(Lenten series I,
Friday 4 March 2022)
In this series,
overall, we are thinking about where we currently find ourselves… living in a
time of crisis… environmental crisis, with all its immediacy in increasing
occurrence of natural disasters and their effects; pandemic crisis, affecting
our lives in so many ways; deep crisis in the church, so that at times we
scarcely recognise the company of Jesus in the world; crises in politics and
the conduct of public affairs, with warfare, naked unprovoked aggression,
refugees, and all the attendant disruption of homes and cities; crises in
morality and the effects of secularism and godlessness, so that lies become
truth, decency is pulled apart, public order is scorned… This is where we are now called to love God
and our neighbour, and to follow Jesus. It is these realities that thoughtful Christians
and congregations need to get our heads and hearts around. There are a couple of primary concerns for
this series – one is just that, our awareness of continuing crisis which is
already upon us, because it is possible to live in denial and pretend it’s not
there. The other is our need to
simplify. Jesus spoke plainly in his
teaching… it is his followers who get selective, complex and confused. So, these two things over the weeks of Lent –
our time of crisis, and our need to simplify.
Crisis, as it happens, is a Greek word and it means decision… it
is a time for making good decisions, learning discernment. And that word time… in Greek, kairos… you
remember kairos?... kairos is God’s time, God’s moment, time to
be sitting up and paying attention.[1]
I found it very
useful to turn to Sarah Bachelard.
Crisis, Sarah reminds us, is nothing new. It may be something we repeatedly encounter
in life… illness perhaps, breakup of a marriage, bereavement and grievous loss…
but painful and all as crises may be, life does go on, the world we inhabit is still
there afterwards as it was before. It is
possible still to find meaning. If you
know the Hebrew story of Job, you will remember how, first, he was deprived of
his family and his livelihood – and Job’s response is: Naked I came from my
mother’s womb, and naked I shall return there; the Lord gave and the Lord has
taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. Job is still able to find meaning. Then he is
afflicted with loathsome sores; he sits outside on the ash heap; he has lost
everything now including his self respect.
His wife incites him to curse God, and die… but Job replies: Shall
we receive the good at the hand of God, and not the bad? He can even yet find some meaning, however
flimsy. It is when his friends
come to sit with him for seven days and nights – the parish pastoral team, we might
say – with their wordy counsel, that Job crosses a line; he finds he can no
longer make sense of his life or beliefs.
He curses the day of his birth.
Now we have crisis of another order. Simone Weil describes this as
affliction, different in kind, she says, from pain and suffering.[2] Job’s world cannot now and will not be the
same. This crisis, says Sarah Bachelard,
is a turning point; life is not going to resume as it was. Do you find that disturbingly familiar…?
Of course the
crisis may be a “good” crisis – a new relationship perhaps, a truer vocation,
the relinquishing with relief of old plans or dreams. Either way however, good or bad, there has
been the loss of the narrative we knew and relied on. Our task now is to find God’s meaning in
God’s moment, God’s kairos. Do
not remember the former things, or consider the things of old, says God
through the Prophet Isaiah. I am
about to do a new thing, now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness, and
rivers in the desert… And that, I
think, is our task as the company of Jesus, onwards from 2022, amid the
collapsing of much we knew as familiar.
Life and faith are not going to be reinstated as we knew them. So what matters? What is essential for us to see, as Jesus’s
followers? That is what I expect to
pursue in these Lenten weeks, remembering that if we are able to keep it
simple, then it’s possible that we are not straying too far from the way of
Jesus. Simplicity rules! With that in mind, next Friday, we take a look
at what the Apostle John tells us is the one indispensable mark of Jesus’s
company, the essential resonance of Jesus’s followers.
[1] Greek’s
two words for “time” – chronos (χρόνος) is simply the time of day; kairos (καιρός) is “God’s moment”, the
special time when something is happening.
[2] The
French word is malheur. She
writes movingly: Affliction is the uprooting of life, a more or less
attenuated equivalent of death… The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness,
or at least to go on wanting to love… (The Love of God and Affliction).
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