Beautiful feet – Lent I, 12 February 2016

For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”  (Romans 10: 12-15)

(At the risk of skiting… that last sentence after all those rhetorical questions is a textbook example of the figure of speech called metonymy, or perhaps synecdochy.  I don’t think anyone ever teaches these things these days.  And human feet are not normally depicted as beautiful.)

This is the Epistle for this Sunday, Lent I.  In a world such as ours is, and is becoming, relentlessly splitting between rich and poor, Moslem and Christian or Jew, white and coloured, lawful and lawless, right-wing and left-wing, old and young, and still in places male and female, St Paul’s insistence to the Roman church of his day seems clear enough if you profess to be a Christian.  In the faith of Christ such distinctions, divisions, are out of order.  You cannot proclaim Jesus, you cannot teach the way of Christ, you cannot live authentically as a Christian, in partiality or discrimination.  There is neither Jew nor Greek… refers to the major religious distinction in Paul’s day.   Paul stresses this in two or three places.

And that, he says, is good news.  Of course, it carries all manner of risks.  People who prefer to eliminate risk from their lives therefore find ways to ration the indiscriminate grace of God.  The favourite course is to say in subtle or unsubtle ways, you need to be righteous, or you need to be like us.  The corollary is often:  If you do what we say you will become like us… happy, wealthy, successful...  The good news is that God in Jesus pulls down these walls and requirements, supersedes the divisions we have made and so often fiercely defend.

A discipline of contemplative life and prayer alters our attitudes to fences and boundaries, walls and self-protection.  We may not have the slightest idea how myriads of people, all different from each other and from us in all sorts of ways, can live together in community in peace and respect.  But we nevertheless find the fear of difference being removed from our hearts by grace.  We find ourselves increasingly open to the new, while being at the same time as grateful as ever for the past and the old and the familiar.  The Spirit of Jesus, who seemed never to hesitate to cross boundaries and befriend outcasts, whose closest friends included women and tax-collectors and social riff-raff, is the Spirit we consent to in the stillness and silence of our prayer.

Following Jesus – Epiphany 5, 5 February 2016

When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him. (Luke 5:11)

It is one of those many New Testament narrative pictures which requires our gifts of imagination, however unused they may normally be.  Literalism, naivete, credulity will never get it.  I can remember, as a youth, wondering how realistic it actually was – these Galilean men, hovering always just above the poverty line, needing to earn livelihoods to house and feed their families and themselves, men with skills and responsibilities, suddenly now dropping it all to follow Jesus.  Occasionally we have encountered someone who did exactly that… I knew a trained nurse who chose to go off more or less penniless to an Asian country to bring people to Jesus.  They didn’t want to be brought to Jesus.  In about six months she was back, disillusioned, defeated and ill. 

We now know that God honours the life we already have, where we are, with its achievements, failures and commitments.   Our understanding of Christian vocation and the call of Christ is that it will be, most likely, or at any rate will start, within the life we are living.  Our discipleship will be exercised and grow in situ.  When I made a bright-eyed decision to become a minister, and show the world what ministers should be like, I was working as a journalist.  My first action was to write to my uncle, a minister in the USA, to announce to him this important news.  He replied, “I get a little tired of youngsters who don’t know much, announcing I’m now going to be a real Christian -- I’ll become a minister…!   Years later when a whole class of us finally qualified and graduated from theological college, and were about to go forth and be ordained, the acerbic and wonderful Principal of the Theological Hall addressed us.  Gentlemen, he said, I beg you, do not delude yourselves that the church and the world have been waiting with bated breath for this moment.

So, what did Peter and Andrew, James and John, really do back then in response to Jesus?  Certainly, it looks as though they didn’t do much fishing, any more.  It does look as though they became fulltime disciples in Jesus’s company – which we now are learning was much wider and more varied than just those twelve men.  Then, as the church tells it, they became apostles who witnessed around the world to the resurrection and the life.  But the fact is, most people whose hearts became captive to Christ worked it out and lived it right where they were – and they still do.  The primary shift in us is not geographic, or irresponsible.  It happens over the years ahead in our inmost being, where we are most ourselves, where love is born and sometimes can die, the most deeply sensitive part of us God knows and loves, the place Jesus called where your treasure is. 

That is the door we open in Christian Meditation.  It is safe to open the door in the silence and stillness, and in the company of sometimes very different people doing much the same. 

Advent and two photos - Advent IV, 18 December 2015

I confess that I have little affinity with the prescribed readings for Advent IV.  Mary sings the Magnificat for us, Elizabeth sings the Benedictus, just as the church prescribes.  It’s lovely, it’s familiar, it’s poetic, it is often set to music, and all is well.  All we wait for now is the magic of Christmas Eve.

But as we know, all is not well.  Nothing, not the most sublime Magnificat, makes up for two photos I saw.  The first showed a very small North African child, maybe three years old.  The child is naked, starved and hopelessly dehydrated, kneeling collapsed with head on the ground, drained of all energy.  Behind this child is a vulture, waiting until breathing stops.  I presume the photographer – I hope the photographer – picked the child up and showed some care.  The child was clearly dying.

The other photo was of what they themselves called “An ordinary American family”.  It is their Christmas photo to go out to family and friends, and there they are, all smiling, all clad in Christmas red, with holly and tinsel around.  There are two grandparents, maybe three adult daughters, one son-in-law (it’s not clear who they all are), and four grandchildren.  Each adult is wearing, or carrying, visibly and proudly, a lethal firearm.  Even grandson Jake, aged abut 6, right in the front, is clutching a gun clearly too heavy for him.  That, it seems to me, is child abuse.  The story informs us, It’s up to Americans to protect America – we’re just your ordinary American family.  We are given also a list, an inventory, of the weapons they keep oiled and ready, in their happy hospitable home.  The names of the weapons mean nothing to me, but they certainly sound malign and deadly.   At any rate, it would not be a smart move to enter their home uninvited or unexpected.

I can’t cope with this, and I am seriously out of my depth.  All I can suggest is that we remember that the Christian Christmas festival is about peace and joy.  (And with the debate going on with secularism at present, it is worth remembering that Christmas is a Christian festival, and it is not compulsory…) The best option for Christian believers is not despair, but reality nevertheless.  The world is not as the Warkworth Santa Parade depicts it.  The world of the close of 2015 is a sad and desperate place for millions of people.  Among them are an almost incredible 30% of NZ children officially below the poverty line.  We now know that nothing whatever is resolved by violence – guns, bombing, or the violence of words and attitudes.  Nothing is resolved by closed minds and anger.  Nothing will be resolved by tanks and artillery and blowing people and their homes to smithereens.  Why would anyone ever think it would?

As always in history, it will be people of peaceable hearts, people free within themselves, people of wisdom and quietness, who may know accurately what to do next.  People, that is to say, not frightened all the time, people who have learned to live with difference and colour, mystery and uncertainty.  People not obsessed with their own privileges, comfort and safety.  Some of them will be Christians, some Buddhists, Moslems, Sikhs, Hindus, some of them will be atheists, agnostics, crystal gazers, even some Presbyterians. 

I can’t imagine this sad world will ever be heavily populated by such people, but there will be a few, here and there, and these are the ones we should look to for enlightenment.  Quite a lot of them will be followers of Jesus.  That would be even better.  Meanwhile it is important, where we are, to have a happy Christmas, to bear the pain of the world, and to hear the angels sing. 

Our Warkworth Christian Meditation group is now in recess over Christmas and January.  We will resume, and these postings will resume, on Friday 5 February 2016. 

Children of Abraham - Advent III, 11 December 2015

Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. [Luke 3:8]

Anyone who has been to Palestine knows that there are stones everywhere.  If you are looking for a strained or broken ankle, that is where to go.  It is a landscape of stones.  In the heart of the cities, in the countryside, among the trees, right beside modern buildings… stones and rubble and dryness prevail. 

Stones figure also everywhere in the literature.  The Judean wilderness is not sand dunes, it is stones.  Jesus was tempted to turn the stones into bread.  On another occasion he prophesied that the holy temple would soon be a heap of stones, which it was.  The people were about to throw stones at the woman caught in adultery – it was a convenient and costless mode of capital punishment.  The government of Israel has just increased the sentences for anyone convicted of throwing stones at the police or the military – but stones are the only ammunition they have, and they are plentiful.  Jacob made one stone his pillow, and dreamt of a ladder to heaven.  Jesus told about seed which fell on stony ground… everyone knew what that meant.  The name of one of his disciples, Peter, in both Aramaic and Greek, means a stone – so Jesus made a pun on it, which soon became a metaphor for an unshakeable and eternal church, built upon a rock.

Stones predominate, and here Jesus presumes to say, You assume you are notable and accepted because of who you are, your natural and spiritual lineage…  Hebrew, Jew, sons and daughters of Abraham, privileged, powerful, pre-eminent, educated, successful, famous, iconic, role-model, born into some ruling caste… with us in our day it could be white, Christian, civilised, decent, democratic, even sang in the choir.  But Jesus presumes to say, God can raise up 100 like you from these stones.  Jesus was not out to win friends and influence people.  It was never a question of who you are.  It was always a question of what you are.  Jewish literature has always known, and written, that God looks on the heart, on the person, on the motives and all the inner struggles, sees, understands and pardons the negatives and failures.

It can never be a matter of status or attainment, wealth or power.  What matters, says Jesus, is fruits worthy of repentance.  We touched on that word repentance last Friday – it does not mean feeling sorry, it means being changed.  It means doing life in the ways God intends -- to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly.  Jesus exemplifies this for us.  The new life of his death and resurrection, mediated to us by the Spirit he promised, makes all things new.  Our practised silence and stillness --  not only when we are actually doing it, but equally at all the other times, whatever we may be doing, our hearts remaining still and receptive -- are an important way in which we are open to God’s Spirit of change. 

If Jesus did indeed say that about Peter being a rock, upon which the church would be built – and plenty of scholars have serious doubts about that – then we might be tempted to think it was an unfortunate analogy.  The image of a rock, solid and unchanging, appeals to many, including parishioners I remember well.  John’s image of the wind is rather more helpful.  Stones…?  God could raise up any number of impeccable and unchangeable believers, cornerstones of the church, no doubt.  But what matters these days is openness to change, to justice, love and mercy… with all the risks pertaining thereto.

A word from God - Advent II, 4 December 2015

…the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. [Luke 3:1-2]

Every time I have set myself to get the history of this period straight in my mind I have wound up in confusion.  It is impenetrable.  Tiberius never wanted to be emperor, but he was – that should have been quite a good sign, but in fact he was what my mother would have called, “Not very nice at all”… to say the least of it.  And if you ever are tempted to think you belong to a dysfunctional family you should take heart.  These people all emerged from families marked by murder and plots and nepotism – Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, Herod Antipas, Philip, Lysanius, and the High Priests Annas and Caiaphas – represented a coterie of corruption and crime, as toxic a bunch of political unpleasantness as you would find in any age including our own. 

Then, into this climate of fear and oppression comes a word from God.  Most of our contemporary dysfunctional culture would not give two minutes of attention to any alleged word from God.  But in any case it is not as though God somehow intervenes with some news, some instruction, some wisdom, that hadn’t been heard before.  It is more that a prophet, a person disciplined to listen, announces that there is a word from God we need to know.  There are prophets in our day also, and they prophesy in a world environment in many ways strikingly similar – but like John the Baptist they are out on the margins and scarcely noticed, certainly not on the official Christmas card list.

What John the Baptist hears is a message about repentance.  The Greek word Luke chooses is µετανοια (metanoia), and plenty of scholars regard the English word repent or repentance as a serious mistranslation.  John the Baptist was not inviting people to feel sorry for their sins.  God’s word is a command to change, to move into a new life, more accurately to be changed – metanoia means change.  The best response to a world of corruption and violence, lies, injustice and the misuse of power, is to be different from that – as Jesus put it, It shall not be so among you -- within the world, of course, loving and hospitable, but different.  Baptism signifies this entry into the new obedience and response to God and life.

As we know, our culture quite often does not agree that it is OK to be different.  If you are in any way different, you may make some people feel insecure, even angry – but, like any contemplative, you simply and gently be it without needing to justify it.   Christians, all followers of Jesus, have at their best always been at odds with a world scorning to hear any word from God.  Sometimes we join that world, and sometimes we retreat from it.  But never could we feel that our home is in the world of violence and lies, even in our families and among those we love.  Jesus taught us another way.  It entails change at the level of the heart.  That is metanoia.  Benedictines have a vow called conversatio – it means openness to conversion and change by the Spirit of God in Christ, each day.  That is the point of our prayer, Christian Meditation, to be silent and still in what Jesus called the πνευµα, the wind of the Spirit – blowing, as a local prophet, James K Baxter, pointed out, both inside and outside the fences. 

Being on guard - Advent 1, 27 November 2015

Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man. [Luke 21:34-36]

In one episode of Fawlty Towers, one of the hotel guests dies in his sleep.  Of course, in the morning, when this is discovered by Basil with his unique ineptitude, we get total chaos.  One of the permanent guests, the Major, asks Fawlty, Stabbed, was he…?  No, says Basil, he died in his sleep.  Ah, well, says the Major, you’re off your guard, you see.   

Advent, we are informed in the lectionary, is about being awake, on guard, remaining alert.  It sounds a little tiring to me.  People living in Paris at present might have a better idea what it means to be on guard.  It seems interesting that, according to Jesus, the opposite of being alert and on guard is dissipation, drunkenness and the worries of this life.  So, I am confused.  In our contemporary culture, dissipation and drunkenness are widely seen as an efficient way to forget the worries of this life.  So much so, that the surest and quickest way to have scorn heaped upon you is to say, or even remotely suggest, or even unwittingly hint, that partying and revelling may not be a good and fulfilling life.  It is partly because of the worries of this life – and they are very real – that a culture accumulates useful avenues of dissipation. 

The worries of this life, however, depend on who you are and how you’re placed.  For a refugee family from Syria or Libya, the worries of this life are probably about survival, food, shelter and obtaining a helping hand or two.  For some New Zealanders I can think of, the worries of this life are more likely to flow from being possessed by their possessions – or in other cases simply paying the bills, finding employment, saving for retirement.  Or the worries of this life may be how to keep going in chronic ill health or pain – and we can think of yet others for whom the worries of this life encompass family strife and feuds and ugly memories, and trying to keep at least the illusion of control of life, events and the future.

Jesus suggests here that we can be so preoccupied with ourselves, whether with enjoying ourselves and being entertained, or with our fears about all sorts of things – or more likely, with all the things we have to do -- that we spend our lives missing what God and life are saying.  What actually matters comes from the silence and stillness.  Our very discipline of Christian Meditation teaches that we must be awake and aware and in the present moment.  We teach mindfulness and attention.  The distractions, as we call them, which inevitably come in our meditation are simply an opportunity to return, gently but firmly, to the simplicity of the mantra.  It helps us to continue being fully present and consenting to whatever God may give or change.  If we are on guard, it is against whatever might shift us from life and paying attention.  We are now in a world of frightened people, an ungracious and violent world.  Perhaps it was always so, but now the media leave us in no doubt about it.  It is a time for steadiness and depth and wisdom.  It is still God’s world, and it matters that God’s people know how to be alert and attentive.

Alpha and Omega - 20 November 2015

I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.  [Revelation 1:8]

What is happening in us, when we come to these regular times of silence and stillness?  We know very well, if we are paying attention, that we are in the presence of God.   But also we rapidly find out that we are very much in the presence of ourselves.  We have all sorts of issues that rise up in the silence and space.  So there is a tension.  But it is a perfectly proper encounter, between me with all my memories and fears and hopes – me as I normally am, in other words, not some religious version of me -- and the Spirit of God in Christ the Creator, Lover and Healer.  In this encounter, I have learned to be still and silent, as well as I can.   This is the rhythm of contemplative life and prayer, the diminishing of the ego – that is to say the Me which is the accretion of all the ways I usually try to be happy and secure -- and the emerging of the true self, original, recognised, known, probably much nicer, welcomed and unconditionally loved. 

Contemplatives have made a discovery.  Two contradictory things can be true together.  I am in the presence of God – I am in the presence of myself.  I am loving – but quite often I am unloving.  I am a person of faith – I am a person also of doubt.  Zen Buddhists know how to express this, in what they call koans, contradictory statements which sound like nonsense to our logical and analytical minds, but which invite us to consider that the truth may not be down that road.  I may interpose that Benedictines also seem typically to love unresolved issues.  A story from the earlier Desert spirituality tells us:  A novice brother asked an Elder, “Father, how do I overcome all these problems?”  The Elder asked, “Son, have you had your breakfast?”  “Yes, Father,” he replied.  “Then wash your plates.”  The sublime and the prosaic come together.  Any contemplative is happy with that.  It is not now a matter of whether God and the world meet with our agreement – merely with our consent.  Consent is what we bring to the silence and the stillness, and all the unresolved issues.

I learned the Greek alphabet in (I think) 1954 – age 19, Greek Stage I, at what was then Auckland University College.  Alpha is the first letter, Omega the last.  That became clear on Day One, rather as they teach pre-schoolers with the alphabet across the top of the blackboard, although not in our case with pictures of elephants and little furry forest creatures.  Then came Homer and Euripides, Plato and Paul the Apostle.  At the same time I embarked on Hebrew, and so ventured into the world of the Jews, and yet another alphabet, and yet other ways of talking about the invisible God whose name was unpronounceable.  It was back then, I now realise, that we began to learn a decent reticence in the ways we talk about a God we can’t even name.  Today in the lesson from the Book of Revelation we read some mystic of the early Christian church under extreme threat and stress and suffering, who describes God as the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.  It is not a description or a definition, it is not a name.  It is a statement of the ineffable and of hope.  It is a reminder of whom we encounter when we calm down, and stop fretting about whether we can believe or not.  It may indicate to us that unconditional love is first and last, whatever its cost, and its cost may be total.  At any rate, the Alpha and the Omega God is not available to be enlisted in our cause against other people.  We are best to be still and silent.