Lunch and dinner – 30 August 2013

He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbours, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid.  But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” [Luke 14: 12-14]

This gospel is actually quite fun.  Jesus says, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or your rich neighbours, to lunch or dinner.  The reason is that they might reciprocate and invite you to their homes.  But that is precisely what we get up to, and what we think matters.  In this way a lot of people derive pleasure and companionship, and make sure nothing happens they don’t know about.  There are those who love giving hospitality in their homes, and love preparing good food.  Along the way, and maybe after the guests have gone, we sometimes indulge in games of comparison about homes and decor, and food, always in a kindly way of course.  Jesus, undaunted, moves right along:  Make sure instead you invite the crippled, the lame and the blind.  The reason...?  Simply that they can’t repay you.  Well, there are some dangers lurking there I would think, particularly if we are tempted to come over all virtuous or even superior. 

Now, yet again, with these narratives, it is better not to have left our brains and imagination at home.  Mahurangi in 2013 differs in some respects from Galilee in 30 AD.  Who are now the crippled, the lame and the blind...?  In contemplative life and awareness, in the disciplines of silence and stillness, we begin to make friends with our real selves behind our facades and the ways we hope we appear to others.  And we discover that in important respects we are the needy.  At any rate, we come to see that it is simply unsustainable and certainly unsatisfying to regard ourselves as serenely in control, arbiters of taste, management success, or of wisdom.  We have greeted humility, learned and acquired through our experiences, and we have found we were not essentially different from the crippled, the lame and the blind – if maybe for the time being a little more mobile and independent.  Part of humility is also that we found along the way that we often don’t possess answers or even satisfying responses to life’s difficult questions. 

You will be blessed, says Jesus in this gospel.  Can it be that the blessing is simply the gift of being grateful that we have been sustained.  I have learned to be content, writes St Paul, with whatever I have [Phil 4:11].  The Greek word Paul chooses here meaning “content”, αυταρχης, actually has little or nothing to do with how we are feeling.  It means literally “independent, self-sufficient” – on the one hand grateful, on the other hand needing nothing more.  I like to think the joke in this story is that each person at our dinner table is crippled, lame or blind, in some respect at least, just like me, whatever they say.  Isn’t that amazing.  Jesus noticed these things.    

The priority of the donkey – 23 August 2013

^...But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?  And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” [Luke 13:14-16] 

The two ends of religion, any religion, confront each other in this incident.  Jesus heals a woman whose condition, whatever it was – I was raised never to ask a lady what was the matter with her – had her bent double for 18 years.  But Jesus does this on the Sabbath Day.  The leader of the synagogue sees only an offence against the law of the Sabbath.  And he is quite reasonable – there are six days, after all, to line up for healing, so why do it on the Sabbath?  Jesus seems not to mind starting a fight.  He seems actually quite angry.  This is hypocrisy, he says -- these good people never hesitate to lead their ox or donkey out to water on the Sabbath Day.  Evidently some people assume the needs of the ox or the donkey trump the needs of the woman, who of course is supposed to be mainly invisible anyway.    

This debate is without resolution.  Centuries before the time of Jesus, as we read in the Hebrew scriptures, the prophets are confronting the legalists.  Each thinks the other is dangerous for healthy religion.   What God requires, in the words of the Prophet Micah, is that we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly – not that we fulfil some quota of religious observances or moral protocols.  God does not want our burnt offerings if they are not from changed, merciful, loving hearts.  Isaiah 58, for instance, sets it out in pungent prophetic prose.

Let’s always honour the legalists for what they are trying to protect -- order, dignity and decency, their perception of truth.  Jesus’s argument against them was not that they had rules, but that eventually they started giving room to hypocrisy and injustice.  People are prior to the rules.  If the donkey’s needs, rightly, can be attended to on the Sabbath, why can’t the woman’s?  Yes, Jesus is indignant, not only because they would have denied the woman healing because it was the Sabbath, but also because she was a woman and not a man or an animal.  It reminds me of the priority for hot bath water in 18^th century English homes – first the men, then the dogs, then the women, then the servants.  A jolly Saturday bath night when everything was as it should be.  But Jesus dares a special space for women in his society and culture.  It is part of healthy spiritual understanding and practice for those of us who follow his way.   It is not the rules that set life the right way up, but what the Dalai Lama calls the Good Heart.  Our religions meet at their deepest truths. 

Division – 16 August 2013

I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!  I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!  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: 49-53]

This is the gospel for next Sunday, and it is indeed difficult to know what to say about it.  This is not gentle Jesus meek and mild...  He sounds exasperated.  In the next few sentences, which I didn’t read to you, he berates them because they talk obsessively about the weather, which of course we do, constantly, but seem blind to how the world is going.  And that, as we know, is a little unjust.

His face was set towards Jerusalem, as the scripture puts it, so of course he was under stress.  Were followers quietly disappearing because of family ties and commitments?  Every parish minister knows that phenomenon.  And so, with what seems to be a note of bitterness, Jesus says that what’s coming will be anything but peace on earth and goodwill among men.  Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?  No, I tell you, but rather division!  He illustrates with the instantly recognisable and always painful phenomenon of family division:  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.  It sounds just as shocking as it generally is.   I often wonder whether the Family- First-type parties and groups, with their pictures of happy family units complete with a father and a mother actually at home, and grateful well-brought-up children, are paying any attention at all to realities.  Jesus, in his blackest moments, knows that whoever follows him is going to need a spirituality adequate to social ignorance and misunderstanding, hatreds and the parting of ways, sometimes in the so-called best families and social strata.  An email from a friend asks me how meditation helps when there has just been gross verbal abuse from a family member, leaving my correspondent shocked, angry and hurt. 

In the stillness and the silence, the waiting and the attention, we learn the graces of setting some things aside, declining the luxury of bitterness and retaliation, understanding that all is not fair or just, all is not as it should be and is unlikely to become so, seeing sometimes why things have happened as they do, renewing God’s gift of humility – and in the words of the Lord’s Prayer, forgiving as we are forgiven.  It is Jesus’s way, the path we walk.  Faith so often means the readiness to take the rough with the smooth, understand it, move on, put one foot in front of the other, refuse to dwell in memory and bitterness.

Receiving the Kingdom – 9 August 2013

The Gospel lesson for next Sunday starts with this sentence: Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom [Luke 12:32].   I clearly remember that being quoted, as long ago as 1967, by Lloyd Geering when he was on trial for doctrinal error in the Presbyterian General Assembly.  He was surrounded and getting pecked to death by people who insisted that they believed the correct things and he did not.  Lloyd maintained that the one thing he could not do was be dogmatic and doctrinaire about God.  He thought his accusers were all more bothered about correct belief than God was.  And he quoted Jesus in St Luke:  Do not be afraid, little flock.  It is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.  We don’t have to qualify in any way beyond our deep inner consent to God.   However valuable quality control may be, God seems not to practise it obsessively in his kingdom.  Jesus repeatedly reflects that truth.  It is God’s good pleasure – he takes pleasure – to give us the kingdom.

Well now, to some, this seems very daring and even irresponsible.  How can God be so negligent?  And yet our latest pope seems to have joined in.  To him a God who disqualifies people because of their homosexuality seems plainly dubious.  That is not the God we find reflected in Jesus – who is actually named by St Paul as the image (the icon, εικων in Greek) of the invisible God [Col 1:15].   

Contemplative spirituality teaches that God is known, not by correct belief or behaviour, but by personal encounter -- once we are ready to leave self behind, to listen rather than to maintain things, to set aside the chatter and debate in favour of silence and stillness, waiting and attention.  Fundamentalism, whether it is in Christianity or in Islam, in Communism or in Capitalism, in Art or in Sport, is always in fact a retreat from the truth because you are hiding in the illusion that the letter is prior to the spirit.   What Luke reports is a startling statement by Jesus.  And once again it is about not being afraid – how often that recurs in Jesus’s teaching.  We are not to be afraid, because God takes pleasure, actually, in including us in God’s kingdom.  Qualification is not the issue.  Love and presence are the issues – and acquiring the disciplines of being always present, whatever we are doing. 

Looking for happiness in the wrong places – 2.8.2013

Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”  But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”  Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’  Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’  But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you.  And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’  So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”  [Luke 12: 13-21]

Firstly, Jesus refuses to arbitrate in a family dispute about property inheritance.  And wisely, one might think, although the person in the crowd who asked the question might have felt somewhat knocked back.  Jesus uses the occasion to give a warning about greed -- one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.  There are plenty of people who assume that is precisely what life is about.

One of my unfulfilled ambitions is to read the parable which follows, at the annual church parade of the Chamber of Commerce.   It is about a man who identifies with his accumulated possessions.  He has achieved his dream.  He actually says to his soul, relax, eat, drink, be merry.  His soul, he thinks, is satisfied, satiated, by the abundance of good things, no doubt all in impeccable style – and by, of course, his remembrance of the poor and his giving to good causes.  He is a living role model of success.  But, says Jesus, he is actually a fool.  All that can be taken away, in an instant, in a dozen different ways.  What is left then – if his health has collapsed, marriage and family life in disarray, if his public reputation is demolished in a court action, if someone accuses him of something disreputable, if war, pestilence or earthquake, tempest or disease, destroys all he loves and depends on? 

Looking for happiness in the wrong places, one writer calls it.  Certainly, bitter and often wretched disputes about property and inheritance tend to unveil people’s real values, where their heart is, as it were.   But as we are well aware, we do have property, some at least of which we are glad to have; we do have obligations and matters which occupy us and fill our minds at times.   In the gift of silence and stillness, when we consciously set all this aside for the purpose of attentiveness, mindfulness, as God is attentive and mindful to us, the Spirit of God works subtle changes at the point where we might have become dependent on lesser things.  This gentle work undermines our fear of life and the future – as also, I think, the burden of injury from the past.  We are consenting to a process of becoming rich toward God, as Jesus puts it.