Broad phylacteries – 31 October 2014

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honour at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi. But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven… The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted. [Mathew 23:1-12]

Jesus was clearly exasperated, at any rate on that day, by people practising religion.  By any standards his speech is judgemental and dismissive.  He was angry, and what triggers his anger is his awareness of burdened and suffering people for whom this kind of religion is no help at all.  They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.  And there are examples of precisely that in the Auckland religious scene, and far beyond, today.  That section of chapter 23 morever is tame compared with what he goes on to say.

Jesus calls us to live differently.  It is really a shameful thing when this seems to be understood better by a secular society than in the congregations and councils of the church.   The call of Jesus is a call to live simply and humbly.  Even atheists understand that.  It is not a question of how much or how little we own.  Simplicity and humility become apparent, or not, whatever car we drive and wherever we choose to live. 

Basil Hume was a Benedictine monk of Ampleforth Abbey.  More or less out of the blue he was appointed Archbishop of Westminster.  At his ordination and induction, amid great colour and panoply, the preacher was one of his fellow monks who warned his brother: It will make everything harder for you, including your prayer.  A bishop, said Basil Hume, quoting St Augustine, is a man who knows the weakness, fears and anxieties of all people; who, as well as sensing the presence of God, experiences the darkness of his apparent absence; whose job is not to stifle but to release, not to impose but to draw out, not to dominate but to animate.  Basil Hume wrote a book for children, about himself, called Basil in Blunderland.  He once told his priests, Remember, when you die, someone will be greatly relieved.  These are signs of a humility, acquired in the Spirit of Christ, apparent through all the noise and colour of high church office. 

We learn simplicity in our prayer of silence and stillness.  We have set aside for the present all the things other people might admire us for, and things we do for a sense of justification and worth.  We are not seeking here any huge enlightenment – indeed, as Basil Hume pointed out, prayer may often have more to do with the apparent absence of God.  It is only genuine humility which can bear the sense of evil in the world, and the weight of our own personal history in places.  So our phylacteries, you might say, are diminishing.  We are free because the only requirement of us here is simplicity.

What it amounts to – 24 October 2014

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.  (Matthew 22:34-40)

Steadily, across the spectrum of Christian faith around the world, and across immense obstacles, a huge shift seems to be happening.  On a perhaps superficial view it is a shift from exclusivism – that is to say, the assumption that you ought to believe the right things and in various ways conform – to a need for inclusivism – that we reduce the rules and remove the fences, and remember that God is the judge of people’s hearts and motives.  Exclusivism is a need to protect the faith and the church.  Inclusivism opens us to difference and risk, and often as not, the need to change.

There is another view, one that goes back to the Hebrew prophets.  It is to remember that God works, constantly, sometimes dramatically but usually not, sometimes with us but often despite us – God works to make all things new.  This is the creator tending and loving his creation.  It is the Spirit of the Risen Christ, continually inspiring and bringing us back to the way of Christ. 

The commandment which, said Jesus, is the greatest of all, the commandment which he said fulfils all the law and the prophets, is plain and simple:  You shall love the Lord your God… You shall love your neighbour.  That is the requirement.  It does not say that we must first be morally blameless or at any rate considerably improved.  It does not say that we must believe the right things.  It does not say that we must first fulfil various liturgical and canonical requirements.  It is a commandment to love – as though the love we have received and practise, however feeble, is what God sees and loves.

Neither is this love a matter of our emotions, of how we feel.  Jesus made that plain.  We often have to go on loving despite how we feel.  This cuts right through the terrible mess our culture and our generation has made of the word love.  Love is something I decide, a response to being loved unconditionally.  Pope Francis is one who apparently sees that the church needs to learn to love again – loving God and loving one’s neighbour are inseparable loves, mutually dependent.  When Mary McAleer, the former President of Ireland, who already had one child, found she was now expecting twins, she was as she puts it underwhelmed.  However was she going to split her love three ways?  In the event, she says, each child came with her/his own river of love.  Love is what we receive.  It is what changes us.  It is what brings us to God and to each other, and works all manner of miracles. 

Give to God what is God’s – 17 October 2014

In the Gospel lesson for next Sunday (Matthew 22:15-22) Jesus answers some local Pharisees, who were religious leaders, and Herodians, who seem to have been part of the court of the Roman puppet ruler, Herod Antipas.  They were trying to catch Jesus in sedition.  If he even hinted that the Jews should not be paying the Roman tax he was in big trouble.  As we know, Jesus asked for one of the coins in which the tax had to be paid, held it up to show Caesar’s image on it – and decreed, Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.

…and I remember thinking, as a teenager in church:  Everybody thinks that’s neat and clever, but I still don’t get it.  Presumably we pay our tax – that is what belongs to Caesar – but what belongs to God?  Preachers and commentators seemed to think that was obvious.  It wasn’t obvious to me.  What is God’s? what do I owe God?  Do I owe God my gratitude for good food, for warmth and shelter, for security, for life, health and my next breath, for the love of family and friends, for a peaceful land and all the moods of Kawau Bay…?  No doubt I do – but there are plenty who do not have these things, living in squalor, or danger, or cold.  What do they owe to God? 

And indeed Jesus said this in an occupied country, repressed by a brutal military, to people replete in daily life with misery and terror, starvation and disease.  Perhaps he meant something a bit different… or on the other hand, as old as the Prophet Micah:  What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly…  That is what is God’s, it seems to me, that we do justice, love mercy, walk humbly. 

What does it mean in the attitudes of my heart that I do justice, in my judgements, for instance…?  What has to change in order that I love mercy…?  What might I have to relinquish before I walk humbly…? 

But this is not some rigorous reform of self, amendment of life, which has to take place before we are as we ought to be in God’s sight.  It is what starts to happen in our hearts as we are still and silent, when we set aside the study group chatter, shut the books for a while, give ourselves a rest from worthy activism, and recover the space of waiting and consenting. 

Christian Meditation is the simplest of all disciplines, the spiritual practice which asks us first to cease, for the time of meditation, every attempt to change ourselves and our world, let alone our church.  It asks us to be still, making space for God to do in us and around us what God is always seeking to do, but blocked and hampered by all our best intentions, plans and motives.  What we owe to God is what the Bible calls μετανοια, change, conversion, returning to where we truly belong, consenting to love and grace.

Both bad and good – 10 October 2014

Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests. (Matthew 22:10)  The Gospel for next Sunday is the parable of the wedding feast.  This one should have wide appeal in today’s church – it’s about food.  The story is a bit fanciful, but it images a culture in which all the right people, all the beautiful, successful people, all the privileged with status, all the ones who dreamt of being at George Clooney’s wedding in Venice, somehow, unaccountably, are now so bored and sated with their lifestyle that they can’t be bothered showing up at the wedding of the king’s son.  It reflects perhaps the ultimate tedium of a life spent answering the demands of the Ego, as on a cruise ship.

But all this food is there and ready, so the king sends his servants out to the streets to gather in all the nonentities, the powerless in society, the poor, the ones who queue up at Winz.  The servants collected, says Jesus, all they could find, both bad and good, and the hall was full.  Imagine that.  (In passing, it amuses me that some modern translations reverse what the Greek says; the Greek says both bad and good; the translators make it both good and bad – as though Jesus was deficient in style.  It’s nicer if you put the good first...)

However, the fact is, admittance to the king’s feast is now no longer a matter of who you are, and no longer a question of what you are like.  Nobody disputes – well, I don’t dispute -- that it’s better to be good than bad, although at times it’s not as much fun.  But indeed, each of us is more or less morally compromised, whether it’s in actions or in thoughts, in our treatment of others, in what we have done or left undone, in matters we can’t mend now, in attitudes...  This is called the human condition, and on a macro scale it causes wars and beheadings.  I have seen it cause the breakup of churches and of families and marriages.  Its walking wounded wander the earth, and most of us are among them or could easily be. 

We are invited and welcome at the king’s feast.  Contemplatives dare to believe, we are there already if we stop, are still and silent, simple and accepting, consenting...we are in there, seated, and at the feast, waiting, content, and the main reality around us is love.  The next reality we know is a reminder of a world of injustice and of hideous violence.  So our stillness is both disturbing and upsetting, as well as relaxing and health-giving.   The kingdom we are in is not the kingdom of power and privilege, strength or status, or social safety.  The king has welcomed all who labour and are heavy laden.   It is not winners and losers any more, it is sufferers and lovers, and all of us who have found how to receive humility and simplicity. 

They will respect my son – 3 October 2014

The Gospel reading for this Sunday, Jesus’s parable of the wicked tenants (Matthew 21:33-46) is in all three synoptic gospels, and it is remarkably similar in all versions. The landowner built a vineyard and let it out to tenants who were supposed to farm it properly and productively.  But when the owner sent two successive emissaries to collect the produce the tenants beat up each one and threw him out.  So the owner sends his son.  They will respect my son.  But the son is murdered.  Then we have some puzzling, cryptic statements about the stone which the builders rejected, and so on.  But, says Jesus, the kingdom will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing its fruits. 

There are two compelling points here, it seems to me.  The first is that these people were tenants.  They never owned the place.  But they were treating it as their own.  That can’t be right.  The second is that, as Jesus sees things, the owner – that is God – remember, Jesus's parables are about the kingdom of God – then transfers his kingdom to others who, he says, will produce fruit. 

We don’t own the church.  It is not ours.  We are temporary tenants.  Wanting things to be in the church as we like them to be may be understandable.  Tenants generally arrange their furniture as they want.  But it is not their property to possess.  When we make rules of exclusion, or attempt to decide who is worthy or unworthy, when we perpetuate ancient divisions or start to put a fence around the Lord's Table, we are out of order. 

Neither do we own the world.  We are tenants here.  We are not at liberty to trash God's creation.  Neither may we live in it in ways that plunder natural resources, or that exploit other people, for our benefit.

In the contemplative life, possession in all its subtle forms is instinctively seen as hazardous.  Possession, ownership, which is so often good and necessary, a privilege and a responsibility, so easily mutates into possessiveness.  In God's kingdom then possession is something to be done thoughtfully and with accountability.  Contemplatives come to see possessiveness on the other hand as a burden to be recognised and shed.  All of this is clearly set out in Jesus's teaching, in parables and in what we have come to call the Sermon on the Mount. 

This parable has the desperate owner saying, They will respect my son...  Respect as a word suits the narrative of the parable, but it is a somewhat anaemic word to describe our relationship with Christ. The contemplative life is one of becoming conformed to (reformed by...informed by...) the way of Christ rather than the needs of the Ego, in our attitudes and reactions, in our approach to justice and compassion, in our use of nature and resources, in our treatment of each other and of human fallibility, vulnerability and mortality.  St Paul could say he is becoming conformed to Christ even in his death.