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.