Advent IV – Isaiah 9:2, 6 - 20 December 2019

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light;

those who lived in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined…

For a child has been born for us, a son given to us;

authority rests upon his shoulders, and he is named

Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace…   (Isaiah 9:2, 6)

(It’s not the reading in the Lectionary – it’s the one I would have prescribed had they asked me.)  One of my earlier Advent lessons came from my mother, who was inclined to call a spade a spade, and was generally underwhelmed by ministers in pulpits all dressed up.  We were walking home from some carol service, and my mother gave a snort of derision at one of the best-known carols of all, one line of which says: But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.  Did you ever hear such silliness, she asked.  If you wanted religion demythologised, it did help to go to church with my mother.  And indeed, in our days as young students demythologising was all the rage.  We thought our faith had to be made intelligible for “the rational mind”.  The years and maturer wisdom say that the truth, the divine Logos, is not something we can ever grasp, possess, own, understand and use.  What we do is bear witness humbly to the Light we see… love, grace, mercy, incarnated, made flesh, in a baby, this child…  


Never a Christmas goes by for me these days without Thomas Hardy’s lovely poem of wistful longing (The Oxen, 1915, after Ypres and Gallipoli…):  

… I feel, if someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come, see the oxen kneel

In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

The humility necessary at Christmas begins back in Advent, as we have seen in all those poetic words of Isaiah, not with answers but with quiet longing – sharing God’s longing it may be -- the lovely German word Sehnsucht… longing, yearning, waiting, for ourselves, for our world.  On Christmas morning what we find is the veil drawn back a little, a glimpse of God... a word from God.  God was in Christ, says Paul.  In another place he says this child is the icon of the invisible God[1].  It is a glimpse of love – before we see anything that might be called powerful or majestic, before we think we have answers now to life’s questions, we have this scene of love and humility and vulnerability.  The point about the Nativity scene is that it needs nothing from us.  There is nothing we can contribute… what did he want with gold, frankincense or myrrh?  Our knowledge, our knowhow, our achievements, our plans, are all set aside.  What we bring is quiet, awed wonder and our longing, loving hearts.

(OUR FRIDAY MORNING CHRISTIAN MEDITATION GROUP IS NOW IN ABEYANCE UNTIL 7 FEBRUARY 2020.)

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[1] II Corinthians 5:19; Colossians 1:15 – “image” in the Greek is icon (ἐικων)

Advent III – Isaiah 35:1-10 - 13 December 2019

The wilderness and the dry land will be glad,

the desert will rejoice and blossom;

like the crocus it will blossom abundantly

and rejoice with joy and singing….

Strengthen the weak hands, make firm the feeble knees.

Say to those of a fearful heart,

“Be strong, do not fear!  Here is your God…”

The eyes of the blind will be opened,

and the ears of the deaf unstopped;

then the lame will leap like a deer,

and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.

Waters will break forth in the wilderness, streams in the desert…

A highway will be there, it shall be called the Holy Way…

it shall be for God’s people;

no traveller, not even fools, shall go astray…

The ransomed of the Lord shall return

and come to Zion with singing…

they shall obtain joy and gladness,

sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

It’s tempting in Advent to become facetious… and like Oscar Wilde I can resist most things except temptation.  Here we have, for instance, the desert rejoicing with joy and singing… as when my wife comes in from watering the garden to inform me: “The silver beet’s saying thank you.”  Then we get the bit about firming up the feeble knees, which has relevance for some of us.  Then the highway… I don’t know what highways were like in the 8^th century BC, but this one is the highway to Zion, and it will be such a wonderful highway that, says Isaiah, not even fools will go astray… not even tourists in campervans.  Everyone arrives at the temple singing… sorrow and sighing flee away.

There is discovery in faith which may come as a lovely surprise.  It is what one hymn writer calls the joy that seekest me through pain.[1]  There are levels deeper than the pain, and joy is hidden there – although words like “joy” and “rejoicing” may be spoilt I think, through having become religious words.  C S Lewis wrote about being surprised by joy.  Etty Hillesum, on the cattle wagon leaving for Auschwitz, threw a card from the train which read, We left the camp singing.  Though I make my bed in Sheol, wrote the Psalmist, you are there.[2]  For Thomas Merton at a low and restless time it was the liberating discovery of his major handicap: taking himself seriously, the delusion that it was all about Thomas Merton.  And for Karl Barth it was finding Mozart, the divine child in all of us.  Martin Luther was overcome by joy when it dawned on him what St Paul is saying, that we live by faith, by unknowing.  Jesus died, says the writer to the Hebrews, for the joy that was set before him.[3]  What Isaiah sees, his vision, is that all this journeying, all this struggle and setback, ends wondrously:  they shall obtain joy and gladness, sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

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[1] George Matheson: O Love, that wilt not let me go

[2] Psalm 139:8.  Jewish prisoners did celebrate Sabbath Eve, Passover, in Auschwitz.

[3] Hebrews 12:2

Advent II – Isaiah 11:1-9 - 6 December 2019

The readings for Advent II take us to another of the visions, or inspirations, of the prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem.  He sees a deliverer coming, but not the kind of deliverer one might expect:

The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,

the spirit of wisdom and understanding,

the spirit of counsel and might,

the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord…

With righteousness he shall judge the poor,

and decide with equity for the meek of the earth…

The wolf shall live with the lamb,

the leopard shall lie down with the kid,

the calf and the lion and the fatling together,

and a little child shall lead them.

The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,

and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.

They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain;

for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord

as the waters cover the sea.

It is a strange picture, like the endearing quaintness of the early medieval pictures of saints and kings – the wolf and the lamb playing together, the calf and the lion… What it depicts is a life without fear.  Children are safe. This theme has been picked up by many, including Franklin D Roosevelt who listed four basic freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.  (It is ironic, then, that the USA is the only country not to have ratified the 1989 Convention of the Rights of the Child.)  Roosevelt’s list was enshrined in 1948 by the United Nations in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  The American artist Norman Rockwell movingly depicted children going off to bed free from fear.  These days it is more the case that we have to teach children danger-savvy, what to be afraid of and how to deal with it. Numerous United States children are taught to feel safe if there are guns in the house (and membership of the local gun club). How do children feel safe in Syria, or in any Kiwi home housing drugs and violence? 


The Christian scriptures convey the insight that it is fear, not hate, which is the opposite of love.  Hate is derivative from fear.  In contemplative life and prayer we tackle fear on deeper levels. What are you afraid of, asks Jesus – why are you afraid?  Love casts out fear, writes John[1]  Love and fear are mutually incompatible.  As fear takes over, love and peace, understanding, retreat.  We are learning, slowly it may be, to lay down the burden of fear so that fear is not ruling our lives, or determining our decisions.  Obviously there are times and situations in which fear is appropriate – we would be silly not to be afraid.  But that is different from a chronic fear of life, being afraid of tomorrow, afraid of difference, afraid of change, needing always first to feel safe…  Once again such a vision seems far out of reach – but it is the way Jesus invites his people to live, and in Advent at any rate we remind ourselves not to lose the vision, and to turn our steps in that direction.

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[1] eg. Matthew 14:27; 17:7; Mark 5:36; John 6:20; I John 4:18; Matthew 6:25-34

Advent I – Isaiah 2:2-4 - 29 November 2019

Rowan Williams says that in Advent we all become Jews once more.[1]  If all we do during Advent, then, in life and in worship, is sentimentally anticipate Christmas, we are missing a wonderful season… the sounds and songs of Advent.  So I thought it was time for some sublime Hebrew poetry – indeed, the four passages from Isaiah the Prophet set down for Advent readings this year.  Here is the first:

In days to come

the mountain of the Lord’s house will be established…

and will be raised above the hills;

all the nations will stream to it.

Many peoples will come and say,

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

to the house of the God of Jacob;

that he may teach us his ways, and that we may walk in his paths.”

…They will beat their swords into ploughshares,

and their spears into pruning-hooks;

nation will not lift up sword against nation,

neither will they learn war any more.[2]

This is some seven centuries before the time of Jesus.  Even back then the Jews are waiting, seeing in their hearts a better day, a reign of peace, an abandonment of cruelty and violence – and it must have seemed then, as it does now, a hopeless dream.  What they knew was, as Rowan Williams expresses it, a hunger to be spoken to, to be touched, to be judged and loved and absolved.

But, says the prophet, the first Advent requirement is that we take leave of our idols.  Idolatry is worshipping, giving ultimate value to what is not God.  Jesus called it, where your treasure is.  Isaiah in this same chapter says: On that day people will cast their idols of silver and of gold, which they made for themselves to worship, to the moles and to the bats.[3]  And so in contemplative prayer and life, in what may be a long and demanding process, our idolatries are being removed from usurping the place that belongs to God.
  

Notice too that, in Isaiah’s vision, the Lord’s House is open to all.  The Jerusalem temple wasn’t.  It is an end to Jewish exclusivism: all the nations will stream to it… many peoples will come… And what will happen at the Lord’s House…?  …They will beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither will they learn war any more.  Advent then is when we listen to Isaiah – we call our idolatries again into question; we question whatever in our faith excludes rather than includes; and we question the violence that may lurk in our actions or speech or our attitudes.  To borrow a modern trendy phrase, in Advent we are invited to live the dream.  It changes us, which is always what has to happen first.

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[1] Rowan Williams: A Ray Of Darkness (Cowley Publications 1995, p.5)

[2] Isaiah 2:2-4

[3] Isaiah 2:20

Christ the King – 22 November 2019

And so we arrive at the final Sunday of the liturgical year, Christ the King.  Yet again I had a look at the texts and imagery surrounding this day, mostly about victory, majesty and power... and yet again came back to, for instance, the dispute among the disciples as to who would be the greatest.[1]  Jesus tells them:  The kings of the gentiles lord it over them… But not so with you.  The greatest among you will become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves…  I am among you as one who serves.  


The Feast of Christ the King is actually a recent invention.  Pope Pius XI inaugurated it in 1922, not 100 years ago, in the wake of the First World War.  Europe was falling again into class and race divisions and militant nationalism, and the Pope sought to teach that it is Jesus who reigns as Prince of Peace, reconciling all to himself.  But Christ the King remains an image that resonates power and (some would insist) dominance and masculinity.  That may not be at all what Pope Pius intended, but a doctrinal formulation perhaps appropriate in 1922 may be seen now as simply replacing the power of politicians and demagogues and armies with the power of some christian imperialism...  Christ the King… based allegedly on love… except that, tragically, love is not what many now associate with the christian church.  And there are those of us who find it difficult to offer heart worship to a Christ in Glory, Christos Pantokrator, Christ Ruler of All, “exercising dominion over all creatures” (Cyril of Alexandria).
  

I am way out of my depth in all this.  That may already be evident.  Richard Rohr wheels in a theory in physics called Quantum Entanglement.  Sub-atomic particles seem to know and are able to react to each other while far apart, even though there is no imaginable means of communication between them.  So, it is thought, we can posit a mysterious force field of love and goodness, in which my loving thoughts or actions actually affect others far away – some people like to explain prayer this way.  Equally, evil or negative attitudes or actions produce corresponding negative reactions.  And these mysteries, some think, are a way of seeing the triumph and reign of Christ in power.  He rules by some such hidden, transcendental network.


For others of us, it is a more subtle thing, not enhanced by being explained or defined.  He reigns by love.   His reign is completely unlike that of any earthly ruler we have seen.  He knows our griefs and bears our sorrows.  He suffers our rejection of him.  He seeks the lost.  He fills judgement with mercy.  His power is never power of coercion.  His judgement is never condemnation.  His kingdom is not some “spiritual” version or replication of earthly kingdoms.  It is, Jesus told Pilate, not of this world.[2]  To be quietly at prayer, alone or with others, is to come to the threshold of this kingdom where Jesus reigns, and to start to hear its songs and to share its hopes and longings.  It is a matter of being present to him, as he is present, always, to us, to the end of the world.

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[1] Luke 22:24ff

[2] John 18:36

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

A field at Anathoth – 27 September 2019

Then my cousin Hanamel came to me in the court of the guard, in accordance with the word of the Lord, and said to me, “Buy my field that is at Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, for the right of possession and redemption is yours; buy it for yourself.” (Jeremiah 32:8)

There’s a very nice range of pickles and preserves in the supermarkets with the brand name Anathoth.  It is a Hebrew feminine plural noun and it means “answers”.  When you say I want answers, anathoth is what you want.  Jeremiah is standing there in the ruins of Jerusalem and the temple, the people being herded off into exile in Babylon, Judah now a vassal state of Nebuchadnezzar, Jeremiah is challenged to buy his cousin’s field at Anathoth.  It is scarcely a smart time to be buying real estate.  But Jeremiah buying that field is what we call proleptic prophecy.  Proleptic prophecy is an act of faith – Jeremiah buys the field as though Jerusalem were restored and all was peace and prosperity again.  In Hebrew faith however it was more than that… the gesture of buying the field mysteriously helped recovery and restoration to happen.  Jeremiah drove a stake in the ground.

And when Jesus’s followers in our day find ourselves willing to be different, unwilling to be deaf to the call we hear, to the scriptures we love, to the way that opens for us to walk…then we are anticipating another day of faith, which we may not live to see.  When in a clamorous, violent, confused, rancorous world we opt for the treasures of silence and stillness, humility and the ways of love… our feeble voices are speaking to the world from a better time and a better place.  We are buying a field at Anathoth.

Now hope that is seen is not hope.  For who hopes for what is seen?  But if we hope for what we do not see we wait for it with patience… words of St Paul.[1]  We don’t see the church of the future, and it’s hard to imagine.  What we do see is Jesus’s people, far more around the world than we realise, who respond instinctively to his way, his call, his placing his life on the line, his lack of arrogance.  Many are in the formal church, many not.  And they arise from every christian sect, or none, every ethnicity… as though those categories are less and less decisive any more, or helpful.

Waiting moreover is not some unfortunate choice thrust upon us.  It is purposeful waiting.  We need to learn it.  It is honouring God, who is encountered when we are still, and – to put it plainly -- have shut up.  Elijah on Mount Carmel encountered God not in the earthquake, wind and fire, but in what in the Hebrew translates as a silent voice of stillness.  As Jesus taught, the kingdom is already present, in our hearts and in our midst.  We join him there, as it were, on the field of Anathoth… as the writer to the Hebrews put it, the promise of things not seen.

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[1] Romans 8:25

Another kind of church – 20 September 2019

If you are allowed the Old Testament reading on Sunday, you will hear one of Jeremiah’s “lamentations”.  Judah is under prolonged siege by the armies of Babylon… cruel times, like today, where conflict destroys life and culture and leaves a wasteland.  Jeremiah is shattered by the result – the city is gone, crops and fields burned, the temple is in ruins, and the people are terrified, desperately needy, scattered everywhere.  My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land: “Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her King not in her?” The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored? (Jeremiah 8:18-22)

Sarah Bachelard, the Australian Anglican priest of the Benedictus Community in Canberra, gave five talks at the John Main Seminar in Vancouver last month.  She asked, how is the Christian church to be from now on?  It’s an interesting question for us, caught as we are now in a strangely similar context but in the 21^st century?  What are the church and christian profession for, as the climate teeters, as power is increasingly misused, truth made negotiable, as millions become displaced and prey to starvation and disease – and as the formal church in the west collapses, except in the meantime for where it is offering excitement, entertainment and credulity to needy people instead of faith, a kind of credulous idolatry that now needs to be named as such because however well-meaning in places it misrepresents the way of Jesus.

Another reality in all this for us is conflicting voices, different opinions, dividing people into parties and sects, deeply so in religion.  Then there is our natural reluctance to believe the facts.  We are products of a largely stable life and faith now deeply under threat.  So, asks Dr Bachelard, from her land of drought and bush fires, how do we respond to Jesus here? 

We have no complete answer, but contemplatives learn how to let go of what needs now to be thanked and discharged.  We let go, not with rancour or loss, but by grace and with grace, because this is one of the key ways the Spirit of the Risen Christ opens doors in us to growth and understanding.  At this kairos in history, says Dr Bachelard, we are letting go, for instance, of christian tribalism, denominationalism, us and them.  We let go of infantilism, the kind of religion that never grows up.  Of course, what we let go of won’t change anything much, except in ourselves.  But, says Dr Bachelard, whatever the church is like from now on, it will need to be a school for christian maturation, for making disciples who are teachable, open and humble and hospitable.  The way of Jesus is clear enough from the gospels, and we know that as we learn stillness and silence, and how to let go of what’s in the way, the Spirit of truth, as Jesus promised guides us into all the truth, from within.  No one knows whether we can save the planet, but again, contemplatives learn what the Psalmist knew, for instance: waiting and longing, and being what Jesus taught.