likely to be meaningful to people like the historian Diarmaid MacCullough who describes himself now as “a friend of Christianity”.  He feels alienated from the church, being gay and having suffered abuse and rejection, but as a scholar he deeply values the treasures of Christian faith and often takes part in its rituals and events. 

So… the writer to the Hebrews says essentially, remember who you are, where you are, what you’re doing here.  You are part of a vast Communion of Saints, seen and unseen.  You have come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, heavenly Jerusalem[1]… Jesus himself put it: My kingdom is not of this world.  The kingdom is present, in and among us, universal and true, while aspects of the visible church may be indeed the opposite of the kingdom of God.  It is inwardly seen and inhabited.  Then the writer reminds us we are not alone here.  We are among innumerable angels in festal gathering, and the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven  “Innumerable” in Greek is myriads – so it is not just countless numbers of saints and sinners, but an endless variety, in this Communion of Saints.  and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant… That is where we are, simply in our prayer, silent and still, or at the sacrament of bread and wine.  Various teachers have pointed out that there is really only one prayer in the universe – it is Jesus’s prayer to the Father, a prayer of unity and love.  It is echoed in John 17.  Our prayers, our contemplative silence and stillness, our praise and intercessions, are all part of this one great prayer.  When we come to prayer, we join this myriad unseen company, all joining in Jesus’s prayer of love and unity before a loving judge.



[1] Mount Zion and the Temple, and the city, had been utterly destroyed by the army of Titus in 70 AD, following a prolonged and terrible siege.  This was a profound grief to the Jews of the Diaspora.

16 August 2019

They will be divided – 16 August 2019


The Gospel for next Sunday has this puzzling passage.  Jesus says:  Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” (Luke 12:51-53)

The song says he came singing peace … but here he is announcing inevitable division, even in the hallowed relationships of immediate family.  He spells out the fault-lines, generations within the family at odds with each other.

Family is such a curious thing.  One of the pivotal characters on Coronation Street is Gail, whose family year by year redefine dysfunction.  Last I heard, she had two sons in prison.  Gail is nevertheless unshaken in her belief that family is paramount.  Normal questions of right and wrong seem not to apply to family relationships.  Gail will do anything for her offspring including breaking the law.  A caricature, perhaps… but she represents a familiar tribal ethos in which history may get rewritten, skeletons locked deep in the closet, official mythologies created, and children rarely told the truth.   Most historians, biographers especially, know that truth rarely thrives in family narratives.  You may be disloyal elsewhere, but not to family. 

Jesus creates a different community.  He called it the Kingdom… because, in the thought-forms of those days, and long after, every human society was subject to some kingdom, with a ruler, good or bad[1].  Jesus announces the Kingdom of God, a spiritual kingdom, subject to God, ruled in peace and justice, love and truth.  He says that to be part of this community, subject to this king, may indeed trigger conflict with other allegiances -- the iwi, the ones we were born among, brought up and taught to love and respect.  Some decision we make, or some opinion we hold or express, which accords with what we are finding in Christ, is at odds with what the family expects of us.  It comes to be seen as disloyalty, or hypocrisy, letting down the side.

Moreover, “family” as we know is a flexible concept.  It can be much wider than the folks at home.  The gang, or the tribe, can be family.  Similar loyalty is expected in places to the nation, or to the ethnic group, or one’s social status, or to the religion… the “church family”.  Jesus warns here – and he words it as a warning -- that allegiance to him takes priority, and so carries always the possibility of conflict.  The only way I know to resolve this is in contemplative life and prayer, receiving the gifts of love and non-violence in our attitudes and memories, becoming steady and gentle and always ready to listen.  When Jesus has priority, it is always, necessarily, in humility and with a peaceable heart.  These are fruits of the prayer of silence and stillness.



[1] The Greek word is basileia (βασιλεια) = kingdom.  There was the kingdom of Caesar, the kingdom of Satan, etc.  Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God.

09 August 2019

Violence – 9 August 2019


Wars and fights among you, where do they come from?  Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?  You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder.  And you covet something and cannot obtain it, so you engage in disputes and conflicts. (James 4: 1-2)

Bryan Jackson’s strange book on Warkworth: Incidents, Accidents and Tragedies, opens with an account of the apparently de facto wife of the local medical practitioner, Dr Edwin Theophilus Jesse Ick-Hewins, horse-whipping the local pharmacist, J Charles Cadman, who she thought had maligned her.  Mr Cadman’s allegations would scarcely raise an eyebrow today.  However this was 1911, and while Mrs Ick-Hewins felt insulted, Mr Cadman was publicly wounded and humiliated – I trust he had suitable liniments and soothing salves in his pharmacy shop.

Our subject is violence, and the notion that violence is ever an appropriate or sensible response to dispute.  The doctor’s wife thought it was -- and she then presumably felt better.  Violence is pandemic.  I don’t know that there has ever been a peaceful human society.  We have violence against children in Syria, in Yemen, and in many other places.  Violence brings towns and cities to rubble, destroys crops and livelihoods, irreplaceable libraries and sacred shrines.  Doctors and others working to relieve suffering become subject to violence, as also do journalists seeking out the truth. We have “domestic” violence in many homes, and again children suffer.  Many factors make violence almost a reflex reaction, mindless and blind.  Words are used to do violence, and this is now facilitated by powerful tools such as Twitter and cell-phone texting, driving some to suicide. 

The writer of the James Epistle says violence comes from our conflicting desires.  The KJV translates it the lusts which war in your members, but it means simply desires… life frustrates me, I am not getting what I want, I can’t handle what I do get, I’m afraid, angry, out of options, I do what I don’t want to do…  On the much wider social and international scales there is always the serious risk that competing wishes or demands default to violence.  There must be tens of thousands of battered Toyota utes rushing around the Middle East with machine guns mounted on the back and excited young men dedicated to violence, knowing little else.

Jesus teaches otherwise, and the Spirit of the risen Christ, when we make space for this, attacks the roots of violence in us.  One day it dawns on us that even our hidden violent thoughts, malevolence, and what in German is called Schadenfreude – pleasure at the suffering of others – is becoming attenuated within us and we don’t want to live that way or have those reactions.  The Spirit is calming our conflicts, opening pathways of peace… it develops day by day, year by year, as we make space in prayer and in our hearts.  Yes, there are situations in which violent people have to be stopped… and that may mean physically and with retaliatory violence.  We hate it – it’s part of our bent world.  It is still a fact that we are people of peace and reconciliation, trust and understanding, in company with Jesus.

02 August 2019

On getting weary – 2 August 2019


A long reading from Ecclesiastes is on the menu for next Sunday.  But sadly it’s listed in the Lectionary as an alternative reading and I rather think it will be avoided.  In one verse it says:  All things are wearisome; more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing. (Ecclesiastes 1:8)

Now let’s do what lots might hope we’d do… that is, leap ahead suddenly to make it alright and everyone feel better and go home happy.  Indeed it is true, Jesus said: Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden[1]  He recognised the human condition of world-weariness, tiredness of life.  He offered a “place” of both rest and hope, in him. 

Nevertheless, it seems to me, we have reason to be grateful to the Hebrew Qohelet – the word means Teacher, or more literally Assembler, someone who assembles wisdom for us – the sage of Ecclesiastes is called Qohelet. He is a wonderful weary sceptic who by some wondrous grace emerged in the canon of Hebrew and Christian scripture.  Ecclesiastes is indispensable. Shakespeare drew on it, as did Tolstoy, Hemingway, Robert Burns, G B Shaw…  Pete Seeger’s song, Turn! Turn! Turn! is straight out of chapter 11.  Edith Wharton’s novel House of Mirth references a sentence in Ecclesiastes: The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.  I recall a pious old hymn which began with the incomparable words: Art thou weary, art thou languid, art thou sore distressed…?  Don’t you love “languid”!   Qohelet says the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing… these days when it seems you have seen it all, heard it all, nothing surprises you now...  An Auckland doctor who has done a lot of emergency medicine wrote in The Listener about the road toll – he said you can’t change people’s behaviour; they/we will continue to make stupid decisions.  His letter was an almost perfect statement of the doctrine of original sin.  G K Chesterton said it memorably: I tell you naught for your comfort, yea, naught for your desire, save that the sky grows darker yet and the sea rises higher[2]

Well, so it does.  Faith points us to where the light can be seen, sometimes brightly, other times dimly and flickering.  True faith will always be open to the sceptic, even the pessimist or the agnostic – and the Bible certainly supports that openness, and the tension of not knowing.  Similarly, what we know as contemplative prayer and life, with its awareness of silence and stillness, humility and gratitude, is open always to hesitancy and question.  We have space, that is hospitality, in our hearts for those who have lost their way in faith – not to correct them and make everything right, but to listen to world-weariness, to faith-weariness, to battle-weariness, and gently to point towards the light we can see.



[1] Matthew 11:29
[2] G K Chesterton: Ballad of the White Horse