Recess

Our Christian Meditation group at Warkworth will now be in recess over the summer holiday period.

We will resume on 7 February 2014.

Our usual time and place of meeting:  8.30 am, Fridays,

at

the Christ Church (Anglican) lounge in Warkworth.  All are welcome. 

Grace and peace – 20 December 2013

Here are a few words from the Epistle reading for next Sunday, right at the beginning of St Paul’s Letter to the Romans.  Paul is writing to a distant Christian community he has not yet met, and he addresses them as...

...yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, to all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ [Romans 1: 6-7].

Grace and peace...  One of my colleagues over many years, an old friend, usually addresses people in his correspondence including his emails in that way.  He wishes us grace and peace.  To say the least, it makes us pause and think – this is what mature Christian faith conveys: grace and peace.  Hospitality at its best confers grace and peace.

They are two rich words which are diminished when we try to define them.  The best way to learn them is to experience their reality in life.  Grace – the lovely Greek word χαρις -- is Nelson Mandela choosing not to walk the path of retribution at the very moment he had ample power to do so, and ample reason to do so.  Grace is the father running to greet his returning son who had squandered everything.  Grace is never reasonable and very rarely deserved.  It is Godlike. 

Peace is the Hebrew word shalom.  It means somewhat more than the absence of noise, although that in itself is not a bad start.  Shalom is a fundamental rightness, a sense that things are tending as God intends.  It includes our health and wellbeing – but the hard thing to grasp is that shalom does not wait until every problem is solved.  Someone whose body is falling to bits can know the gift of shalom. 

St Paul wishes these Roman Christians grace and peace.  Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  St Benedict said we must also have grace and peace from each other.  One reality of the birth of the baby is that you know that baby has no quarrel with anyone right now.  One of the miracles of our time is that, in a culture whose media is thriving on public blame and shame, on seeing people suffer, on sickening self-righteousness and lack of wisdom about human frailty and error, in a cruel culture of retribution – there was this one man, with no great pretensions to religion, with all his own human frailties on show, who flatly refused to condemn and punish at the moment he was in a position to do so.  It was a shaft of grace, and our media could only report it as a strange and wondrous thing.  Then came Archbishop Tutu and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  If you told the truth, the slate could be wiped clean.  Grace and truth, wrote St John, came through Jesus Christ.  Grace is the receiving of love, unmerited and unconditional.  Grace to you and peace...  Grace and truth...  These are at the heart of the strong message of Advent and Christmas.  Grace to you and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Learning patience – 13 December 2013

The epistle for next Sunday is from the little-used Letter of James.  Martin Luther famously called it an epistle of straw.  It is nothing of the kind:

Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near. Beloved, do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged. See, the Judge is standing at the doors! [James 5: 7-9]

It’s all very well to talk about being patient, when advancing decrepitude means you don’t have much option.  You can’t run any more anyway, and you are retired and there’s not much reason to rush around as there once was.  Multi-tasking turns out to be not only difficult but dangerous.  It’s smart to learn the virtues of patience.  You are amazed at the people who get on the escalator at Countdown and still actually walk or even run up or down it.  They can’t simply stand still and wait.

But all this is to misunderstand what the word means.  Patience is from the Latin word, to suffer.  Being patient is a mature quality, knowing how to take the rough with the smooth, how to postpone or do without satisfaction. Patient is not passive.  A patient person not only is able to bear pain, but has learned that pain and injustice are everywhere.  It is an unjust world.  James reminds Jesus’s followers that they are not living in some safe cocoon of faith where all is well. 

That is why he also says, Beloved, do not grumble against one another.  And here I may be walking over eggshells... but James is saying that the kind of patience which marks Christian discipleship and Christian fellowship is accepting or at least understanding of human perversity and silliness.  It bears with other people – in which enterprise, I may say, a lively sense of the ridiculous helps quite a lot.  St Benedict knew that in any monastery there will be monks with smelly feet, nuns with blocked sinuses, people teetering towards lunacy accompanied by halitosis – and so, in his Rule he repeatedly warns against grumbling (sine murmuratione).  Grumbling badly damages the community.  It is a matter of discipline in a Christian fellowship that we do not grumble.  Put positively, it matters that we have learned patience, that our expectations are sensible and realistic, that we make room for human difference.  We come to gain pleasure from difference and eccentricity.

Moreover, this is Advent teaching.  James writes about waiting in patience.  He says the Judge is standing at the doors.  He wrote in the early Jerusalem church where they were always threatened by real oppression and persecution.  Patience and endurance is necessary equipment, and a sense of what matters and what doesn’t.  Our contemplative stillness and silence can equip us with a large and generous spirit.  Sometimes, even at my great age I confess, I am considerably tested in this regard.  But we get there.  At any rate, all our impatience and grumbling gets folded into the stillness of prayer, where Christ’s Spirit is making us into better disciples. 

To the moles and the bats – 6 December 2013

Here is part of a real flesh and blood Advent reading – the kind of reading ministers may be tempted to avoid if they can, but if it does get read, people’s eyes start to glaze over:

The haughtiness of people shall be humbled,

 

            and the pride of everyone brought low;

the Lord alone will be exalted on that day.

The idols shall utterly pass away.

Enter the caves of the rocks and the holes of the ground,

from the terror of the Lord,

and from the glory of his majesty…

On that day people will throw away to the moles and the bats

their idols of silver and their idols of gold

which they made for themselves to worship…  [Isaiah 2:17-20]

Rowan Williams identifies two very personal issues in Advent.  The first is to realize yet again that there are things we cannot do for ourselves.  Alone, as we know, we can’t learn language and communication.  Alone, we can’t learn to love and to be loved.  Alone, we can’t know whether we are worth anything or not, or actually visible to anyone or anything.  It is trendy now to have taken leave of God and religion and to be self-sufficient.  And our generation is left with what Rowan Williams calls paralyzing unhappiness and anxiety.  We would love to hear a voice of recognition and reassurance, but it must be on our terms and say the things we want to hear. 

So – and this is the second thing -- we make idols.  We project on to the empty space before us the voices and images we want – typically in western culture they include wealth and power, sex and so-called freedom, sport and entertainment, family first and last, happiness, the illusion of safety, personal appearance…  For Jews the covenant was always about the forsaking of idols.  We cannot make God, least of all in our own image.  We cannot domesticate God to our own life and preferences and what we imagine are our needs.  In the Christian Advent we become, as it were, Jews again.  We are reminded how, surrounded by all our goods and fortified by all our knowledge, we still need to be touched into life by a word from God – a word which brings all our idolatry to judgement. 

The wondrous thing is that, after our weeks of Advent waiting, this word turns out to be spoken in the birth of a baby, in a story which the secular world and much of the church have turned into a charming nursery tale.  In our contemplative life and prayer, our thoughtfulness and attention, but also in our silence and stillness, we are not strangers to mystery and awe, to the truth that may lie in the shadows, and the love which never lets us go.  And we are very ready, when we see our idols, to cast them to the moles and the bats.