Being nice – Easter III, 8 April 2016

A Southern Baptist theologian, looking back on the teaching he received as a youngster at church, said what it amounted to was:  Jesus is nice, and he wants us to be nice too.  Certainly there is a widespread assumption that Christians are supposed to be distinctive by being nice.  Church Ministers are supposed to be very nice.  Recently after I had spoken my mind about something, a response came from some people who never go near the church from one year to the next, to the effect that I am not much of a Christian.  But perhaps the real problem with that Baptist chap’s memory of his early years is that he was taught that Jesus was always nice.  And that’s at least dubious.  The myth was typically reinforced by sentimental pictures on the walls or in books of Bible stories. 

The best evidence indicates that Jesus was a man of his time, a man of a violent and perilous time and culture, and that he was a complex person indeed.  We now know that every sanctified image of him -- whether it is the Sunday school picture, or the healthy hero Jesus of young fit manhood, or the cult figure built up by various “high church” devotions, or the authoritarian teacher of high protestantism – every image of him, as one of my finest teachers of long ago said, crumbles to pieces in our hands, is eventually found wanting and is rejected.  We make images and they become idols. 

The real point about Jesus, especially Jesus Risen, is that he eludes us.  That is the point of the strange events in the gospel records of the resurrection.  We do not define him or image him.  We do not recruit him to our cause, possess him…  He finds us, as he found the disciples at the lakeside, and he knows us already, and names us, and calls us. 

The reality about Jesus is miles away from domestic niceness.  Jesus confronts us.  He commands our love.  He commands our possessions – or at any rate the use we make of them.  He requires that we are peaceable, and that we follow justice.  He seeks our consent to daily inner change.  He deeply challenges the prevailing culture of self and of image and style, the worship of power and money and worldly success.  His followers come to understand that truth matters more than respectability or reputation. 

Perhaps it’s worth knowing that the word nice comes from the Latin nescius, which means ignorant, even foolish, stupid or senseless. The English language has taken it over until it means pretty, or normal (like a nice cup of tea), certainly inoffensive… and all manner of other derived uses.  None of that sounds like the call and the way of Christ to me. 

Our stillness and silence is at another level than convention and niceness.  Jesus meets us where we are, once we are paying attention and consenting to his presence.  The initiative is his – we simply dispose ourselves appropriately, as best we can.  So, to those of us able to set our literal minds aside for a while, our contemplative prayer is very much an Easter prayer.  It is a way we encounter the risen Christ, quietly, as it were at the lakeside, but in fact wherever we are.  He is injured, wounded, yet risen and alive in a way the secular mind cannot grasp.  And for us it is enough simply to be present.

Loving God, I – Easter II, 1 April 2016

Easter is a time for compulsory superlatives and grand anthems and huge hopes.  The effect on me is a felt need to slip away to find somewhere a bit of quiet and sensitivity, and an economy of words.  Do you love me? asks the risen Jesus to Peter on the beach at Galilee.  And there follows this puzzling litany in which Jesus asks him three times, Do you love me? … as though this is something we are being asked repeatedly, inwardly perhaps, one way or another, at our different times and seasons, and as the years go by.  Do you love me…?

Jesus was a Jew.  And so he was well acquainted with the command of the Law:  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might (Deut. 6:5).   You shall love…!  It is a command.  It is not as though we have another option.  Moreover, the command calls to our heart… with all your heart… the inescapable part of us, what is deepest in us, and so Jesus comes to our inmost room and asks, Do you love me? 

Michael Casey is a Benedictine monk, and a scholar, and an Aussie – and he points out something about loving God which the church does not always make clear.  It may be that a lot of people simply wouldn’t believe it.   He goes to the teaching of the rabbis on this crucial verse in Deuteronomy which says we are to love God with all our heart.  We are to bless God, say the rabbis, with both our good and (in Hebrew) our yetserim, our evil impulses.  Think about it…  This is what Michael Casey writes:

Even the shadows in our personal history are called upon to bless the Lord.  We are not to exclude our sins… they are not to be banished from consciousness… We never graduate from a state of being utterly dependent on God’s mercy and forgiveness.  In fact the more we advance along the spiritual path, the more aware we become of our impediments… and of the burdens we carry as the result of choices made in the past.  We are not to ignore these liabilities; they also must join in our hymn of praise to the God of grace… We thank God for the darkness in our life, for the mistakes we have made…[1] 

What we might normally wish to conceal, what lies behind our various facades, all of this is brought forward like the recalcitrant, rebellious child at some junior concert.  Our frailty, our fallibility, our woundedness, is all an essential part of our praise and worship.  All of us, in grace, is set free to love God and to love all that God loves.  What is inappropriate in prayer and worship is our falsity, our image, and our facades.

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[1] Michael Casey: Seventy-Four Tools For Good Living (Liturgical Press 2014) p.8.

Stones – Holy Week, 18 March 2016

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”  (Luke 19:39-40)

I seem to remember commenting quite recently how anyone who has been to the Holy Land knows that it is a landscape of stones, dry stones and rubble lying around.  Stony ground, and I wondered how often the local medical clinics deal with turned ankles and the like – perhaps mostly with tourists.  Stones are prominent in the gospel records.  Peter’s name means a stone, and Jesus made it a metaphor for that special kind of faith.  Here in the gospel for Palm Sunday, the Pharisees are unnerved because the crowd hails Jesus as the promised Messiah, but he says if he stopped them doing that the stones would cry out.  On another day he had told the Pharisees and all the men clamouring around the woman caught in adultery, Let whoever is sinless among you throw the first stone.  His parable about the sowing of seed mentioned what they all knew about, the difficulty of seed falling in stony ground. 

It was a stone that was rolled across the tomb where they buried him – and was found rolled back on the Sunday morning.  An angel sitting on a stone said, He is not here, he is risen.  In Israel stones are a persistent problem, and in our day the Knesset has just legislated very serious penalties for anyone throwing stones at the police or the military.  But some orthodox Jews believe that throwing stones at enemies is a righteous act even on the Sabbath.

However, the point in all this is Jesus’s colourful way of saying that there is no way to stop the people’s excitement.  The Pharisees couldn’t stop them, and neither could he.  He never wanted to be called Messiah – he had made that quite clear.  It was dangerous, but more importantly, the Messiah they were expecting was not the sort Jesus would ever be.  The people are expressing a deep, clamant need, a need for hope… is that what it is?  Anyway, if that need, that cry is suppressed or denied, if anyone tries to clamp the lid down on it, the very stones will take it up, says Jesus.  It is something dictators, tyrants, oppressors, have discovered all through history.  The moment we start erecting fences, building walls, restricting freedoms, hiding truth, denying dignity, we simply trigger a counter-reaction… and any student of history can give 101 examples.  It applies equally to the life within.  Build fences around what we are allowed to believe and we confine and restrict life itself, the life God has given. 

When we choose to sit in prayerful silence and stillness, we are choosing the freedom of God’s Spirit – which, Jesus reminded Nicodemus, is like the wind – the wind which, James K Baxter wrote, blows both inside and outside the fences.  The people greeting Jesus were indeed unwise, they may have been in various ways mistaken, but they were giving voice to their spirit calling out for God’s Spirit.  And Jesus knows that God hears that – even the stones are listening.

A new thing – Lent V, 11 March 2016

Time for a taste of Hebrew poetry and prophecy.  This is from the Old Testament lesson for this Sunday:  Thus says the Lord… Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. 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.  (Isaiah 43: 17-19)

One of our really effective teachers in contemplative spirituality is Cynthia Bourgeault, an American Episcopalian priest.  She teaches for instance -- and I think this is important – that the issue in this kind of prayer is not really focussing and paying attention.  Obviously it does matter to be still and silent, and to focus as best we can so that our monkey minds are not all over the place.  It does matter that we develop a discipline of paying attention, not only in prayer, but also just about everywhere else -- for instance in conversations we have.  These things and much more are all part of the discipline of the contemplative.  But there is a deeper issue.  Cynthia Bourgeault says it’s not so much attention as intention.  In the Cloud of Unknowing this is called our naked intent.  Our intention is God.  If it is not, then it is not prayer.  All else, for the time being, we set aside, and what she writes is:

The way this is done is through a simple inner agreement which I am perfectly happy to call a deal.  The deal is this:  If you catch yourself thinking, you let the thought go.  Promptly, quietly, without self-recrimination, you simply release the thought and start over…. It is a pathway of return, almost entirely so.  The effectiveness… is not measured by your ability to maintain your mind in a steady state of clarity, openness, or stillness.  It is measured by your willingness, when you find yourself caught out by a thought, to return again and again… to that state of open receptivity. (The Wisdom Jesus)

This intent for God, in our prayer, is a daily µετανοια, metanoia, what our English bibles call “repentance”-- but it is not a matter of how we feel, sorry or ashamed, but of what we do, turning around, returning daily to our true path. 

The Hebrew prophet saw that the footprints of God are seen not where the old and familiar is being restored, reconstituted, but where a new way is being opened.  Behold, I am doing a new thing… do you not perceive it?   The new way is the pathway God is always opening up ahead.  Sometimes it is a dark path, sometimes a vague and overgrown path, sometimes it may seem like a shining highway.  The prophet informs the Hebrew exiles in Babylon that there is a way ahead.  God is doing always a new thing.  Tens of thousands of Syrian and other exiles today could do with such a prophet and such poetry and such hope.  In our prayer, in our silence and stillness, we are always at the place in the road where it is a choice, restoring the old path and the familiar things, or turning on to the new way.

Ninety-nine righteous – Lent IV, 4 March 2016

Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. (Luke 15:7)

So, in Jesus’s kingdom it’s counter-intuitive.  The most disadvantageous thing you can be is righteous -- even if you are in an overwhelming majority of people who see themselves that way.  Martin Luther realised that one day, in a burst of inspiration which radically changed his life, and changed western Christianity.  After years of trying his hardest to be righteous, sincerely striving to do what he believed God required -- and generally failing – it dawned on him, in the writings of St Paul, that God was not seeing Martin Luther in the way he was seeing himself. 

Jesus makes this remark about what gives pleasure in heaven, to explain the parable of the lost sheep, and the parable of the lost coin.  It is the one that is lost that is the issue, that is occupying God’s attention.  Then Jesus goes right on with the best-known parable of the lost son, the so-called prodigal son.  The boy’s older brother speaks eloquently for the 99 righteous:  All these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command…  He believes he has earned his status, by what he has done and by who he is.  He is probably right.  Most righteous people are not self-righteous hypocrites.  The chances are they, or we, are genuinely good and sincere people, possibly also generous and hospitable.

The father however is preoccupied with the younger son who has turned around and come home, humbled and penniless.  The shepherd has carried the lost sheep home, on his back, rejoicing.  The woman has run out to her friends and neighbours to tell them, I have found the coin that I had lost. 

So there is something we need to understand about God.  It is not what we thought.  If recognising and rewarding virtue and achievement is what we expected, then we are out of luck.  God, whom Jesus called Father, is somehow absent from the prizegiving, watching instead for the one who has got lost, the one who has made stupid mistakes, all his own fault, getting what he deserves, the one who has been told 100 times…  It’s not the sins and errors and calamities that are counted, but the µετανοια, the turning around, choosing mercy and change.

Pope Francis has declared the Year of Mercy.  The title of his book is, The Name of God is Mercy.  Auckland minister Mike Riddell writes: Mercy is an incisive scalpel that divides religion from faith, piety from pity, judgement from compassion.  The song of the angels, Jesus informs us, is not so much about all the righteous – it is much more about the one who is turning around. 

Fruitless fig tree – Lent III, 26 February 2016

Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’” (Luke 13:6-9)

Here is a very intriguing thing.  If you read in Mark or Matthew about Jesus’s encounter with the fig tree, it’s much briefer and somewhat more startling, and it is not a parable at all but an actual alleged event.  It happens when Jesus is on his way into the Temple.  Life has become very fraught by this time.  He would have liked some fresh figs, but there are none to be had, so he curses the fig tree – and on their return it is withered and dead.  In Luke it is all quite different.  It’s a parable.  The owner of a vineyard (generally a metaphor for God) loses patience with his barren fig tree.  Dig it up, he orders, it’s cumbering the ground.  But the assistant pleads, give it another year; I will dig around it and give it manure.  If it still doesn’t bear fruit, we’ll dig it up. 

You remember last week’s word… teleios, fit for purpose…?  The tree is pointless if it’s not producing fruit.  Now, this could be a very harsh lesson indeed, but I instinctively want to avoid treating it that way.  It may indeed be true that there are some Christian churches and some Christian believers who are, as we say, a waste of space.  There are also some who appear to be producing poisonous fruit.  I think however, as a metaphor, the fruit we have to produce is a rather more subtle thing than shining good works and visible, measurable, quantifiable results.  You don’t assess Jesus’s kingdom in the way a secular culture wants to measure success.  It does not have annual performance reviews or a Budget or declare a dividend.  Every now and then someone says, I give to the Salvation Army because they roll up their sleeves and get things done.  And what they do is admirable.  Much the same gets done also by non-religious organisations and secular aid agencies. 

In Jesus’s kingdom we certainly care for the widow, the stranger and the orphan; we certainly care about justice.  But Jesus equally insisted, the kingdom is within.  The fruit is in real inner change, what the Greek scriptures call µετανοια, metanoia, daily conversion to the way of Christ, which is not the way of the world, turning back to him, turning away from ways and attitudes, opinions and actions, that are not of him.  It is what St Paul calls the fruits of the Spirit, and he lists them:  Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22).  These are the fruits that ripen, by the work of the Spirit, in us, as we learn how to be still and silent and consenting to be changed.

Those of us who are mature – Lent II, 19.02.16

I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.  Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you.  (Philippians 3:14-15)

It is that phrase, those of us who are mature, which catches my attention.  Obviously, if we talk that way, we may be in danger of elitism, of thinking rather highly of ourselves – which in NZ is right up there with treason and being critical of sport.  There is also the clear danger of deciding for ourselves that we are “mature”, when that might be something better decided about us by others. 

So we have a closer look.  That word “mature” in its biblical sense needs some clarity.  Plenty of people are of mature years, as we say, but their grasp of Christian truth and allegiance remains naïve, even childish, sentimental and superstitious, fragile and very easily shaken.  The Greek word Paul uses is teleios (τελειος).  It is the same word used in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus enigmatically says, Be perfect (teleios) as your heavenly Father is perfect (teleios).  It certainly does not mean morally “perfect”, stainless, guiltless.  It means fit for purpose, being what it is meant to be, and doing that well and simply.  A person who is “teleios” in the Christian sense is not a know-all, in fact he/she has become keenly aware of what he/she doesn’t know, doesn’t understand, and knows how to embrace mystery.  Now we know in part, writes St Paul, but then (he means in a later, fuller life) we will know, even as we are known.

I would think one distinguishing mark of this mature believer is that he/she is not afraid.  Love and humility have replaced fear... I mean fear for oneself, the need always to protect and defend one’s choices and opinions, and constantly to garrison and sanitise life lest something go wrong.  The person who is “teleios” is quite at home with mortality and human frailty and error.

He writes: Let those of us then who are mature (teleios) be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you.  Being of the same mind does not mean being in agreement about everything.  It means understanding each other, listening to each other, respecting difference.  If you think differently, he adds, this too God will reveal.  God will sort it out.  The mature believer trusts that truth will emerge. 

Well, contemplative life and prayer is the life and prayer of ‘οι τελειοι, the mature – and of those who are tentatively setting out on this path.  Its pillars always are silence, stillness, consent.