Shaking the pharisee tree – 25 October 2019

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” (Luke 18:9-14)


I think the pharisee was genuinely righteous – boring but righteous -- and the way he prayed was the way he understood religion to be.  It is how many sincere Christian people understand religion to be.  It offended him that the tax-collector was there in the temple at all, living as they did back then, by exploiting needy people.  Richard Rohr, who says things lucidly, says this:  Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control, power, money, pleasure and security.  Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else.  We are often given a bogus version of the gospel, some fast food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of “Christian” countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious and addictive as everybody else…


Pharisees – and they exist in any religion including atheism and secularism -- try to do two things.  One is to preserve the strictness of (in this case) the Jewish Law, the Torah and all its requirements… while on the other hand trying to accommodate it all to those who find difficulties, the rich, the influential, the powerful.  As Richard Rohr puts it, in the areas of ego, control, power, money, pleasure and security.  Christian pharisees assume, or they hope, as Kierkegaard wrote, that passages like the Sermon on the Mount are deliberately set as we might set our clocks, slightly fast, so that we still get there on time, as it were.  

Jesus’s message to all pharisees is No.  He shook the pharisee tree – in his kingdom we don’t get dispensations or what the Americans call rain passes.  This pharisee in the temple actually thanked God that he was not like other people… and especially that he was not like that tax collector.  I imagine he was sincere.  But in Jesus’s kingdom, as he taught, this is exactly the self we are to leave behind, the self that is forever concerned about my spiritual or social standing, my reputation, my achievements, my generosity… the self that would rather like to enter heaven with my ego and my possessions.


Pharisees will always fit quite well into much popular religion… but not at all well into the faith Jesus taught, and calls us to.  This is becoming clearer as we can actually watch the western church and popular religion shrinking to a memory, more and more riven by dissent and ever new forms of pharisaism, and once lovely and much loved buildings becoming night clubs and gymnasiums or trendy apartments.  It is time to refresh our bond with Jesus and his way… in computer terms to hit the restore button… and that begins, as Jesus said, in the inner room. 

Itching ears – 18 October 2019

For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. (II Timothy 4:3-4)

Paul is writing to young pastor Timothy, who we think lived and ministered in Lystra, a Roman colony in what is now Anatolia in Turkey.  It was in Lystra that Paul had once been stoned and left for dead.[1]  Now Paul is writing from prison in Rome, and the advice he offers Timothy might just as well apply in the 21^st century.  For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.

So Paul identifies the perennial and obstinate religious affliction he calls Itching Ears.  Just around the corner, or down the road, or coming to town soon, is some new and exciting evangelist or keynote speaker or christian pop idol, complete with electronics, who is much more entertaining than the stodge we get at the parish church.  But then, most of us at some time have found some teacher, some writer, some preacher, who we think, or thought at the time, holds the key to it all… when the truth is, more likely, that this person shed some light for us in our circumstances at that time.  Hopefully wisdom has taught us to receive with thanks what is meaningful from that, and move on. 

Of course, curiosity leads us to venture beyond the boundaries… which is good… but when we do, it is as well to have first a grounding in what Paul calls sound doctrine.  I would be more inclined to call it sensible doctrine, grown-up faith.  We are pilgrims, often keen to see what’s around the next corner, over the next hill… but the best pilgrims have a place where they belong and return, wiser, refreshed and renewed.  Jesus certainly pushed the boundaries.  He boldly restated Jewish faith and the teachings of scripture with newness and freshness – but he remained a Jew.  St Benedict was scathingly critical of monks who shopped around, and Benedictines require the vow of stability, which means there is somewhere you belong. 

An essential part of growing up in faith is discovering that in spiritual growth there are in fact few dramatics, no silver bullets – but rather the daily work of attention and obeying, of learning to let go, learning from each other as we become humble enough to welcome God’s Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus, the real teacher.  We grow, as Benedictines put it, by falling down and getting up again.  We find the joy hiding even in pain.  We are becoming free to say Yes to silence and to simplicity, to mercy, truth and grace… and Yes to mortality, the final handing over of self.  We don’t need Itching Ears.

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[1] Acts 14:19

Grace – 11 October 2019

If you are acquainted with the writings of Kathleen Norris, you may have noticed that inside the title page of her set of essays, Amazing Grace, she quotes a line from an old hymn.  It’s from Robert Robertson’s hymn, Come thou fount of every blessing which, you may think mercifully, we rarely hear these days.  But that one line is very striking:  O to grace, how great a debtor…  It invites us, I think, to refresh our understanding of this central theme of God’s love and of Jesus’s teaching.  

I don’t know a definition of grace that really gets it.  As is often the case, we get a better idea by saying what it is not.  One writer says that grace is the opposite of karma.  Karma is getting what you deserve – although such a slick definition would probably make Hindu or Buddhist devotees shudder...   But with grace by contrast we may receive what we didn’t deserve… or perhaps not receive what we did deserve.  Grace is God’s “nevertheless”, and perhaps the most vivid picture of grace in the scriptures is the father of the prodigal son, seeing his son coming home, while he was still far off, it says – the father was waiting for his son to come home – then clothing him in the best clothes, ordering a feast – while the older son, indignant and affronted, can see only what this brother deserves -- punishment and relegation to servant status.[1] 

In the Greek of the christian scriptures “grace” is the lovely word charis (χαρις).  Of God’s fullness have we all received, writes John, and grace upon grace (χαριν ἀντι χαριτος).  Full of grace and truth, writes John of Jesus.[2]  The law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.  The law prescribed what people deserved – grace describes what we get when love and wisdom intervene alongside justice.  Where sin abounded, writes St Paul, grace did much more abound.[3]  Indeed, that may be a good definition of grace:  much more…

It is the privilege of Jesus’s disciples, and our calling, to find ways by which grace can be released in a world preoccupied with punishment and retribution.  We don’t suggest that the justice system should suddenly start handing out rewards.  When we talk about grace, which is difficult, even incomprehensible to many, it has much more to do with our hearts and our attitudes in a world of brokenness, irrational hatred and desperate burdens of guilt.   We live differently because we have become different.  We have come to see how woundedness is part of the human condition which we share.  We are learning to set ego aside, not because it is bad, or wrong, but because the self on which God lavishes grace and love is the self God creates and recreates daily… at another level altogether from the ego.  We are called to share in God’s delight and love for the world God made.  And when we find ourselves being changed by the Spirit of God, it is just that – receivers of grace, we become givers of grace from our hearts.

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[1] Luke 15:11-32.  See also Hosea 11:1-9

[2] John 1:16, 14, 17

[3] Romans 5:20

Waiting quietly – 4 October 2019

The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall! My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.  But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.  “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.” The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him.  It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. (Lamentations 3:19-26)

As we saw briefly last week, the contemplative concept of waiting, let alone waiting quietly, may be puzzling.  Doing things is how we achieve, get results... being busy.  Waiting, in our culture is a problem, an imposition… like waiting in a phone queue, or in a snaking line at the airport.  Waiting however is something Jews have always known, and treated with respect.  At the end of the Passover meal they will say, Next year in Jerusalem… knowing well that that’s unlikely.  Jewish faith is built on waiting, while at the same time you get on with all that needs to be done.  Waiting is extolled many times in the Psalms, and indeed there are several Hebrew words which convey different aspects of waiting.  Our soul waits for the Lord… our heart is glad in him (Ps 33:20).  For God alone my soul waits in silence (Ps 62:1).  I waited patiently for the Lord (Ps 40:1).  And famously in Isaiah: Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint (Is 40:31). 

Waiting presupposes a listening, attentive heart.  It is not idle hanging about, and it is different altogether from the sullen anxiety of the outpatient waiting room.  Waiting, in the biblical sense, entails being ready to set aside, for the time being, our achievement mentality, and so it is truly contemplative.   I was very struck by Walter Brueggemann’s view of the culture in which Jesus’s followers find ourselves in our day… we are called to wait because…

+ The old certitudes are less certain.

+ The old privileges are under powerful challenge.

+ The old dominations are increasingly ineffective and we are not so clearly in charge.

+ The old institutions seem less and less able to deliver what is counted upon.

+The old social fabrics of neighbourliness are eroded into selfishness, fear, anger and suspicion.

In this environment the waiting heart comes into its own.  It is an important way forward in faith, expressed so well by the Psalmist:  Be still, and know that I am God.[1]  Be still and know…  That Hebrew verb literally means to relax one’s grip on something, to unclench.  The way forward is in stillness and silence, relinquishing, letting go of fear and anger, of our various idolatries, opening one’s heart to a deeper knowledge, a clearer discernment, a wider love.

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[1] Psalm 46:10