Losing and finding…4 – 27 May 2016

If anyone wishes to follow me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For whoever would save their life will lose it; and whoever loses their life for my sake will save it.  [Mark 8:34-35; Matthew 16:24-25; Luke 9:23-24; John 12:25]

Now we come to the crux of it, I think.  What we have from Jesus is another way of living – “Losing” my life, as the gospel writer expresses it, rather than “saving” my life…   I want to say, after a week of pondering this, and at the risk of everyone falling about laughing, that what Jesus does for his followers is readjust our relationship with the possessive personal pronoun.  My life… my lifestyle… my possessions… my feelings… my rights… my opinions… my faith… my church… my dreams… my goals… my safety… my… oh my.  Obviously we use the possessive pronouns in all sorts of ways, some of which are perfectly fine.  But in Jesus’s company we start to see that my needs and preferences are not the point.   As Paul says to the Church at Corinth:  What do you have that you did not receive?  And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift? [I Cor 4:7].  By saving my life, as Jesus uses the word, we mean possessiveness and ownership, as though we have forgotten is that all is gift, not only our possessions, but our very breath, our neurones, our next heartbeat, our ability to love, and the sparkle on the water of Kawau Bay.  By “saving” my life he means me first, my safety and security, defending what I believe is mine.  So it goes with my inability to let go… not only of possessions, but also of opinions and beliefs, of attitudes, of poisonous memories.  Saving is clinging.

Losing my life is the discovery, in Jesus’s company, that I don’t need to take myself all that seriously.  It is a developing inner freedom.  It is a growing willingness to relinquish control, to loosen my grip on people and events.  I find one day I can more easily be happy for people to be themselves, for better or for worse.  My life and my wishes and preferences may be interesting, but never for me definitive or determinative, or even all that important, any more.  

We learn now to live with mystery and unanswered questions.  A man in a Christian study group recently announced, evidently without blinking, I have no problems with the Holy Trinity.  Perhaps there is no mystery in his life at all.  Perhaps he is, as the politicians like to say, substantially satisfied with the main issues.  In the Beatitudes, Jesus blesses the meek, he blesses those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, as though they haven’t found it yet, he blesses the merciful, the pure in heart, and the peacemakers.  It brings us to the borders of contemplative life and prayer, where what we do is follow Jesus, not knowing where the road ends, but knowing that he follows us, day by day. 

The contemplative people I know tend to be normally busy and involved people.  Some are very busy indeed, on all manner of worthy things.  Others who are not able to do much, keep a daily interest in what is happening to others around the world.  What we all have in common is the fellowship of silence and stillness, the place of empty hands and minds quietly paying attention, where Jesus is present.  Our facades are being dismantled and all our chatter is ceasing.  We have nothing to prove and nothing to achieve.  St Paul says: You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.  When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory [Colossians 3:3-4]. 

Losing and finding…3 – 20 May 2016

If anyone wishes to follow me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For whoever would save their life will lose it; and whoever loses their life for my sake will save it.  [Mark 8:34-35; Matthew 16:24-25; Luke 9:23-24; John 12:25]

It’s interesting always to ask, are there ways we can read these ancient words so that they strike sparks in our time and lives, in our language and concepts?  If we don’t at least try to do that, then this utterly central teaching from Jesus simply gets heard as nice religious words, and it changes nothing much.  Two Fridays ago we looked at what Jesus might mean by denying oneself.  Last Friday it was the idea of taking up one’s cross.  Then, he says, Follow me.

Does that mean going to church?  Does everyone at church follow Jesus?  Does it matter which church?  Does not going to church mean not following Jesus?  If an atheist still respects Jesus and his teaching, and generally adheres to that, is he/she following Jesus?  How does following Jesus’s teachings in for instance the Sermon on the Mount, differ from declaring from the heart that Jesus is Lord, my Lord, Teacher, Master and Saviour…? 

The Greek verb akoloutheo [ακολουθεω] means to follow someone, along the road perhaps, or follow your big sister to school – it also means in some uses to obey… and even more than that, it can mean to confirm, agree with, endorse… so that eventually St Paul can write about putting on Christ, as one might put on a garment.  So it seems, when Jesus invited someone to follow he was inviting us to do more than come along and see if it works out.  One celebrity, getting married for the third time, was asked: Do you think this one will work?  She replied that she always liked to keep her options open.  And of course, in her case, that would be only prudent and sensible.  But Jesus was offering one of those scary choices in which you can’t see the end from the beginning.  This choice would initiate a process of serious change -- a change which might begin with the decision to follow, but which would grow (I would say, grow up) and develop and mature down the years.  It means that Jesus becomes the key to life, but certainly not in any arrogant sense, or in any legalistic way – nothing is less like Jesus than Christians booming at others from some moral and religious high ground. 

Jesus is Lord means, in the familiar words of Cranmer: “…for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death does us… unite”.  I think that is what follow means.  It is a quiet, hidden bond of love and obedience which, as Paul writes, survives all our lapses and defections.  As time goes by this bond is tested and matures.  It is not something we normally dissect or discuss.

It is a mutual bond, moreover.  Jesus is committed in love to his followers – although that is the kind of statement that is incomprehensible to many.    In John’s Gospel we find Jesus saying, Abide in me, and I in you.  It is a mutuality, and the bond depends, not so much on dedicated and heroic deeds, as on our stillness, receptiveness and our grateful hearts. 

Losing and finding…2 – 13 May 2016

If anyone wishes to follow me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For whoever would save their life will lose it; and whoever loses their life for my sake will save it.  [Mark 8:34-35; Matthew 16:24-25; Luke 9:23-24; John 12:25]

One of Rowan Williams’ more extraordinary sermons was about a French priest of the 19^th century, the Abbé Huvelin of Paris.  It seems scarcely credible, but this consummate pastor was actually a card-carrying neurotic.  He suffered from gout, migraine, depression and what they called neurasthenia.  He received a constant stream of his parishioners while lying in a darkened room.  He conducted catechism classes and visited the sick.  The Abbé Huvelin was in fact a remarkably gifted pastor.  And Rowan Williams finds in this an example of what it might mean to take up your cross. 

We commonly make that expression mean something like making the best of all our hardships in life, physical weaknesses, big disappointments… whatever it is, we call it bearing one’s burdens, carrying one’s cross.  Well maybe… but it’s a richer truth than that.  We all bear our crosses, inevitably, whoever we are.  The Abbé Huvelin was an injured and scarred man, yet God had given him a ministry.  Rowan Williams points out, each of us has factors in life which cannot be undone or unmade.  Our wholeness and status with God is not some eliminating of all the bad things and their memory, but rather our acknowledgement of who we are and all our truth.  This is the person God sees and knows and loves, and who emerges in a contemplative life of silence and consent. 

I have discovered that teaching about the ego tends to get me into trouble.  The egos of some people feel immediately threatened, and they react dismissively or even with anger.  While the ego has many good and necessary features, in our culture it typically sees its task also as a kind of cosmetic surgeon, hiding the blemishes, excusing the weaknesses and failures, concealing the fact that we do have flaws which may be beyond remedy.  Our growth in grace has very much to do with recognising and befriending our neediness and mortality – bearing our cross -- consenting daily afresh to live (in St Paul’s words) by the Spirit and in truth, meeting and embracing the true self, becoming ever less able to take the ego seriously or to be dominated by its demands, being daily born again. 

Interestingly, when the American Episcopalian Church came to revise their Communion liturgy, and they came to the ancient Eucharistic invitation you will recognise: Holy things for those who are holy… some Americans wanted to change it to: Healthy things for healthy people.   In New Zealand in recent times we even began to talk about “healthy churches”, by which we meant churches in which nothing went wrong any more.  It’s fantasy-land.  “Holy” does not mean everything perfect and nicely religious.   “Holy” is people attending to God, like Moses at the burning bush, people submitting their egos and their future to the Spirit of Christ and to loving grace.   Here it is in St Paul, perhaps too direct for modern taste, but right all the same:  You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self… and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. [Ephesians 4:22-24].

Losing and finding…1 – 6 May 2016

If anyone wishes to follow me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For whoever would save their life will lose it; and whoever loses their life for my sake will save it.  [Mark 8:34-35; Matthew 16:24-25; Luke 9:23-24; John 12:25]

I think this is the heart of discipleship.  I would like to spend a week or two around this theme, Losing and Finding.  And I think it’s as well to note at the start that we find this teaching from Jesus in all four gospels.  It is really beyond doubt an authentic record, the more so that the gospels are in remarkable agreement about precisely what he said.  Secondly, what Jesus teaches here is for everyone.  It is not some private special teaching for his immediate disciples.  In Mark, the earliest written gospel, we read: He called to him the multitude, with his disciples, and said to them…  In Luke, simply: He said to all… 

There are two big problems, it seems to me.  The first is – and we will come back to this repeatedly, I think – that we do not wish to deny ourselves.  I may choose to deny myself excess sugar, or cream… but it is still my choice.  However, none of that is what Jesus means.  Denying self is something altogether deeper and more meaningful than what we might call self-denial.  Even that, now, in our secular, idolatrous culture, is considered silly and unnecessary.  No one is going to stop me having what I want.  That is the first problem.  What Jesus asks of us is deeply counter-cultural and counter-intuitive.

The second problem is that Jesus in his day had never heard the terms which we will need in order to understand this truth.  He had never heard about the Ego or its role in our lives.  He had never heard of psychology or its insights.  What he was, was wise – he saw into reality to where the blockages are.  Out of his wisdom – and I would say, out of his bond with God -- came this teaching, to all.

What then is the self I am invited to deny?  In our day we label it the Ego.  It is the self I present to the world – and, often as not, I am convinced by it myself.  My persona…  One teacher, Thomas Keating, says the Ego is the accumulation of all our strategies to be happy, successful, appreciated, safe… all that.  Laurence Freeman says it is the desire to dominate, the desire to take rather than to give or simply to let be; it is the desire to possess…  It is a lot more also.  The Ego is good and necessary in many ways.  It is our instinctive protection, it includes our genuine desire to be good and useful.

Contemplative understanding is that God dwells, abides, recognises us, somehow behind and beyond this ego.  Steadily, over time, the ego yields place to God.  It is a subtle and lovely process, and (I think) impossible to describe, let alone define.  But as we are still, asking for nothing, simply consenting to God, the ego becomes more and more attenuated.  We cease to take ourselves so seriously.  What is good in the ego is confirmed and reinforced, but even then we sense if once again it is assuming the place that belongs to God. 

We will continue this, I think, for two or three weeks, exploring how we might say in our language and concepts, what Jesus taught in his day to the multitude.

Euodia and Syntyche – 29 April 201

We come at this morning’s talk by a circuitous route.  We are again in the Book of Acts, and we learn of St Paul’s missionary journey into Europe – a trail become very familiar, as we speak, to thousands of desperate refugees from tyranny and terror.  Paul winds up at the Roman colony of Philippi, in Macedonia, just to the north of Greece.  As Paul usually did, he sought out the local synagogue.  In Philippi the Jews met by the riverbank outside the city gate.  And here we meet Lydia.  Lydia is a Jewish businesswoman.  She deals in purple cloth – this is the much sought after Tyrian Purple, the colour dye made from a particular shellfish secretion.  It was very trendy, and Lydia was on to a good thing.  One interesting side-issue is that the makers of the purple dye acquired such a pervasive body stench that the Talmud, the Jewish law, eventually provided that a woman could divorce her husband if he entered this trade following marriage. 

Paul founded a Christian church in Philippi, and clearly Lydia was one of its leaders.  He mentions her in his later Epistle to the Philippians as exactly that.  We are only now starting to assemble with much more precision the evidence of what that infant church was like in its structure and life.  It is fascinating.  It was most certainly not the male-dominated, patriarchal arrangement reflected and carried into church law in subsequent centuries down to our own day.  Right at the start, women were totally present in the communal response to the risen Christ. 

Now, in the same letter Paul wrote to that church in Philippi, he makes this wonderful plea about two other women:  I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord.  Yes, and I ask you, loyal Synzygus, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life [Phil 4:2-3].  Euodia and Syntyche are at odds with each other.  There is damaging dissention in his beloved Philippian church, but Paul, uses sensitivity.  He repeats the verb for each of them equally -- I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche… He lists them in alphabetical order.  He praises them…  He asks Synzygus to help these women. 

We have no idea what this was about.  In my experience it might have been because Euodia didn’t want her children playing with Syntyche’s rotten kids...  Or it may have been a bustup in the church choir among the sopranos…  The point is not any of that.  The point is that strife anywhere, anytime, is a choice we have made.  Agreement to live in peace, on the other hand, agreement to understand and respect difference – these are also choices we are free to make.  

In contemplative life and prayer, in a sense, there is no choice about this.  In the company of Christ we are not at liberty to be in enmity with anyone.  Disagreement, certainly, but so far as it lies with us we do not have enemies.  There is silence and peace, shalom, in our relationships, especially in the difficult ones.  And it is all fuelled and renewed daily in the silence of our own hearts, our inmost lives, and our prayer. 

Hindering God – Easter V, 22 April 2016

If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?”  When they heard this, they were silenced.  (Acts 11:17-18)

Hindering God seems a curious concept.  The church tends to assume that it is all the time facilitating God.  Next Sunday we get to hear a story from the infant Christian church.  Peter has been resting, recuperating perhaps, at Joppa, a coastal town.  He falls asleep in the sunshine and he dreams.  In his dream he sees a lot of animals in some kind of sheet let down from heaven.  A voice tells him to kill and eat – but these are animals forbidden for food in the Jewish Law.  I suppose the significance of their being let down from heaven is that, although ritually forbidden, they are nevertheless part of God’s gift in creation.  Peter says there is no way he will transgress the Law to eat anything profane or unclean.  He never has, he says, and he never will.  The voice says, What God has cleansed you may not call profane.  Later, back in Jerusalem, when Peter is taken to task by Jewish Christians for having associated with Gentiles, he tells them this story, and how the same Spirit of God had come upon Gentile believers as upon Jews.  To impede this, by prejudice, by inability to let go of former things, is to hinder God.

Perhaps we hinder God all our lives, in a myriad of ways, some of them trivial and some certainly not.  Our choices at various times, our attitudes, the effects we have had on other people, perhaps needy people, it may be without our ever realising it.  Peter says he refuses to hinder God any more by discriminating between Jewish followers of Jesus, and non-Jewish, Gentile, or pagan, followers of Jesus.  It was the first major test of the Risen Christ’s power to bring down walls and reconcile differences – and that battle, confronted that day in Jerusalem, is being fought still among Jesus’s followers, along the racial divides, whether women may be ordained, for goodness sake!... the status of homosexual people in the company of Christ… and other assorted issues.

It is pretty basic contemplative understanding and experience that it is our egos that hinder God.  It is simply that the ego, however worthy, tends to usurp, even in subtle ways, the place that belongs to God.  The ego may have a heavy investment in the primacy of men in authority, or in the exclusion in societies and families of what seems different or strange.  The ego knows what it likes, and does not like.  The ego may have been seduced by power, money or style.  The ego may have developed desires and ambitions which conflict with the way of Christ. 

In the rhythm of contemplative life and prayer, the ego is constantly, daily, being brought back into submission to God.  This happens gently and quietly, and steadily, in disciplines of silence and stillness.  And one way of seeing it is that we are seeking no longer to hinder God, by our actions, by our attitudes, by our requirements, by our noisy presence in God’s world. 

Easter and chocolate – 15 April 2016

The editorial in the latest Consumer magazine begins with this sentence: By the time you read this, Easter will be a distant guilt trip away.  People who read the Guardian Weekly are probably familiar with the irascible old bloke, Professor Pedanticus, who has a melt-down with every logical fallacy he encounters, or non sequitur.  There is something of the Pedanticus in me, on reading that sentence:  By the time you read this, Easter will be a distant guilt trip away.

Everything is wrong with that statement.  Easter is the high festival of Christian faith.  Easter celebrates the storming of the gates of hell by humility and goodness.  It announces that evil and death do not have the final word.  It proclaims life.  Easter forms and directs our faith and life, day by day, and from here to eternity.  It is never distant.

By distant guilt trip, says this writer Sue Chetwin, she means that we are slowly recovering from our over indulgence in chocolate eggs and chocolate easter bunnies.   Well, some may be.  Others of us may not have wallowed in chocolate to celebrate Easter.  And yet others, who did, are not yet on the road to recovery.  At another level of this – because secularism too has its levels of meaning – she says the real problem with chocolate is not so much sugar, as palm oil, a major ingredient.  So this is now an issue of justice.  The rich world’s hunger for palm oil in all manner of products is destroying ancient rain forests, and so the habitats of many animal species.  It is also feeding widespread political and commercial corruption.  I am sure she is right.  But in the process she has managed to turn Easter from the most sublime moment in Christian truth, to that most tedious of modern clichés, a guilt trip.  In cliché-land that’s right up there these days with adrenalin rush and caffeine fix.

Now of course, I am not being kind here to Ms Chetwin who is simply doing her job.  I am wanting to talk sensibly about Easter.  It is a mistake to expect the secular culture to know or appreciate what we greet and celebrate.  Indeed it seems, there is now a growing anger if “religion” is brought into the secular encounter with easter at all.  Secularism defaults to sentimentalism, to easter bunnies and wicked chocolate – and ploys for keeping your children entertained and not bored. 

In the church’s earliest years, Easter was the reinterpretation of the Jewish Seder, the Passover.  In the most ancient liturgical words we have, Jesus shared a meal with his followers, he gave new meaning to the ritual meal of the Jews, he was then arrested and he died at the hands of the Romans.  On the third day the tomb was empty and the lives of his followers radically transformed.  He has become the Giver and Renewer of Life, making – as the Hebrew prophet said long ago – all things new.  His presence makes possible our contemplative prayer, and all the light we may see in darkness.  Distant guilt trip…?  How sad to be so far from the point.