Advent IV – The Stranger – 17 December 2021

 

The Sunday morning hymn session on TV1, a few weeks back, featured the much-loved old gospel song, Blessed Assurance, Jesus is Mine, sung with fervour.  And I was left wondering about the awkward possessive pronoun, “Mine”…?  Jesus arrives as does any new-born, as a stranger, even to his parents.  They have to find out who he is… and good luck to all parents in that task… hopefully they are not assuming their child is to be some faithful replica of them.  But at a deeper level, in this “Jesus is mine” statement, there is the strong note of possessing, and from the outset, with Jesus, it seems inappropriate.  Jesus is mine…?  “Mine” places ME firmly at the centre.. my faith, my happiness, my spiritual life…  That is not the way the gospel story tells us about all this.  There is a persistent note of strangeness in it from the outset.  About the only accounts of his life until, in Luke’s words, Jesus was about thirty years old…[1] are the stories of devout Simeon, and the prophetess Anna… and the very odd story of how the family went to Jerusalem for the Passover, and returning home they were a day or so on the road before they realised he wasn’t with them – he was back in the temple debating with the teachers there.  Understanding any of that may indeed be over to contemplatives like Anna or Simeon… and his mother, we are told, who treasured these things in her heart.[2]  And onward through his life Jesus is, in the Latin expression, sui generis, defying classification.  He appears, he disappears, his closest followers constantly misread him…  He defies labelling, and you certainly can’t possess him or domesticate him to your own personal happiness or your panacea in life.

In contemplative life and prayer we encounter true mystery as an open door, or perhaps even better if you think about it, an open window… at any rate not some impediment, or problem to be solved or explained, or a question to be got to the bottom of.  The baby lying there, an utterly dependent newborn, open to disease or injury, subject to fallible parents… is to the eye of faith God’s word of love.  We don’t explain this word – we receive this word, in faith and love, in awe and gratitude.  This is, as the Apostle John puts it, the word made flesh, pitching his tent among us… full of grace and truth.[3]  In good Benedictine fashion, you pause at the threshold of the stable, and you’re silent…  Paul says this stranger brings a new world:  If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation; the old has passed away; see, everything has become new![4]  Our priorities have shifted.  We are not thinking and reacting the same any more.  The things Jesus taught seem now to make a vital sense.  We are not so frightened… of life, of death, of tomorrow, or of others…  we can go on about all this, and plenty of preachers will, but the best gift now is to know how to be still and silent… as the carol puts it, O hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing.

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[1] Luke 3:23

[2] Luke 2:51

[3] John 1:14.  “…lived among us…” The verb is literally “pitched his tent”, from the Greek verb skēnoō (σκηνόω) meaning to pitch one’s tent. (Epidemiologists may be interested that the second-to-last letter of σκηνόω is Omicron... but perhaps not.)

[4] II Corinthians 5:17

Advent III – The Messenger – 10 December 2021

 

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God.  As it is written in the Prophet Isaiah, “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight…’” (Mark 1:1-3)

So… right at the outset, in Mark the earliest of the gospels, we find that the good news, God’s Good News, in Mark’s Greek the euaggelion, requires a messenger, in Greek an aggelos.[1]  Each word comes from the same Greek root.  Jesus is himself the euaggelion, the Good News… John the Baptist appears, bearing this news in the world… he is the aggelos, the messenger.  And the good news is that is God is not our enemy or adversary or examiner or competitor, that God creates and recreates in love and mercy… the good news is that what we see in Jesus is what we may see in God… Jesus is, in St Paul’s later words, the icon of the invisible God.[2]

But the point this morning is the messenger, the aggelos.  The messenger now, moving along to 2021, is not John the Baptist.  The messenger, the aggelos, is you or me… whoever, like John, recognises in Jesus God’s love, God’s word, God’s good news.  For better, and sometimes undoubtedly for worse, we bear the euaggelion.  And therefore, like John, the more authentic we are, the truer we are, the more we may seem strange, even inconvenient, in the world at times… and the more, like John, we see ourselves receding so that Christ may proceed.[3]  And like John, our ministry is as it were in the deserts of human life, in the world, where we find our task, in any of a multitude of ways, being one of making the desert blossom, making paths straight, living Jesus’s way in response to him. 

It is never a question of being good enough, or any of the humble hesitations by which we excuse ourselves… being an aggelos, a disciple or follower, is a matter of living in a bond with him, and with his people.  This bond is variously described in our scriptures as being in Christ, or mutually abiding, simply following…[4]  Walter Brueggemann, one of the truly great Christian theologians of the Hebrew scriptures of our day, wrote: The prophetic tasks of the church (that is to say, what we are here to do) are to tell the truth in a society that lives in illusion, to grieve in a society that practises denial, and to express hope in a society that lives in despair.  It has become a costly ministry in many places in recent times… as it turned out indeed for John. 

But there, each year, right in the middle of Advent, comes the Messenger, John the Baptist, the aggelos.  We assume the mantel of the aggelos, not because we are good at it, or because we’re saintly or wise, but because of the bond that changes us, an inner abiding of love and obedience.  It is the way we live.  Or as Jesus puts it, it is where our treasure is and therefore where our hearts are also.[5]

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[1] “Good News” is euaggelion (εὐαγγέλιον).  “Messenger” is aggelos (ἄγγελος) which also translates as angel.

[2] Colossians 1:15

[3] John 3:30

[4] eg. II Corinthians 5:17; John 15:4; Matthew 4:19

[5] Matthew 6:21

Advent II – Watching – 3 December 2021

 

I suggested that the first theme of Advent is Waiting.  The second theme might be Watching.  Advent can be tricky these days because it’s far too hard to hold Christmas at bay… children arrive singing carols… In the process we can miss a lot, unless we take notice of some of the great Advent hymns… There’s a light upon the mountains… or, Awake, awake! for night is flying… that one pictures the watchmen on the city ramparts, bound to stay awake; they are peering, watching for the first dawn light from the east… Zion hears the watchmen singing, and all her heart with joy is springing; she wakes, she rises from her gloom… Advent, said Rowan Williams, is when we all become Jews again, needing to be spoken to in our confusions, needing a word from God.  It is the time of watching and hope.

Waiting and watching… a basic rhythm of our lives.  We have done it often – with a sick child, awaiting the birth of a child, awaiting exam results, awaiting whatever has to happen before we can get married, waiting at the airport when perhaps all is not well, watching a business decline with pandemic restrictions, watching happen what you hoped wouldn’t happen.

While waiting has to do with time going by, however, watching is about paying attention, while time goes by.[1]  In the gentle disciplines of contemplative life and prayer we may find ourselves more and more distancing, gratefully it may be, from the chatter that constitutes so much of what we call communication these days… responses ranging from reflex to witty… reacting off the top of our heads, mainly, to what someone just said… with whatever it was that happened to me… swapping stories, swapping opinions, “you’ll never guess what she told me”… one way or another therefore, bringing me in, my ego.  This is not attention.  Fr Richard Rohr comes at it in this rather startling way: The presence of God is infinite, everywhere, always, and forever.  You cannot not be in the presence of God.  There’s no other place to be.  (Any) change is always on our side (ego, you see, intrudes) -- God is present, but we’re not present to Presence…  We’re almost always somewhere else.  We are reprocessing the past or worrying about the future…  We just keep thinking in the same problematic ways that our minds love to operate.  But we can say that all spiritual teaching… is teaching us how to be present to the moment… present to the Presence.[2] 

That is the essence of it, and that is the difference between the minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour passage of time, which is chronos[3] …busy involved people are always acutely aware of chronos, life by timetable… and kairos[4], which is God’s time, the moment that arrests our attention, our presence, the moment in which we know ourselves seen and addressed… or even dimly suspect that we were.  Jesus sometimes calls it being awake.  We can call it contemplative life.  Advent then is attending to God, cultivating the gifts of being able to attend simply to God, and especially at this time being acutely aware of all we will otherwise miss in our busyness. 

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[1] There may be exceptions… in the waiting room of North Shore Hospital emergency medicine I recommend going into a gentle stupor. 

[2] From Richard Rohr, First Sunday of Advent: To Be Awake Is to Be Now– Here, November 30, 2014.

[3] Greek χρόνος, as in Matthew 2:7, etc.

[4] Greek καιρός, as in Matthew 8:29, etc.

Advent I – Waiting – 26 November 2021

 

In these cliché-ridden times, one of the most frequently heard is, I can’t wait…  I can’t wait to go on holiday… I can't wait to get a haircut...  but you may have no alternative.  Waiting, I think of as the first theme of Advent, and it matters that we know how to wait.  Remember the Stanford marshmallow test…  Put a marshmallow in front of a child, tell the child he/she can have a second one if he/she can go 15 minutes without eating the first one, and then leave the room for 15 minutes.  Contemplative people can learn waiting quite well without marshmallows because we see the point.  The point is, while waiting may inconvenience me, and probably will, and may not improve me as a person to know, it is also probably not about me.  It is about other needier patients; or it’s about people doing their best in trying conditions...  or inadequate management…  or simply too much needing to be done.  In recent times we have had dramatic displays of people unable to wait for restrictions to end, becoming angry, risking mental health, defying the law, listening to lies…

But why is waiting such an Advent theme? …simply that waiting is salutary, it is not yet having, it is decidedly not instant gratification, it is the state of not possessing or controlling… waiting is always “not yet”… it may be “if ever”.  So, waiting puts our ego in check.  It is the appropriate attitude to God.  I waited patiently for the Lord, sings the Psalmist; he inclined to me and heard my cry.  I wait for the Lord, my soul waits / and in his word I hope; / my soul waits for the Lord / more than those who watch for the morning…  I am weary with my crying / my throat is parched. / My eyes grow dim / with waiting for my God… Be still before the Lord / wait patiently for him…[1]  The Psalms are full of waiting.  If you can’t wait, you can’t pray much because you are busy fretting, or grizzling or being upset about time passing uselessly by.  So it is that the first thing contemplatives want to do is set time aside.  We appropriate time from our busy schedule.  We designate it for waiting, specifically not for getting something done.  We choose to be present, as untrammelled as possible; we choose to pay attention; we choose the present moment… each successive present moment, as we are still and as time moves on by. 

Paul informs the believers in Rome, If we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.[2]  “What we do not see…”  Now faith, says the writer to the Hebrews, is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.[3]  We wait because, mercifully, at the end of the day (cliché-time again), we are not going to bring in the reign of God.[4]    For all our good works – and they are many and admirable… and indeed we had better achieve the necessary climate changes – we do not bring in the kingdom.  God’s Advent arrives quietly, despite us, and God’s rule comes into waiting and watching hearts and minds.

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[1] Psalm 40:1; 130:5; 69:3; 37:7

[2] Romans 8:25

[3] Hebrews 11:1

[4] I recall, from back in the days when we had grand church parades, a parade of some earnest men’s organisation; they insisted on singing what they called their official hymn: Rise up, O men of God! / Have done with lesser things. / Give heart and soul and mind and strength / to serve the King of Kings.  We could have (but didn’t) substitute a verse on their hymn-sheet:  Sit down, O men of God! / His kingdom he will bring / whenever it may please his will / you cannot do a thing.

Birthpangs – 19 November 2021

 

When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?”  Then Jesus began to say to them, “Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.  For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines.  This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.” (Mark 13:3-8)

… part of the Gospel for  last Sunday… I didn’t want to pass it by.  We hear about the beginning of the birthpangs… the onset of labour.[1]  Jesus mentions wars, earthquakes, famines… we of course can add pandemics, climate crises, corruption in high places…  Then we could ask, if these are birthpangs, what is being born?  W B Yeats, in 1919, his pregnant wife critically ill from the influenza pandemic, the world groping back to its feet after the First World War, his beloved Ireland falling into rebellion and civil war… and Yeats famously wrote:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

the ceremony of innocence is drowned;

the best lack all conviction, while the worst

are full of passionate intensity…

The darkness drops again; but now I know

that twenty centuries of stony sleep

were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

and what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

What rough beast…?  I think Yeats rejected faith and Irish Christianity because he found it too often not much like Jesus.  In our day, faith in God is widely dismissed as incomprehensible.  Human encounter lies wide open to some rough beast.  And indeed… so much of what occupies or entertains people now, seems to be about monsters, catastrophes, super-beings, aliens… as though reality, the gift of creation, simply discovering the day and its essence, spending time seeing beauty or meaning, making connections, doing some task well… as though all of that is simply unconscionable, too tedious altogether.

Grown-up faith, approaching Advent, sees the familiar roads start to peter out.  We move into vision and apocalypse.  Ahead, it becomes a contemplative trail.  Now we need the poets and the prophets... and the language of silence and waiting... and steadiness.  It is here that we pause… we start to watch hopefully for the dawn.  To pause at the threshold is always a sensitive and respectful thing to do.  And we can see, there is no rough beast slouching to Bethlehem, unless it’s us.  We learn clearly here, from Jesus, that earthquakes and viruses are not apocalypse.  God’s newness is seen to the eye of the heart… a baby is born, someone unforgivable is forgiven, love and mercy prevail over judgement and pharisaism, someone discovers how to change their mind, people find peace and meaning, and a way of faith.  Isaiah is the prophet who speaks for Advent:  In returning and rest you will be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.[2]

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[1] Mark’s Greek word is ōdin (ὠδίν), severe labour pain. In the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures it is used graphically in Psalm 18:4… the torrents of perdition assailed me.

[2] Isaiah 30:15

Tower and temple – 12 November 2021

 

As Jesus came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” (Mark 13:1-2)[1]

Herod the Great[2] had hugely expanded the Jerusalem Temple to create, it is thought, some 35 acres of sacred space.  Jesus’s disciples are amazed at its magnificence.  Jesus comments: Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.  The army of Titus demolished it all in 70 AD.  To this day it has never been restored. 

Now… to avoid overstatement… it was not the first time Jerusalem had been raped and pillaged, and not the last, and it is always hideous.  Such things are happening today… whether by violence or by what the hymn Abide With Me calls change and decay… much that was familiar and valued collapses and isn’t there any more… the church life we knew and the practices of faith, what we feel is ordered society, politics and morality, decency, we have the perils and panic of pandemic and mounting levels of anxiety and risk, cruelty to children, dreadful distortions of religion.  What with care and toil he buildeth / tower and temple, fall to dust.^[3]

But neither is it apocalyptic.  We do these things – God doesn’t.  God is not punishing the world.  Not the God in such loving bond with Jesus that Paul can say Jesus is the icon of the invisible God.  Paranoia about God and human events derives directly from fear and ignorance... on which so many people seem wilfully to thrive.  Our need is for a fresh understanding and practice of faith in Christ, which is not a bolt-hole but appropriate to the kairos, to the times we are actually in, the changes and the threats.

That faith, many of us have come to see, has to be contemplative… a word which already is having to be rescued from people wanting to distort and exploit it.  If there is one thing contemplative life and prayer utterly depend on, it is seeing the ego, the Me, assume the place where ego belongs, which is not in the illusion of control.  For Jesus’s disciple it is what he called leaving self behind, seeing the true self emerge, by grace, the self God always saw and knew and loved.   Contemplative faith rediscovers freedom, which is service to Christ.  It attacks the roots of fear, fear of life and of death. 

Mature faith cannot be in denial about change, or be always trying to restore what has served its purpose and is gone.  Faith always makes room for newness… as in the ringing words of Isaiah: Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.  I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?  I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert…[4]  “I will make a way”… and soon, in Advent, we will hear just that:  In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.[5]

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[1] “What large…!” ποταπός (potapos) in the Greek.  The English translation is anaemic – the disciple is amazed – it’s not their size only but their magnificence.

[2] Herod the Great, ruled Judaea 37-4 BC.  He was succeeded by his son Herod Antipas, who ruled at the time of Jesus, 4 BC – 39 AD.

[3] Hymn: All My Hope On God Is Founded (originally German by Joachim Neander).

[4] Isaiah 43:18-20

[5] Isaiah 40:3

Rumpole Pillars – 5 November 2021

 

A couple of years ago I copied a quotation from John Mortimer’s Horace Rumpole stories, thinking I might look at it again some time… Rumpole is addressing the judge in the Old Bailey and informs him: When my country is no more, and even the Old Bailey will have sunk back into the mud of the Thames, we will be remembered for three things – the English breakfast, the Oxford Book of English Verse, and the presumption of innocence.

Now, I wouldn’t normally go to Horace Rumpole for informed spiritual wisdom, but here he hits (inadvertently, it may be) upon three features among numerous other features of a healthy, grown-up spirituality.  What will remain in memory, says Rumpole, is first, the English breakfast.  (Bear with me here… I think it comes out alright in the end…) You may have had a true English breakfast.  It is the full version of what Jack Duckworth called a fry-up, somewhat frowned on in my home.  You would have had a pork sausage, maybe two, fried eggs, slices of bacon, baked beans, black pudding, hash browns, mushrooms, grilled tomatoes and toast... even, I would personally hope, devilled kidneys.  It is excessive, of course… once a year is probably enough.  But it serves to remind me that a lively spirituality does includes a grateful, if not always sensible exuberance about food.  We give thanks for our food.  Every meal that sustains us would be a gift rare for many in this world.   Food is quite basic, and Jesus made it sacramental.  Rowan Williams tells a lovely story from the Desert, in which a brother sees a vision of two boats on the river.  In one of them sits Abba Arsenius and the Holy Spirit of God… in complete silence.  In the other boat is Abba Moses, with the angels of God – and they are all eating honey cakes, with merriment.^[1]  In one of his poems Thomas Merton says to a Severe Nun: I know, Sister… you have chosen / a path too steep for others to follow. / I take it you prefer to go without them…^[2]  I am not much of an ascetic, I’m afraid.

Then, said Rumpole, the British people will be remembered for The Oxford Book of English Verse…  He often quotes from this, as a dreamy response to She Who Must Be Obeyed.  It is good to have a copy at home – it is a lovely antidote to our dreadful misuse, abuse of words and atrocious plundering of language.  God’s Word speaks simplicity and love… He spake and it was done, says Psalm 33.  Truth, Beauty and economy of words go together – Benedict devotes a chapter of the Rule of St Benedict to Restraint of Speech.  God is in heaven, you upon earth – therefore let your words be few, says Ecclesiastes.^[3]

And thirdly, says Rumpole, the presumption of innocence.  No one may be convicted of any crime so long as there remains reasonable doubt as to his/her guilt… otherwise we are presumed innocent… something our media need constantly to be reminded of.  It is, says Rumpole, the Golden Thread in our common law.  But it reflects the insistence that pushes its way through all biblical truth since earliest times, that God will always veer towards mercy, pardon, restoration… towards the poor, the disadvantaged, the widow, the orphan and the stranger.  I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God – turn, then, and live!^[4]

Thank you, Rumpole… crusty old reprobate.  I think you have the Dalai Lama’s accolade, a Good Heart.

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[1] Rowan Williams: Silence and Honeycakes (Lion Publishing 2003), p.42.

[2] Thomas Merton: Selected Poems (New Directions 1967), p.95.

[3] Ecclesiastes 5:2

[4] Ezekiel 18:32.  See also Jonah, ch.4. 

Not far from the kingdom – 29.10.21

 

The Gospel for next Sunday…  One of the scribes came near and… asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbour as oneself,’ —this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” (Mark 12:28-34)

I am intrigued by Jesus’s response, You are not far from the kingdom of God… it’s tantalising… only a little way to go… what does he still have to do?  Jesus has just given the classic Jewish answer to the scribe’s question.   The scribe needs for some reason to rank the divine commandments, as though lowedown the list might be optional.  Which is the greatest commandment of all?  Jesus replies, and the scribe marks him correct… awfully decent of him… and the scribe adds, to love God and to love one’s neighbour is more important than all the sacrificial offerings of the temple worship.  Jesus must be right, thinks the scribe, because I agree with him.  Over in Luke we find a similar version, about a lawyer asking Jesus which is the greatest of the commandments; Jesus says, Well, what’s in the Law, how do you read it?  And the lawyer gives the same answer from the Book of Deuteronomy, You shall love…etc – and Jesus says, That’s right… so do it.[1]  It is not our ideas, primarily, that need changing – it’s not at that level -- it is our hearts.  Entering the kingdom is not believing the correct stuff, finding the answers – it is entering a change of heart, or a heart ever open to change… to being blown by the wind of the Spirit… or to alter the imagery again, to what the Hebrew scriptures beautifully call returning and rest[2]... coming home, to where we belong.

Some people object to the word kingdom, because it’s male.  The Greek word Paul uses is feminine.  Let’s say realm, then… the realm of Jesus, the realm of God, is where -- whether abroad in the world and in human events or in the recesses of my heart – God’s command is done, has precedence, is loved, informs and decides my life… the level at which the Way of Christ is freely chosen.  The road less travelled, one might say[3], is the one that goes all the way, the road that leads to the realm of Christ. 

The scribe is nearly there, says Jesus.   Jesus encourages him, I think.  He is on the right road because it is to love God and to love what God has made… and to forsake idols… what Jesus called pure in heart.[4]

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[1] Luke 10:25-28.  The original commandment is in Deuteronomy 6:4-5.

[2] Isaiah 30:15

[3] See Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken.  If you read the poem, ask yourself, which road did he take?

[4] Matthew 5:8

Romans 8…4 – More than conquerors – 22.10.21

 

One more visit to Romans 8… Paul wrote this when he was actually on his way to Rome; he sent the letter on ahead, to introduce himself to these people he had not yet met.  The church at Rome is one Paul did not found, but he is well aware that here are believers living at the heart of Roman imperial power… there are indications that some of them were part of the government and of the ruling class… and they were all living amid Rome’s brutal intolerance of anyone they thought could be a nuisance.  The Roman state paraded always as conqueror… and Paul deliberately responds… we are more than conquerors[1] through him who loves us.

More than conquerors… That is our theme…  Rome conquers… that is what Rome does.  It is the way power is achieved… by taking it, one way or another – I came, I saw, I conquered, famously reported Caesar.  One of Handel’s great choruses, See the Conquering Hero Comes, from the oratorio Judas Maccabeus… was actually intended to celebrate the triumphant return of the Duke of Cumberland (Butcher Cumberland) from the field of Culloden where he had bloodily defeated Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie… subdued the Scots (he hoped) and begun a very nasty round-up of dissenters.  There are parts of the world where religion still behaves exactly and abominably like that.  When heroes conquer it doesn’t pay to be in a dissenting minority.  So it seems to me important to find a route away from the military metaphor here, and to get a civilised sense of what Paul might have had in mind when he said we are more than conquerors.

We are not at war with anyone.  That’s the point.  Inspired by Jesus’s Spirit, led by the risen Lord, formed in his teaching, we don’t have enemies.  Perhaps that comes as a surprise.  In the Letter to the Ephesian Church Paul writes^[2]: Our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers… the authorities… the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil…  And he goes on to describe our spiritual armour and weapons for that.  To be more than conquerors is to have found a way through the darkness that inhabits so much of our world, and so much of the human spirit.  It is to be enlightened in the darkness – a word that belongs as much to Christian faith as to Buddhist or any other – enlightened by Christ.  In an ancient Christian hymn they sang, Awake sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light![3]  The light shines in the darkness, says John, and the darkness has never overcome it.  Whoever follows me shall not walk in darkness, says Jesus.  God is light, writes the Apostle John, and in him is no darkness at all… the darkness is passing away, the true light is already shining.  Whoever says I am in the light, while hating a brother or sister, is still in the darkness…  Whoever hates a brother is in the darkness, walks in the darkness, and does not know the way to go, because the darkness has blinded him…[4] it could hardly be clearer… these are the most basic of Christian teachings.  That is how we live in Christ, that is how we pray, and that is how we confront, daily, the forces of darkness in ourselves and in others, and that is how we are more than conquerors.  

We are, he writes in conclusion, inseparable from the love of Christ.  It is deeper in us than hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril or sword.  I am convinced[5] that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

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[1] ὑπερνικῶμεν (hypernikōmen), “we more than conquer”... should appeal to all fans of the sports gear branded Nike, a Greek word meaning victory, which is part of this word.

[2] Ephesians 6:12. Paul lists four Greek words all describing what the believers saw as “spiritual forces”, driving people to evil.  What makes us do evil?  Paul expresses it movingly in Romans 7:14-25.

[3] Ephesians 5:14

[4] John 1:5; 8:12; I John 1:5; 2:8-11

[5] In Greek it’s one word, pepeismai (πέπεισμαι) from the verb peithō (πείθω) to persuade.  Paul is utterly convinced.

Romans 8…3 – Sufferings – 15.10.21

 

Half way through chapter 8 of Romans, Paul turns to what he calls the sufferings of this present time…  a phrase that probably rings a bell...  although, people in Syria, in Yemen or the Sudan, in many places, might smile at what we here call suffering.  But suffering is not solely a matter of the intensity of the pain… suffering is also, for whatever reason, having to be afraid, fear of having to move on, fear of income petering out, fear of the future, of disease, of extreme weather… fear all the time of helplessness, uncertainty and instability, and that our resources of nervous strength may not be up to it.  Fear of dementia is now a major prevalence for many… and many are living in fear of Corona Virus and the time ahead.

But 1^st century Paul sees the hope of a better life coming… He is so keen on this, I wonder if he seemed to the Roman Christians to belittle their sufferings… I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed…[1]  It will all be alright, one day soon.  And we needn’t scoff… this is a piety, a naiveté that has sustained Afro-American people, and plenty of others, Catholic and Protestant, from slavery until now… Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home… my home is over Jordan… Lovely, wistful, longing songs about heaven...  when I get to heaven gonna put on ma shoes, gonna walk all over God’s heaven…  Paul however means more than that – he sees the whole of creation being made new.  The world is groaning in labour pains[2] for the new world to be born, writes Paul, and our suffering is a sharing in that labour.  He writes about the created world being in bondage to decay… and how it will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.  These grand themes have been taken up by various Christian writers in our times, some of them very movingly.  God is making all things new.  Creation and history are moving towards their focal point, their Omega Point, of redemption in Christ, God’s eternal loving purpose as Creator.

Well… it may be so… but that information is not a lot of use to a poor old codger I encountered in hospital ward… for whom the sufferings of this present time included no visitors allowed, not even his loved next-of-kin… his catheter’s playing up and he has lost all dignity, he knows he’s not getting better, and there is no way he can be comfortable… and I am wondering about Jesus saying: In the world you will have troubles and sorrow, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.[3]  Be of good cheer…?  I am back there where Jesus simply assumes we will bear pain and loss… we are drawn to him by love, he says we are to live his way, with him, in a world of both beauty and suffering, both love and pain.  We are to leave self behind, he says, we are to relinquish any lingering notion that we control life and events, or that we should be in control, and the even more pernicious notion that we have some entitlement, privileged shielding from pain or adversity that other people don’t have.  We are to love one another, said Jesus…  

Perhaps Paul’s best wisdom in this passage is where he says:  hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what is seen?  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience… The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.  And God, who searches the heart, knows…[4]  Well, that is the prayer we pray… too deep for words, says Paul… It is Jesus’s prayer in us, here in our real world, through adversity… his stream of love, flowing in us once we are still and silent and receptive. 

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[1] Romans 8:18

[2] A curious Greek verb, συνωδίνω (synōdinō), means sharing labour pains… not unknown evidently, sympathetic labour, Couvade Syndrome.

[3] John 16:33

[4] Romans 8:24-27

Romans 8…2 – Flesh and Spirit – 8.10.21

 

Last Friday we found ourselves in Paul’s extraordinary chapter 8 of the Letter to the Romans… and the theme was… No condemnation!  The way of Christ is not about sin and guilt – it is about love and mercy.  Back to chapter 8 now, and to where Paul writes about us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.  For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.  To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace (vv.4-6).

We are, I think, intelligent Christians and we prefer our expressions of faith to be intelligent.  So this passage could be bothersome… until we can tell Paul’s truth, not now in the terms of his culture of the 1^st century, but in terms of our times, our ways of thinking, our experience of life and of God.  For one thing, wisdom has taught us to hesitate about stark mutually exclusive alternatives – good or bad, black or white, all or nothing, one or the other, yes or no… or that ridiculous expression, It’s as simple as that… which it almost certainly never is.  But Paul does make an irreconcilable difference between what he calls flesh and the Spirit… you can live either way, but, he writes: To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.  He thinks you can’t swither from one to the other… although we might think that most of us do.  Those who are in Christ Jesus, he says… that is to say, those of us who have entered a life-changing bond with the risen Lord, and his people… it may have been a dramatic change, as it was with Paul, or it may have been a more gradual, gentler growth into Christ… the point is, we now feel alienated if that bond is set aside or in any way denied, even compromised.  There are important ways in which we do live one way or the other, in the flesh, or in the Spirit. 

It is true, I think, in our day, that life in the flesh is hugely popular and plenty would say inevitable.  It is not that it’s bad… any more than life in the Spirit is all milk and honey.  Life in the flesh is the life in which I myself, my ego, my interests, many of which are worthy, or it may be me and my whanau, come first, have priority, are paramount.  Life in the Spirit is life which we receive day by day from God, in gratitude and love, the loving source of life… in Jesus’s words, the Way, the Truth and the Life[1].  Contemplative life and prayer is a way into this life in the Spirit.  Ego, as we constantly say, is never obliterated – we need our egos – but is given its proper place which is not the place of God, and in that place comes to be understood better, becomes more merciful, more compassionate, gentler with self, a lighter drain on creation and the environment.  I live, says Paul, yet not I but Christ lives in me…[2]

Now, if you read the passionate expressions of Romans 8, then the way I have described it may seem anaemic and timid by comparison.  Paul overflows with enthusiasm and he loves hyperbole.  None of that needs blind us to the wonder that he is describing.  In contemplative life and prayer, learning the sounds of silence, being fully present and paying attention in stillness… then these great truths do seem to open up.  And in Paul’s words, It is God’s Spirit now bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God…

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[1] John 14:6

[2] Galatians 2:20