Advent IV, A house of cedar – 18 December 2020

 

On the last Sunday in Advent the lectionary, somewhat surprisingly, provides a rather long Old Testament passage from II Samuel.  This is 1000 years before the time of Jesus.  King David is embarrassed, he says, because while he is living in comfort in a house of cedar, the sacred Ark of the Covenant, which houses the stone tablets recording the Ten Commandments, is still kept in a tent, just as it was during the 40 years of their wandering in the desert.  It is time, says David, when he should build a great temple in Jerusalem.  Nathan the prophet at first thinks that is a smart idea, but then God tells him otherwise…  Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, “Why have you not built me a house of cedar?”[1] The answer to God’s rhetorical question is No…  God is happy in a tent[2] -- as Nathan informs David the next day.  In any case, he says, if a magnificent temple is to be built, it will be done not by David but by David’s son, in years to come.

And so it was.  Solomon built the temple in about 957 BC.  The Queen of Sheba showed up for the opening with great panoply, later celebrated by George Frederick Handel. In the innermost part of the temple, the Holy of Holies, was kept the Ark of the Covenant with the tables of the Law.  It was surmounted by two gold angels whose wings formed a sheltering loop above the Ark – it was said that the Shekinah, God’s Presence, dwelt there at the heart of Israel.  This temple was destroyed in 586 BC at the time of the Exile in Babylon, rebuilt in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah.  This one, the Second Temple, was desecrated by the Hellenic king Antiochus Epiphanes, and later by the Romans. Herod built a Third Temple, and that was destroyed by the Roman army in 70 AD and has never been rebuilt.  By this time the Jews had long understood that God is present wherever they are, in the desert, in exile, diaspora, scattered around the world in synagogues or in ghettos, in Auschwitz or Ravensbrück – the God who is perfectly at home in a tent. 

Then, in John’s Gospel, Christian scripture, we find this statement:  The Word (Logos) was made flesh, and dwelt among us (John 1:14).  The Greek word dwelt is literally pitched his tent[3] among us.  John sees in the child in the manger at Bethlehem, God as it were in a tent among us, freedom camping, you might even say… sharing our trials, our wanderings, our destiny.  Here is the shekinah, the light of God’s presence, not in a house of cedar, but pitched where people are, in our anxieties and danger, in all our regrets and unresolved issues… 

I think I understand our attachment to fine buildings, great liturgy and music.  But the future of faith is, as it always was, with those who find him dwelling first in our hearts, in the deserts of our life and history, in our fears and disasters… and in our stillness and silence and awed wonder.

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[1] II Samuel 7:7

[2] Two Hebrew words used: ohel (אֹהֶל) is a tent; mishkan (מִשְׁכָּן) is a shepherd’s hut.

[3] eskēnōsen (ἐσκήνωσεν).  skēnē (σκηνη) is a tent.

Advent III, Grace and Truth – 11 December 2020

 

The lectionary this Sunday flips us over from Mark to John’s Gospel… From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.  The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.  No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. (John 1:16-18)

In John’s Gospel just about every word pulsates with meaning.  I think the trick with John is not to fret about whether I believe that or not, whether I can accept that – as though John were writing a manual of doctrine, rather than what he is writing, a kind of symphony in words of life with the risen Christ… The point is rather to see how closely, or distantly, at this time of my life, I can approximate to John’s ways of telling the story… telling us who Jesus is.  Mature faith has discovered a modicum of humility and that, when it comes to faith in Christ, what we do is approximate, rather than appropriate.

Here is an example:  No one has ever seen God… Well, that’s simple enough, obvious enough.  The Jews have usually got that right.  It’s Christians who want images and concepts, descriptions and definitions.  What is your concept of God is a question a Jew would be disinclined to ask.  But then John writes: It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.  Now we have to make a decision.  God the only Son…?  Jesus did not describe himself quite that way.  But it is what John is discovering – it is the risen Christ, as we encounter him in life, who lifts the veil, somewhat, and we can see something true of the Creator and Sustainer of all, the Father of love, grace and truth, the merciful judge.  So John writes: It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart[1]… he has made him known. 

So let’s look again at John’s song of incarnation.  From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.  The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.  Everything that Jews love and obey in the sacred Law is now born (borne) in a human child to human parents, incarnate, made flesh, our flesh.  Jeremiah had prophesied centuries before[2]: I will put my law within them, I will write it on their hearts.  Grace and truth, writes John, grace upon grace… he is right at the edge of what words can do, and we learn here yet again that it is nothing to do with deserving or undeserving, chosen people or not.  God creates in grace and love and restores in grace and love.  However the universe is made in all its power, wideness, mystery and complexity, that is its theme and purpose.  We are known and loved.

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[1] Heart is a euphemism.  Kolpos (κόλπος) in Greek means the womb, sometimes the bosom (hence the English colposcopy)… all a little strange if applied to God the Father.  But here John indicates the uttermost intimacy and oneness between Father and Son.  (And in our group this morning, one member pointed out that it is incongruent only if we ascribe gender to God...)

[2] Jeremiah 31:33

Advent II, Locusts and Wild Honey – 4.12.2020

 

Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.  He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.  I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” (Mark 1:6-8)

John the Baptist has always seemed to me an awkward item in the gospel narrative, not made easier by his clothing or his diet.  He defies category.  Was he Jewish?  I assume he was, but he would have been somewhat conspicuous in the synagogues.  Was he Christian? pre-Christian? proto-Christian?  And then… camel’s hair…?  Well, I come wearing sheep’s wool or a snug possum fibre mix, in winter.  Locusts and wild honey…?  I believe locusts are nourishing, but why ruin good honey?   John is conducting a rite of baptism in water, in the river.  That symbolism is as old as religion… you go down into the water with all your sins, and you rise out of the water to new life, pardoned and free.  It is an ancient way of shedding guilt, and of initiation to a new life. 

John’s main purpose however, as Mark insists, is to point away from himself…  John announces a coming one, vastly superior, he says.  I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.  I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.  This is to be something more than the forgiveness of sins, something essentially different.   

Camel’s hair, locusts and wild honey, the more I think about it, do seem to signal a distancing from the socially respectable or acceptable norms of synagogue or church, but equally from many of the expectations of secular culture and lifestyle.  Lately we have been thinking of it as moving to the edge of centre.  Jesus invites us into his company.  And in that company the distinguishing feature is the (usually) gentle, subtle but pervasive power of the Holy Spirit of God to inspire, to change things from the inside, to strengthen and enliven and renew… to recreate, to restore the image of God… the true self.  It is a company in which social and ethnic differences become no longer divisions.  The issues of sin and guilt in our lives come to be seen now in the context of love, mercy and grace.  Humility and service take precedence over power, might, mana and prestige. 

In a time like ours, when even water baptism is largely cast aside as pointless, or relegated to something Granny would like you to do for the children – or if it’s adult baptism by immersion, it’s likely to denote entry into a limited world of fundamentalist faith in any of the many forms that takes… in such a time, we do well, I think, to share some of the vision John had, of the One who would baptise with Holy Spirit, inspiring life from within, displacing ego to its proper place, a life led by Jesus, living simply.  In the incomparable words of the Prophet Micah: Doing justice, loving mercy, walking humbly…  And in one of Paul’s many ways of expressing it:  Practising faith, hope and love, these three, the greatest being love.

Advent I, Stay awake – 27 November 2020

 

From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.  So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates… But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.  Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.  It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch.  Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.  And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.  (Mark 13:28-29, 32-37)

Our neighbour grew a fig tree at our boundary, outside our kitchen window.  And true enough, it produces leaves, then fruit, signalling summer.  I for one am grateful for these simple signposts.  From the fig tree learn its lesson…  The lesson according to Jesus is, Wake up!  He is very much in favour of being awake.  Some years ago I was staying with my cousin and her German family in Freiburg.  They had two hefty sons in late adolescence.  And one morning I heard their mother getting them out of bed – she called Wachet Auf! – Wake Up!  It took me by surprise because that is the title of an old German Advent hymn, which Bach set to a famous chorale.  The hymn pictures the watchmen on the ramparts, needing to be awake, straining to see the first light of dawn.  Stay awake, Jesus repeats… you don’t know what is going to happen… be alert!  The last thing you want is to be found asleep. 

Jesus links this need for wakefulness with knowing what the time[1] is, as we say – what is going on… summer is near…  Sometimes we don’t know what day of the week it is.  I have another cousin, a lovely person, who has no idea what is going on in the world, or why it’s happening, never pays attention to the news, has nothing to say if you mention particular people or events.  At the same time, her up-to-date knowledge of local people and gossip is encyclopaedic.  Well, perhaps her charism, as we say, is more local and social than global and political. 

In discipleship, awake means also being alert to the effect our words and actions have on other people.  In the silence and stillness of contemplative life and prayer we increase our sensitivity to how others are feeling and reacting.  We learn to suspend reaction or response, but rather to be silent and still, and to wait.  We take leave of any need to respond verbally to everything we see or hear, especially with stories of what happened to me… because we are awake, first, to the other person’s struggle and the load they bear, not so much with solutions as with presence, and with God who is the healer.  So the prayer we practise, for all its stillness and silence, in fact wakes us up.  We are ready to listen, compliant to change, humbler, better equipped, open rather than defensive, less afraid of life…

Mark recorded these sayings at a time when the believers widely expected Jesus would return at any time.  We are long past that.  But Jesus’s requirements remain – you don’t ever know what is around the corner.  Being awake is quite a good idea… rather than day-dreaming, living in dreams and fantasies, dining out on memories, or living in fear.  Being awake is being in touch with reality, with the facts of life and death, and with presence and grace of God in it all.

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[1] The Greek word used is our old friend kairos.

Compunction - 20 November 2020

 

Compunction, I think, is not a word we use frequently.  If you say you have no compunction about doing something, you probably mean that you think you can do it, or say it, without hesitation or guilt… You may mean that even if you have hesitation, you will do it all the same. 

Compunction however is quite an important word in monastic circles – and none of that is what the monks mean by compunction.  Thomas Merton says:  The clear-sighted recognition and mature acceptance of our own limitations is called compunction.  Compunction is a spiritual grace, an insight into our own depths which, in one glance, sees through our illusions about ourselves, sweeps aside our self-deceptions and daydreams, and shows us ourselves exactly as we are.  But at the same time it is a movement of love and freedom, a liberation from falsity, a glad and grateful acceptance of the truth...[1]

Well then, there is a bit of a problem… the litany for Ash Wednesday, for instance –Pour out a spirit of compunction… That is certainly about guilt.  The church, Catholic and Protestant, has a long-standing investment in guilt – either the guilt you feel over something you did or said, or didn’t do, or the anticipated guilt, the compunction, which might stop you doing it.  But here are the monks saying compunction is not about guilt, it is about knowing ourselves… as Merton puts it: a clear-sighted recognition and mature acceptance of our own limitations. 

I think Merton chose his words carefully.  Clear-sighted recognition comes first.  Here we are in the realm of grown-up faith, which is faith beyond dreams and day-dreams, fantasies and power-plays.  It is the faith that now knows with relief and gratitude that I do not rule the world or even my small corner of it.  I am not a stable genius.  It is not appropriate for me to make dogmatic statements, pronouncements or judgements.  Growing up, maturing in faith, brings better clear-sightedness.  I am aware of what I do not know, and of former opinions I have had to revise.  I hesitate now to say much – I would rather listen and think.  That is clear-sighted recognition…  Merton says it is a gift of grace, and it is a freedom, a release.

Then he says, mature acceptance of our own limitations.  This is when we realise, not only that we don’t know everything, but that we needn’t expect to – we are setting self aside, we are relinquishing the need to be superior.  If we lead, it is as Jesus said as one who serves.[2]  We are learning to live in mystery and wonder.  We can reflect upon ourselves.  We can stop trying to control other people.    

You see yet again how counter-cultural all this is.  If we understand compunction in the sense that not only the monks but all contemplatives do, then we can see also how it flows from a discipline of silence and stillness, distancing from the ego, the public self… more importantly, finding the self God sees, the self God made to be free.

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[1] Thomas Merton: The Silent Life

[2] Luke 22:27

Talents – 13 November 2020

 

The Parable of the Talents, the gospel reading for this Sunday (Matthew 25:14-30), is too long for me to read it here.  But that is only the first of its problems.  You recall… a wealthy man called three of his servants; gave one five talents, another one two, and the third just one talent.  Now this in itself stretches belief.  A talent was actually a measure of weight, and a talent of gold roughly equalled 6000 denarii in the coinage of the day.  One denarius was one day’s pay for a labourer.  So the first servant got the equivalent of 30,000 days’ pay.  The master then went away, it says, and the servants were expected to invest these talents and make a profit.  The master returns.  The first servant has doubled the investment, and so has the second.  The third servant, being timid, had buried his talent in the ground, and now he can hand it back entire and safe.  He gets fired and cast into outer darkness, while the other two are put in charge of many things. 

Now if this were a church parade of the Chamber of Commerce, I expect they would be quite happy and on familiar ground.  I always thought, when this parable came around in the lectionary, I should get the church treasurer to preach.  Anyone but me…  You don’t have to be a Christian to know you should use and develop your talents, not bury them in the ground. 

But is that what Jesus is saying?  We have a clue in the fact that the talents entrusted to servants were ridiculously valuable.  The servants would never have handled such wealth.  There is another clue in the fact that each servant received a different quantity of talents – the talents were not equally or equitably allocated.  We have a third clue in the fact that the master goes away, and returns for a reckoning.  So there is to be accountability. 

But I think St Paul gives us the most convincing way of looking at this parable.  In Paul’s First Letter to the church at Corinth he finds it necessary to make some pungent comments.  They had been dividing into parties, some for Paul, some for Apollos, and so on, as though life and faith were a game with winners and losers.  That may sound familiar, in this political and populist time…  Our conversation and news reporting, you may have noticed, have become full of sporting metaphors, some of them quite violent and uncompromising.  Paul will have none of this among Jesus’s followers.  Some of their leaders had been getting, in Paul’s word, puffed up[1]… and Paul rapidly deflates them:  What makes you different? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast…?  What does any of us have that we did not receive… the beating heart, the blood circulation, the bodily senses, the versatile brain, the capacity for love, the ability to reflect, the possibility of wisdom, the grace of gratitude, of reverence, of stepping aside or of fronting up… did we create any of these things…?  These are talents we were given, in varying degrees indeed, but in greater magnitude than we realise… to use and to develop.  I am not so sure what to say about eventual accountability… except that along the road we have discovered grace and mercy.  In the end, at any accounting, it will be love that is the winner.

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[1] Greek φυσιόω  (phusioō) – to inflate, to boast or brag. Surprisingly prevalent.

Dies irae – 6 November 2020

 

The lectionary next Sunday provides this somewhat timely passage from the prophet Amos as an alternative reading…  Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord!  Why do you want the day of the Lord?  It is darkness, not light; as if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear; or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall, and was bitten by a snake.  Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light, and gloom with no brightness in it?  I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.  Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon.  Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.  But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.[1]

Well, in our day we are unlikely to cower in terror from Amos’s God of Wrath, or what he calls the Day of the Lord.  Dies Irae – Day of Wrath – is a medieval (or earlier) Latin hymn intended to scare us into righteousness.  You may know it from the high drama of Mozart’s or Verdi’s Requiem Mass, replete with trumpets and big drums.  Vatican II removed most of the Dies Irae from the Requiem Mass, but the very last verse, Pie Jesu, has become a trendy solo for boy soprano. 

Jesus does not depict a God of Wrath.  God is to be loved and served.  Jesus depicts a Creator of love and faithfulness, a forgiving God, who nevertheless requires what Amos says is essential… justice and righteousness.  Justice is to roll down like waters – it is to be there, and it is to be there for everyone, it is not to be manipulated or bought; justice is there to set things right, never to promote privilege or to be at the beck and call of the powerful.  Righteousness in Hebrew understanding is right relationships – you care for the widow, the orphan and the stranger.  Time after time, in the Hebrew prophets, God is depicted as witheringly contemptuous of worship and sacrifice if it is not accompanied by justice and righteousness.  My Father’s house, said Jesus in the Jerusalem temple, is to be called a house of prayer for all people, but you have made it a den of thieves.[2]

Justice and righteousness suffer whenever religion is co-opted into the service of the powerful or the privileged.  Religion becomes distorted, even corrupted, to other requirements… whether we are thinking of the religion of Constantine, or the co-opting of Islam in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, or of Hinduism in India, or Buddhism in Thailand or Myanmar… or protestant evangelicalism in  the USA.  The proper place for faith is on the edges of the inside, where it is fed by simplicity and silence, where people are free to live without walls and divisions, labels and discrimination.  In the words of the writer to the Hebrews: Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured.  For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.[3]

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[1] Amos 5:18-24

[2] Matthew 21:13; Mark 11:17; Luke 19:46

[3] Hebrews 13:13-14

Living liminally…3 – 30 October 2020

 

I am not sure that a protestant should be pointing this out, but the current Pope does seem (in some respects) to be living liminally, moving at times away from the inside towards the edge.  His latest thoughts on same-sex civil unions is a case in point.  So in response we have multiple priests and prelates protesting in high indignation from the inside of the inside, and at least one archbishop urging us to pray for the soul of Pope Francis.  I think his soul is OK… what interests me yet again is the principle, that the more we distance from the inside, the more clearly we are able to see and know and love Jesus and his teachings in their simplicity.  In the apocryphal Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the risen Jesus tells his disciples… find contentment at the level of the heart… And he adds:  Beyond what I have already given you, do not lay down any further rules nor issue laws as the Lawgiver, lest you be dominated by them.[1]

It reminds me of St Paul, writing to the Galatian church in exasperation – they had been turning back from the simplicity of the Way of Christ, to the familiar rules and forms of Judaism, to authority, to making barriers and building walls, defining truth, deciding who is in and who is out… and Paul writes:  O you foolish Galatians!  Who bewitched you?  …Now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian… you have clothed yourselves with Christ.  There is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female – all are one in Christ Jesus.[2]  And that, it seems to me, is more or less what Pope Francis and others are seeing and saying from where they are.  It is the view from the edge of the inside that moved the Desert Fathers and Mothers after Constantine made the church and the faith official.  I think of the Beguines, women, mostly in Belgium and the Netherlands, from the late Middle Ages until today, who distanced themselves from clericalism and patriarchy, much to the consternation of the bishops, in order to live in community simply, freely, and in service to others, in response to Jesus.  Or the Quakers, the quiet folk who call themselves the Society of Friends – they date from the 17^th century, and in simple response to Jesus they make a sacrament of silence, they renounce violence, and their doors are open to anyone of good faith... Christlike characteristics, you might say.

You may be puzzled – you may want to come to the defence of the church – and I certainly understand that.  There have always been plenty of good and saintly people in the church, I know.  The distribution of grace and goodness is always a surprise.  But around Jesus there is a strange force that points us away from certainty and comfort, to where the wind is blowing somewhat, and new things appear.  One day he does not seem to be present at the altar rail, so much as waiting and speaking, perhaps in silence and stillness, far away from there.  And that, I would think, is the point of contemplative life and prayer.

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[1] Gospel of Mary Magdalene, p.9:1-4

[2] Galatians 3:1, 25-28.  Ὦ ἀνόητοι Γαλάται…!

Living liminally…2 – 23 October 2020

 

In the year 313 AD, with the Edict of Milan, the Roman Emperor Constantine made Christianity the state religion and forbad persecution.  No doubt he assumed the Christians would be grateful.  Father Richard Rohr says it may have been the single most unfortunate thing that ever happened to Christianity.  We moved from the margins of society, from maybe 2½ centuries of living at the limits, to the centre, to the place of power.  A lot of the church would have celebrated this – calamitously missing the point.  But Fr Richard says we developed a film over the eyes… After that, we couldn’t read anything that showed Jesus in confrontation with the establishment, because we were the establishment, and usually egregiously so. Clear teaching (by Jesus) on issues of greed, powerlessness, nonviolence, non-control, and simplicity were moved to the sidelines, if not actually countermanded.

And so, one of the astonishing facts of Christian history, many believers, not grateful at all, began to migrate from the cities to remoter parts of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Cappadocia… the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 4^th and 5^th centuries.  We will come to them later, and we will mention others in history who disestablished themselves in order (as Bishop Richard of Chichester put it) to see thee more clearly, love thee more dearly, follow thee more nearly, day by day.[1]  Richard of Albuquerque states simply that in the Sermon on the Mount, which begins with the Beatitudes, we see that Jesus assumed his followers would be at the margins… otherwise these scriptures don’t make sense.  It is our habitat, it is where we are called to be.

If we reflect on our own experiences of church and discipleship over the years, is it not possible that God has been speaking God’s word to us in what we assumed were the negativities… the uninvited guilt-laden doubts; the times we interiorly disagreed or disliked; the times we went home feeling angry, sad, alienated; the times when something that should have happened didn’t; the church leaders, movers, shakers, who let us down in some way… but also the realisation that the church we knew actually had little to offer the people we knew, out towards the margins; our sense that something was wrong but we didn’t know what it was; the realisation that what was once a comfort zone isn’t any more; our instinctive distrust of certainty and any whiff of hypocrisy, or self-righteousness, or the smug hymns of the saved and safe…?  This, in all its variations, degrees and nuances, reflects life and discipleship at the edge of the inside, where the view… is better, wider, but we could do at times with a bit of reassurance.  The good news is, in all this we are hearing the Word of God who speaks in our circumstances.  It is not primarily about why the young people are not going to church – it is about why we are not, or why at times we wish we hadn’t.  It is about us, at our age and stage.   And I am suggesting that we are indeed hearing God’s Word, where we are, and how we are – and that the primary task, the initial  and essential task at present, is to know how to be still, and wait, pay attention and listen.

At the margins moreover we face our questions.  This may be costly and brave.  Things are not right simply because Bible or Church Authority says they are, but because we find it so in silence and solitude, humility and love… measuring by the way of Christ.  We learn to discern things differently, out towards the margins…   

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[1] Prayer attributed to Richard, Bishop of Chichester (1197-1253).  When King Henry III denied him access to the cathedral and to the bishop’s palace, Richard spent two years wandering barefoot through his diocese, living very simply on the charity of his flock.

Living liminally…1 – 16 October 2020

 

Father Richard Rohr is a Franciscan based in Albuquerque, New Mexico – and if you ask him about the church he says he lives on the edge of the inside.  Some of us know that territory quite well these days… the edge of the inside.  We have done lots of things in the church and there have been some good and meaningful times.  But somehow in the process, even just in our thoughts, we have moved centrifugally towards the edge where we find we are seeing some new things.  And that is Fr Richard’s first point on  the subject of living liminally.  Limen in Latin is the doorway, the line between inside and outside, the threshold.  Inside we may be warm, housed, fed and sheltered, even feel safe.  On the boundary it gets different.  Inside we belong, and there are familiar patterns and rituals.  But also, inside, there are things we don’t see so clearly, a lot that we miss by being inside, even get wrong – as Isaiah the Hebrew prophet put it long ago, the people listen but don’t comprehend, look but don’t understand.[1]  That is a hazard of belonging, whether it is belonging enthusiastically to a church, or to the American people, or any sort of fervent nationalism… a political party it may be, or a charmed family circle or tribe, or any cosy culture… Rosemary Clooney put it succinctly:

Am I not seein’ things too clear
Am I just too far gone (in) to hear
Is it all goin’ in one ear and out the other

Moving to the margins however, we may find freer air, we may look back and start to recognise the system’s idolatries, says Fr Richard, its lies, its shadow side – in trendy sporting metaphor, the playing field opens up for us.  And so it is that from ancient times prophets, mystics, some of our best theologians, not to mention many ordinary folk, have found… ourselves coming to the edge of the inside, declining now to be co-opted by any system.  There are, Fr Richard points out, what he calls softer forms of this, like people who are not entranced by TV “infotainment”, people who decline to be trendy, who moderate their income and possessions, people who make prayer a part of their lives, people who place themselves in risky situations for the greater good.  It is ironic that we must go to the edge, often, to find the centre.  And it is a fact that, on the boundaries it becomes easier to see and respond to Jesus and to the Word of God.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus depicts himself as the Door, the Gate of the Sheepfold.  He does mean initially that he is the way in… indeed he may have meant he is the only way in.  But then it says… he leads them out.[2]  His flock go in and out and find pasture.  We can venture beyond the sheepfold because, it says, we know his voice.  Jesus may indeed be in the tabernacle, but at the boundaries and beyond, out in the desert, amid strife and hardship, among the marginalised, in places where, in Rudyard Kipling’s rugged words, there ain’t no ten commandments, we can hear and recognise the voice of the shepherd, and know to whom we belong. 

So, now we will have a little series on Living Liminally… and I am hoping for the wisdom of others who, like me, have been doing this already for some time.

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[1] Isaiah 6:9.  Jesus quotes this in Mark 8:18.

[2] John 10:3-5, 9

Don’t worry, be happy – 9 October 2020

 

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.  Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.  Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.  And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:4-7)

This is the Epistle for next Sunday.  But first, a problem: Let your gentleness be known to everyone.  The Greek epieikes (ἐπιεικὲς) might mean gentleness, but Paul means more than that: declining to react, reluctance to engage in a dispute, willingness to let it go.

The emphatic verb here, however, as you heard, is Rejoice!  Double rejoicing, in fact… Paul writes, Again I say, rejoice!   I have a memory of Music I at Auckland University, 1954, Professor Holinrake, and he made us sing this whole text in Henry Purcell’s The Bell Anthem… with decidedly mixed results.[1]  Rejoicing is what happens when you know that everything that can be right, right now, is right.  Other things may be far from right.  But you are held at this inner space in love and in order.  Rejoicing is when the heart and not merely the liturgy says sursum corda, you may lift up your hearts… as when Etty Hillesum writes from Westerbork on her way to Auschwitz: There is a really deep well inside me.  And in it dwells God.  Sometimes I am there, too …  And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.  Rejoicing is not feeling happy – it is finding the inner place where all is well.

Then Paul writes, Do not worry about anything.  Some people worry about everything.  Some observe a kind of law which says that the amount you worry tells everyone the amount you care... but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.  I really don’t think this is going to God with a shopping list.  Our needs are known.  Wisdom however includes a keen sense of what is not going to change… and so we begin the process of letting go.  Everyone knows what the alcoholics call the Serenity Prayer – not everyone knows that it was written by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and what he wrote was this:

God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things which should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time,
accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it,
trusting that You will make all things right, if I surrender to Your will,
so that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
and supremely happy with You forever in the next.

Paul goes on: And the peace of God… the shalom of God… which surpasses all understanding…  That word “understanding” in Greek is nous (νοῦς) which has entered the English language as nous[2], meaning mind, intellect.  God’s gift of peace/shalom is just as likely to be despite events and the state of things, as to be because of them.  It is not cause and effect, so it is not accessible to our understanding -- it is grace, not a matter of achievement or deserving, but a gift of love. 

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[1] You can find The Bell Anthem sung properly on You Tube.

[2] The Greek rhymes with loose, the English rhymes with louse.

Profit and loss – 2 October 2020

Today our Warkworth Christian Meditation group was able to resume actual meetings within the Covid-19 restrictions.

Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ, and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. (Philippians 3:7-9)

Paul had thought it necessary to provide these Philippians with his impeccable credentials as a Jew – there must have been a number of Jewish Christians in Philippi -- so he wrote: Circumcised the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a pharisee; as to zeal a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.  But then he selects the language of trade and commerce, and we get: Whatever assets I had I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.  The balance sheet accounting words are there in the Greek – profit/gains is kerdos ( κέρδος) and loss is zēmia (ζημία)… and soon there is a third word which accountants might use in fraught moments.

The point is that for Paul there came a turnaround which can only be described as conversion.  His meritorious life, with its credits and assets, has been occupied now by Christ.  A takeover.  The new owner, Christ, has priority now over all Paul’s assets – indeed, some of them seem to Paul not assets any more but loss.  And this is where he uses a third word, a Greek colloquialism, for these former assets, skubala (σκύβαλα), which can mean either scraps you throw to the dogs, or what you have to pick up when walking your dogs.

It’s hyperbole… It is not quite the way we might word our relationship with Jesus, with God in Christ.  We would be, I think, refined, conservative, polite, and a little more respectful of our native gifts.  Martin Luther said his heart was now captive… he belonged to Christ as a slave belongs.  Paul says in another place[1], It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

Yet for many of us such talk is a bit of an embarrassment.  But that is not to deny the reality.  Contemplative life and prayer gently and steadily broadens and deepens the bond with Christ, until it dawns on us that there is no going back.  The grace and love which are now occupying us is different in many ways for each of us, but the common factor is our discovery that now we are captured by the mystery and the adventure of faith, that there are aspects of faith which move us to the core – can it be, we wonder, that Jesus has come and taken residence, abiding in us as he said…?  If so, we spend the rest of our lives finding out what that means in practice, what it is like to live in faith, hope and love… these three, as Paul put it.

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[1] Galatians 2:20

Two sorts of religion - 25 September 2020

 

The Gospel next Sunday presents us with this curious little parable: A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’  He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went.  The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go.  Which of the two did the will of his father?”  (Matthew 21:28-31)

Perhaps in today’s climate there‘s nothing very strange in that story.  Each son changed his mind later.  You’re allowed to do that… indeed, you hear it stated as a kind of sovereign freedom: “Well, I changed my mind!”  On the other hand, in politics for instance, changing your mind gets labelled immediately as doing a U-turn, or flip-flopping, a sign of weakness and prevarication.  “Never back down” is seen as a sign of strength, even when you were plainly wrong. 

This is the passage where Jesus goes on to inform the chief priests and the elders that the tax collectors and the prostitutes get into the kingdom of heaven before they do – scarcely, one would think, a career enhancing statement.  But there are indeed these two types of religion.  The religion of the temple priests and the elders, the scribes and pharisees, as Jesus saw it, is giving lip service to all the fine precepts of faith, but not actually doing it.[1]  Jesus’s truth is not allowed anywhere near the part of them where vital decisions are made and actioned. They see religion as something to be professed, but living it is a private and personal matter and no one else’s business.  The other sort is what Jesus can see in the tax-collectors and the prostitutes.  They may have no time or inclination at all for religion and its lofty principles – but in some important ways, they do what God requires.  Of course it is not always so – you can’t generalise like that.  There are however these two approaches to religion.  The appearance of faith and the generally reassuring practice of its rites and rituals, along with a general public decency and charitable works, suits some people fine.  ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go.

The other approach flows out of repentance and faith.  The tax collectors at that time were men who contracted with the Roman government to collect all taxes.  By extortion they were able to make a good living out of it.  And we know how the prostitutes lived.  These are the ones who may have no use for the church, but Jesus could see in them much that is coming from God, however disguised, distorted, defaced at times… their neediness, their suffering, their hidden strivings and wishes… like the tax gatherer who stood at the back of the temple and prayed, Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.[2] 

As Jesus told it: He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went.  No doubt I have over-simplified, but the Apostle James picks up this same theme when he writes: …those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing.[3]  Our Christian Meditation, indeed our Christian discipleship, is not about religion.  It is not about the way we feel.  It is about loving God, our neighbour and ourselves... about doing justice, loving mercy, walking humbly.[4]

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[1] See Matthew 23:2-7

[2] Luke 18:9-14

[3] James 1:25

[4] Luke 10:27; Micah 6:8

A radiance of his presence - 18 September 2020

 

Thomas Keating was a Trappist monk, a Cistercian of the Strict Observance.  He died two years ago aged 94.  I met him when he was the speaker at the John Main Seminar in San Francisco in 1998.  So much for the name-dropping…  Somewhere in Keating’s many writings I came across his comments on a passage in the First Letter to Timothy, and in particular on this sentence:  God… alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.[1]

The church would do better to be more reticent about God.  Much that we hear, whether it is from statements of belief or from the loopier wings of fundamentalism, simply makes sensitive followers of Christ cringe.  As we keep saying, we need to identify idolatry for what it is… making God, one way or another, inevitably some replica of ourselves.  Our idea of God, wrote Thomas Merton, tells us more about ourselves than about God.  That is why the Hebrews in ancient times recorded what we know as the Second Commandment, which forbids any image of God because, however holy and exalted, it cannot be other than a distortion. 

Timothy is reminded that God dwells in inaccessible light.  Faith proceeds by unknowing… by sight unseen.  Keating writes:  Anything that we perceive of God can only be a radiance of (God’s) presence and not God as (God is).[2]  It is, he says, something like the effect of a prism… as though the divine light is separated into the varied colours of a spectrum, and what we may “see”, one way or another, is one radiance, one aspect, of the Ultimate Mystery.  In the cute imagery of the ancient writings, Moses on Mount Sinai saw only the “back parts” of the divine presence.[3]

St Paul writes that Jesus is the image of the invisible God.[4]  “Image” in the Greek is icon (εἰκων).  Icons are not central in western Christian spirituality and worship, but they are certainly central and crucial are in eastern Orthodox Christianity.  An icon is not intended as an oil painting or any other kind of graphic art.  The point about any icon is to see through it, as it were, glimpses, radiances, of the divine light and truth.[5] 

The Apostle John makes it clear:  No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.[6]  Love, with its attendant truth and understanding, freedom, unity and peace, is the infallibly recognisable radiance of God.  In our kind of world it may indeed be fleeting and fragile.  But we “see” with the eye of the heart.  We see others also opening to truth and grace, in love, and becoming able like true pilgrims to share the light they have found along the road.

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[1] I Timothy 6:16

[2] Thomas Keating: The Daily Reader for Contemplative Living

[3] Exodus 33:20-23.  It is best in the KJV.

[4] Colossians 1:15

[5] See for instance, Rowan Williams: The Dwelling of the Light (Canterbury Press, 2003)

[6] I John 4:12