The end of the world – 15 November 2019

Around this time of the year we get lectionary readings about what theology calls eschatology, the apocalypse, the end of the world.  But it’s not only the Bible… when the All Blacks lost to England in the Rugby World Cup semi-finals, the Herald on Sunday carried a front page totally black except for a tiny message in the middle that if you want any details you’ll find them in the sports section.  Their on line edition had the headline, End of the World.  Time, you might think, for grown-ups and grown-up faith.  Christians have always been fascinated by the end of the world, and one instance is in Paul’s letters to the church at Thessalonica – the expectation that the end is near, the Lord will return, history will be wound up, the sheep will be separated from the goats, and the “saved” will enter eternal bliss.  So it is that for centuries, repeatedly, weird predictions of the end of all things have emerged… and 20 centuries later we are still awaiting the last trumpet.


The end of the world may indeed be nigh, or may seem that way, brought about not by God’s cleaving the heavens, so much as the environment becoming uninhabitable by reason of climate changes, rising sea levels, uncontrollable disease and famine, increasing resort to violence and oppression…  The apocalypse in other words is entirely believable but largely man-made.  I read somewhere some American zealot informing us that God won’t let it happen.  He had some special revelation to that effect.  Wiser heads are disinclined to predict what God will or won’t do. 


The Apostle Peter has some sensible advice towards the end of his First Letter:  The end of all things is near; therefore be serious[1] and discipline yourselves for the sake of your prayers… maintain constant love for one another… be hospitable without complaining…[2]   What could seem more prosaic.  And yet there it is – if I knew that the end of the world were to happen tomorrow, what would I do?  I think I would be still and silent, inwardly receptive and without fear, but loving and hospitable – and take my pills as usual.  In another place Peter writes:  Therefore beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace…[3]  For many people these days, the end of the world has more immediacy.  Ferocious bush fires in California and New South Wales, Queensland and elsewhere seem apocalyptic when you are being compulsorily evacuated and it is suddenly possible you will lose home and livelihood.  Or when civil war sweeps over your homes and towns, or disease wraps up your life.  So it is always the end of the world for someone, somewhere, somehow, sometime soon.  


Faith says that with Jesus it cannot be the end.  It may become the end of what needed to end.  Life is not snuffed out.  It is death that is defeated.  God made life, and light.  The life God made does not end pathetically with the world burned to a silent smoking cinder, moving on forlornly through space – faith sees all things being made new.  Meanwhile we say our prayers and take our pills, and care for each other.

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[1] “Serious” = Greek σωφρονέω (sōphroneō) = sober, sensible, ie. not end-of-the-world lunatics.

[2] I Peter 4:7-9

[3] II Peter 3:14

Making peace – 8 November 2019

Making peace is one of our remits from Jesus.  It’s in the Beatitudes:  Blessed are the peacemakers… they will be called children of God.  Peacemaking, in Jesus’s teaching, is up there with being pure in heart, poor in spirit, meek, merciful, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, and being among those who mourn.  St Paul picks it up in his Letter to the Romans:  If possible, as much as it lies with you, live peaceably with all.[1]


The assumption is that living peaceably and making peace flow from each other – peaceable people will tend to be peacemakers. There is an episode of M*A*S*H in which the surgeon Hawkeye Pierce is exasperated beyond endurance at daily trying to reassemble healthy young bodies ripped around by high explosive.  He hi-jacks a Jeep and charges in to the top level peace talks at Panmunjom.  Of course the most he can achieve is to make his impassioned speech about the utter futility of the Korean War – and treat the top general’s dyspepsia – before he charges furiously back to post-op.  Hawkeye was making peace the best way he could.  Perhaps the greatest obstacle for peacemakers is that so many people actually prefer conflict, or assume it is somehow a way of resolving differences.  Realists will tell you conflict is inevitable. The human cost becomes “collateral damage”.  Most of us can think of families in which conflict persists, pointlessly and poisonously.  So much of our sport is somewhat guided conflict.  Our politics is all about winning or losing, often at the cost of abuse and humiliation, tribal disputes, playing games with the truth.


You will have noticed Paul’s careful provisos… If possible, as much as it lies with you, live peaceably with all.  He knows well that it’s not always possible.  He knows that conflict can get easily out of hand, and as far as it lies with you can be not far at all.  Family disputes… church disputes... tribal feuds including racial strife.  A society free of conflict is unimaginable… and in any case, there are plenty who will want to inform us that conflicts serve useful purposes and shake out what is bad in us... like lifting the cap on the old fashioned car radiator to release the steam.  Well, what is bad in us is dealt with much more wisely, over time, in a discipline of silent prayer and stillness.   I would in any case rather live in peace, in shalom, that rich Hebrew concept that brings together not just tranquillity but also health and justice, kindness and goodness, and truth. 


Being a follower, as Jesus saw it, entails a personal rejection of aggression and violence, in all its subtleties including violence of words and attitudes.  Peaceable people become peacemakers, even at times when nothing is actually said, by being at peace within themselves.  And that, I think, is Jesus’s first work… settling peace within us, as we make space for that, and allow ourselves to be truthful and reconcilers.

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[1] Matthew 5:1-13; Romans 12:14-21

Simplicity – 1 November 2019

We mention simplicity often enough, but it’s another matter to form a clear idea of what simplicity as a response to Jesus might actually ask of us in our time and in our individual circumstances.  For most of us, by the time we came to any awareness of contemplative life and prayer, we had already been long committed to all manner of complexities and compromises in our lives and relationships and possessions, and obligations. Perhaps we are hoping Jesus’s call to simplicity is not as demanding or uncompromising as it sometimes sounds.  (Take only one pair of sandals, etc…)  A couple of reminders, then…  

The first is that Jesus teaches at the level of our hearts – what he gives us is not another law, not a set of practical instructions about our lifestyle or our possessions.  He gives us primarily an invitation to walk his road in his company, to think his thoughts, to share his reactions.  If the simplicity of this bond changes our lives over time – and of course it will -- it is because our hearts are now telling us that such change is what we want.  And that’s good -- our hearts are consenting.  

And secondly, we remind ourselves that the prayer we practise, silence and stillness, is itself already a radical exercise in simplicity.  We are learning how little depends on us anyway – not even beautiful words -- that all prayer in the end is a matter of joining the eternal prayer of Jesus, a prayer of love and unity.  We are shedding our illusions of control.


So…  Blessed are the poor in spirit, he says… blessed are the pure in heart…  He calls in question much of our superfluous speech – Let your word be Yes, or No… (Matthew 5:3, 8, 37 – that would tidy things up a bit!)  Paul advocates simplicity also in the life of the community – Live in harmony… associate with the lowly… do not claim to be wiser than you are….  Be wise in what is good, writes Paul, and guileless in what is evil (Romans 12:16; 16:19).  

One of the Desert Fathers, Abba Arsenius, famously said: I have often had to repent of having spoken, but never of having kept silent.  Simplicity was cultivated in the desert spirituality of those early centuries, with great relief (although it was often overdone or distorted), because it was so different from life in Rome or Alexandria, and from life in the church.  The desert priorities are equally different from most of the life familiar to us. 


Christian Meditation is one exercise in simplicity because we are taking the attention off ourselves, and in the process we are learning to be more selfless, more generous, kinder, more loving, in our daily lives. We come to learn the essential elements of Jesus’s way better because we are understanding them now from within. This is what poverty of spirit means, setting self aside, becoming poor in spirit.  So Christian Meditation is not primarily about relaxation, it’s not mindfulness, it's not about feeling good, de-stressing.  These may indeed be by-products of meditation, they’re not the purpose of meditation.  The purpose of Christian Meditation is that we should become his disciples – imperfect but wholehearted.  We learn… or perhaps more accurately, we discover… a new inner humility and gratitude. 


Ageing too can assist the grace of simplicity.  Maybe we shed possessions, however timidly – but if we can’t bear to be parted from the lumber of former years, then that certainly suggests spiritual sclerosis.  We work out simplicity in our own ways.  It’s best done with a sense of humour. 

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