Lent I, 16 February 2018 – Good News

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:14-15)

Well then, what is the good news?  The crucifixion and the resurrection haven’t happened yet, obviously.  Jesus, a young Jewish man, comes into the region of Galilee, says Mark, with good news of God.  What then is he telling the people which they are hearing as good news, something surprising they didn’t know before…?  I think the question matters, because in our later years, when there is not much we haven’t heard in the church 100 times, it may seem important to re-boot, in computer terms, to touch and grasp the simple essentials, whatever they are. 

We get some help here from contemporary theologian Marcus Borg[1].  He says Jesus preached a way of being that moves beyond both secular and religious conventional wisdom.  The path of transformation of which Jesus spoke leads from a life of requirements and measuring up… to a life of relationship with God.  It leads from a life of anxiety to a life of peace and trust.  It leads from the bondage of self-preoccupation to the freedom of self-forgetfulness.  It leads from life centred in the social, tribal and family culture to life centred in God.

That was good news...  that God is not our enemy, not our adversary, and certainly not any capricious god needing to be persuaded, cajoled, pacified or propitiated.  Awe of God is not fear of God.  Jesus said God may be addressed as Our Father.   It was also good news that Jesus seemed unwilling to recognise fences and boundaries, social or religious conventions separating male and female, rich and poor, Jew and foreigner, righteous and sinner.  These didn’t seem to matter to him, the way they mattered to the religious establishment.  He taught that prosperity is not the same as building bigger barns while ignoring human need.  In fact, he said, God does not tolerate arrogance and hypocrisy and neglect of others, whether it happens in the church or anywhere else.  The God Jesus called Father requires justice along with mercy and love.

Now, we are in Lent, and I was encouraged by our discussion last week, to think some more about the basic message of Jesus, for the 21^st century, but more particularly for those of us in our senior years and perhaps declining powers.   These years, with their limitations for us, and all the memories and lessons learned (or unlearned), we may see as a perfect kairos – remember kairos…? God’s time, meaningful time, time for newness, freshness, change.  So for these weeks of Lent we could have a fresh look at what Jesus called Good News about God and life.  If the basics were true in Galilee back then, they are likely to be true in Mahurangi and environs!  St Paul wrote to the Corinthian church:  Do not be children in your thinking… be infants in evil, but in thinking be adults.[2]  It may be that these senior years are a time for what one writer called unknowing, in order to grasp the Good News.

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[1]Marcus J. Borg,: Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (HarperSanFrancisco: 1994), p.88. (Quote slightly altered.)

[2] I Corinthians 14:20.

Naaman’s ego – 9 February 2018

In the weekly exercise of looking ahead at the Sunday lectionary, it seemed to me that this time the ancient Hebrew story of Naaman[1] wins hands down over the Epistle and the Gospel.  It’s such a good story.  Naaman in Hebrew means pleasant.  We might imagine that this Commander-in-Chief of the army of Aram, today’s Syria, was a popular chap, a role model, handsome in a military way.

But Naaman had leprosy.  Goodness knows what he actually had – leprosy is a more precise diagnosis these days than in the 9^th century BC.  At any rate, he had an affliction which rendered him socially and religiously unclean… it was a catastrophe.  Naaman would become an outcast.  That was the first blow to Naaman’s ego.

The second was that Naaman’s wife’s servant girl, a Hebrew slave, a trophy of war, suggests to Naaman’s wife that there is a prophet in Israel who might be able to help.  As though that were not humiliating enough, Naaman’s boss, the King of Syria, therefore peremptorily orders Naaman to go to Israel and ask for this help.[2]  The king sends a gift for the King of Israel - ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments.  Next humiliation:  The King of Israel stages a melt-down:  Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.  None of this carry-on is conspicuously therapeutic. 

Next humiliation…  Naaman rolls up, chariots and all, at the home of Elisha the prophet.  Elisha however declines to appear – he simply sends a message out:  Go and wash in the Jordan seven times…  This is the point in an American movie where the big irascible bloke flings his hat to the ground… Right! that does it!  Or words to that effect.  Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Syria, better than all the waters of Israel?  May I not wash in them and be clean…?  The Hebrew makes it clear that Naaman is in a ferocious temper.  Final humiliation… His servants point out the obvious – it’s a simple enough requirement, they say, why not give it a try…  Naaman does, and behold, it works.

The rest is a trifle embarrassing.  Naaman henceforth will worship only Israel’s God – and for that purpose he needs a load of Israeli soil to cart back to Syria, since you can’t worship Israel’s God on Syrian soil.  We always assumed that converting to Israel’s God would be an improvement.  I’m not so sure…[3] 

It seems to me that the wisdom in this story surfaces in what Naaman’s servants say to him:  Master, if the prophet had demanded something great from you, you would have done it – but he has asked something simple…  Naaman’s healing is more than the healing of his disease.  He has to stop and listen and learn.  He has to come out from behind his towering ego, and risk being naked and vulnerable.  He has to accept powerlessness and dependence.  He has to be open to newness and change.  So do we.  It is the point of our prayer of silence and stillness and simplicity.

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[1] II Kings 5:1-17

[2] As though someone advised Donald J Trump to seek psychiatric help in North Korea.

[3] This is the 9^th century BC, and Israel’s God is a tribal deity.  We are still a long way from the insights of the 6^th century prophet Isaiah, for instance in Isaiah 42.

Why it matters to be here – 2 February 2018

It seemed a good idea, as we start meeting again, to remind ourselves what we are doing – coming here at 8.30 on Friday mornings, having to organise ourselves accordingly, which may not have been simple, all for 30-40 minutes, much of it in silence, with 6 to 8 minutes of my dissertations, and a few minutes of discussion.  Of course, it’s more than that – the group is more than the sum of its individuals – there is always understanding and caring going on.

Primarily we practise Christian Meditation.  It is a form of prayer.  There are other forms of prayer.  Christian Meditation leads us towards what we call contemplative life and prayer, a special way of living in God’s world – and we can talk for ever (and we do) about what contemplative means!   Moreover, there are other forms of meditation.  Transcendental Meditation (TM) is one.  Buddhism and other faiths have sophisticated disciplines of meditation.  What we practise is Christian Meditation because we share varieties of Christian belief and allegiance – but even more because we understand that in the silence and stillness we are as present as we can manage to God in Christ, and God is present to us.

So, in our teachings about “attention”, and “consent”.  In our stillness and silence we are doing all we can simply to pay attention.  Pay attention to what…?  We are not asking for anything.  We are not seeing images or having visions.  We are not receiving messages or inspirations.  Normally each meditator has chosen a personal word or phrase, a mantra.   We “say it interiorly”, gently, repetitively.  The mantra is something to return to gently when we are inevitably distracted, as we always are, by thoughts or plans or memories or re-runs of events or conversations, or when we are assailed by feelings good or bad… whatever it is, we leave it there, gently return to the mantra, we are still again, and we are paying attention.  In all this, just for the time of prayer, we are setting self aside.  It is not our agenda that matters, right now.  We are consenting to the ego, the busy demanding self, being shifted from the place that belongs to God.

For lots of people we know, some of them church-goers all their lives and doers of good works, all this sort of carry-on sounds “mystical” and weird, perhaps slightly fanatical, at any rate surplus to requirements.  It also sounds like change, and change makes people nervous.  What is the matter with what we have always done – living a good life, being myself, going to church when I can, doing my best, achieving things…?  And it’s not usually a smart idea to be critical of that…

…except that our western world, taking leave of living faith in God, is becoming sadder and more lost.  Even some Christian teachers, such as my friend of years ago, Lloyd Geering, and others, evidently see no place for prayer, or for the concept of a loving relationship with a loving God.  Yet in the world that is emerging, as more of us can see, it is contemplative faith that will survive, sustain and nourish, giving us light and wisdom.  We are practising here the faith and practice we must now be teaching – as Jesus put it, leaving self behind in order to follow him.

Advent IV – Waiting – 24 December 2017

If you ever watched Fawlty Towers, you may remember Manuel the much oppressed waiter.  Manuel was from Barcelona, and he was keen to improve his English.  One day he had just learned the word eventually -- which he liked a lot and started to use frequently.  In the dining room, when an impatient couple told Manuel they wanted some water, he replied, Eventually…

If only everything was eventually.  Eventually Christmas Day will come… eventually it will be 2018.  But eventually doesn’t cover it in much of the reality of people’s experience.  Waiting for a hospital appointment when you’re ill and anxious… eventually isn’t much comfort.  Waiting for son or daughter or grand children to call and to spare you a bit of their time…eventually.  What does waiting mean if you are a Rohingya refugee, waiting homeless in Bangladesh, in rain and mud and cholera… if you are effectively stateless, and governments are simply arguing about whose responsibility you are…?  Eventually…

Waiting, and knowing how to wait, is an important part of spiritual health.  I haven’t learned it yet.   I can’t wait…!  Of course, waiting can also be benign and joyous – as when you are awaiting a child to be born and all is well and as it should be.  Sometimes waiting is totally ludicrous and exasperating, as when you are waiting in a phone queue to speak to someone with intelligence and initiative, and all you are getting is hideous music and recorded assurances that your call is important.  Tedious waiting can on occasion be turned to some interesting subsidiary purpose, such as mentally writing stories about each person in the dentist’s waiting room.  Hospices, as we know, are by their nature waiting places.  Wise people have found how to fill them with peace and goodness. 

Life frequently takes the form of waiting – and so our prayer, in stillness and silence, is itself a mode of waiting in faith, not knowing the end from the beginning, not seeking to manage, control or possess.

Mary and Joseph waited for their child.  The gospel narratives depict a whole world waiting for deliverance.  At the close of 2017 we wait for deliverance from arrogance and violence, from hatred, fear and discrimination, from poverty and disease, from the egoism that turns everything ugly, and from excrescences of religion that distort and disfigure the plain teaching of Jesus.

My experience when waiting, usually, is that everything else around is busy, even frantic, and trauma is abroad.  Have you no consideration for my poor nerves, cries Mrs Bennet to Mr Bennet.  Mr Bennet always greatly preferred to wait in silence and solitude.[1]  I have utmost consideration for your nerves, my love, he replies, they have been my constant companion these twenty years.  Christian Meditation could have enhanced the Bennet family. 

If you are still, something is happening in the distance.  If you are not still, you miss it.  Oh, hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing…

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[1] Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice

Advent III – Seeing the glory – 15 December 2017

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14)

God’s Logos, God’s Word.  Not a statement or a book… not a sacred scripture… not a doctrine, claiming to be truth… not a creed, or a declaration of faith, not a sermon, or a command…  God’s Word is not words at all – we provide words, in vast quantities of variable worth.  God’s Word is a person.  To a person you relate personally.

In the incomparable words of the Fourth Gospel, the Word, God’s Word, became flesh.  The Greek word “flesh” is sarx (σαρξ), useful in English words such as sarcophagus, sarcoidosis, sarcoma, sarcasm – the gospel writer chose an earthy and basic word.  It amuses me that “flesh”, which for centuries has terrified the Christian church as something dangerous and evil and to be subdued and controlled, is the very vehicle God chooses to convey God’s Word.  The Word became flesh…

…and lived among us.  Again, the Greek in which this writer tries to express the inexpressible is striking.  For “lived” he chose a form of the word skēnē (σκηνη), which means a tent.  Literally he writes, God pitched his tent among us.  A tent is not a stable permanence, like tower or temple, the Bank of England or the Warkworth Town Hall.  God’s Word is not something we can set in place, own or possess or use, or set rules for.  This living Word, as with any living person, defies definition.  God’s Word, alive in our hearts, meets us in different ways at different times and stages[1] of our lives, unpredictable. 

…and we have seen his glory, as of a father’s only son…  The glory of God’s Word is what we see, a person, loved and loving.  A mother’s only son… we could say... a father’s only daughter… a mother’s only daughter…  The point is that the glory is the relationship, the bond between Jesus and God whom he calls “my father”.  The same loving bond is opened between Jesus and his followers.  Of course it differs from person to person – the bond I experience and practise in prayer and service is not the same as you experience.  It also, with each of us, changes from one season of life to another.  But we recognise in each other the marks of that loving bond, if they are present. 

…full of grace and truth, writes John.  God’s Word is grace and truth.  If what we hear is not, it is not God’s Word.  In mature faith we have learned to distinguish grace and truth from the myriad distortions wrought upon it, it seems inevitably, by human ego and the need for control.  My sheep know my voice, we read in this same gospel[2].  We intuitively discern, or suspect, what is not gracious and what is not true… and we are seeing a lot of it lately, masquerading as Christian truth and righteousness.  The silence and stillness, then, so far as we are able without words or images, is the space in which we may become encountered and taught by God’s Word.

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[1] “Moments” - kairoi

[2] John 10:4-5, 27

Advent II – At peace – 8 December 2017

Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish… (II Peter 3:14)

On Advent II it’s all about John the Baptist, locusts and wild honey, and much repenting.  I retreated to the Epistle for the day, which is a fire-breathing passage in II Peter, not often visited.  I have discovered it’s more fruitful to study these impossible passionate writings after some 60 years, than it ever was in student days.  We may note that whoever wrote II Peter it could scarcely have been the Apostle Peter, and it certainly wasn’t whoever wrote I Peter… we actually don’t have any idea who wrote this.  That’s exciting for a start -- it was someone from epic and lively days in the church, and it was someone who didn’t mince words.  Consider, about believers who revert to pagan ways:  It would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than, after knowing it, to turn back… The dog has turned back to its own vomit… the sow is washed only to wallow again in the mud.  Speak as uncompromisingly as that in the modern church… insist that there are standards and changes required in personal life and values…

While you are waiting for these things.., he writes.  Here is the theme of waiting again.  We meet it regularly.  The infant church was waiting for the final deliverance, the return of Jesus in power and glory and judgement.  They thought that’s what they had to do.   But you can think of Christian life in any age as, in one way or another, a process of waiting.  Jews know how to wait, wrote someone I read recently – the Book of Psalms is full of waiting and longing.  But our current culture keeps crying, I can’t wait…!  The Now of prayer is also the Now of waiting, knowing how to be still in a frenetic age, knowing what to do with anger and fear and endless unresolved issues, knowing how to live deeper than materialism, entertainment, possession and control. While you are waiting, he writes…

…strive to be found by him at peace.  Note the phrase… found by him…  It is not a matter of how we appear in the eyes of others, or hope we appear, nor even what we think of ourselves.  …and be found in him, writes Paul in another place[1].  Prayer is where we are found… once we have set aside the busyness and the role-playing, the dreaming and dressing up.  Jesus finds us, at peace.  So far as it lies with us, we are refusing to be at odds, to have enemies.  We do not carry aggressive weapons.  We study living without fear.  We seek to make peace.  We instinctively recoil from hate-speech and the vitriol that seems to sustain so many, and maintain divisions, these days.  We do our best to be at peace with the environment.  We no longer have patience for any Christian church in which egos are dictating discord and disorder, since it simply ceases to be credibly Christian.  That is prayer – being found, at peace.  It does not mean untroubled, of course.  Troubles may abound.  But as St Paul put it, Grace does much more abound.[2]

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[1] Philippians 3:9.

[2] Romans 5:20.

Advent I – Heaven and earth – 1 December 2017

Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.  Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.  [Mark 13:30-31]

Well, there seem to be three issues here.  The first is the strange statement Jesus makes, that this generation will not pass away until these things – he refers to the return of the Son of Man in glory and judgement – have taken place.  As we know, we are necessarily in the business of restating Christian truth for our generation and our age and the culture of human arrogance and alternative facts.  Those earliest Christians expected the Lord’s return any day.  It would be most dramatic, nothing like his first Advent at Bethlehem, and all wrongs would be righted. Here Jesus seems to be saying it will be during their generation… but clearly it wasn’t.  Contemplatives know a way to see this more meaningfully.  The end time is always now.  Now is the only time we have.  And an essential feature of contemplative life and prayer is that we are motivated and equipped to live fully in the now – rather than, for instance, what our culture calls living my dream… or retreating from reality into memories, be they triumphs or regrets… Jesus meets us in real time and in truth.  St Paul wrote: Behold, now is the acceptable moment[1], now is the day of salvation!  Contemplative prayer, our prayer of silence and stillness, is always the courage and honesty to mark and name and respect the present moment, to stand in it and realise we are not alone here. 

Secondly he says, heaven and earth will pass away.  Indeed they will, in two respects.  In 1^st century terms, heaven and earth was the whole cosmos, the earth and the sky, the known universe.  Now we know that, although it always had a limited life, we are now helping the process along, accelerating it, by our plundering and misuse of the environment.  The second sense in which heaven and earth will pass away is that we are part of it and plainly mortal.  Our bodies stop working.  We too pass away – in the lovely poetry of the Psalmist:  The wind passeth over it and it is gone, and the place thereof knoweth it no more.[2]

And thirdly he says, my words will not pass away.  What endures is the life and truth to which Jesus witnesses.  It is the truth, the words, the teaching, the presence, the gift of new life, that compels us to silence and stillness, to respond with our innermost Yes, our deepest consent.  It is the preference of love over fear, mercy over judgement, the relinquishing of arrogance and the delusion of control, the subduing of the ego.  Jesus brings us into the realm of truth in which death itself forfeits any right to the final word.  Jesus’s words are eternal because they are words of freedom… freedom to celebrate mystery unafraid… freedom to be still and receptive in the kairos, the present moment.

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[1] II Corinthians 6:2.  It’s that word kairos which we have met already a few times.

[2] Psalm 103:16.