Lent IV, 9 March 2018 – A Jewish teacher

Jesus lived and died a devout and practising Jew, a teacher, a young rabbi.  Christians need to be reminded of this, even more so in our day.  Jesus never heard of the Christian Church or the New Testament.  To 1^st century Jewish ears, his teaching was fresh, startling, often radical.  A lot of it exists for us in the form of sayings, aphorisms, and of course parables.  Blessed are the poor in spirit… those who mourn… the meek… You see how it is relentlessly counter-cultural and counter-intuitive.  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness… the merciful… the pure in heart… the peacemakers…[1]  In large sectors of American and other faith communities today, to be blessed is to be comfortably off, to be happy, and safe – more or less the opposite of what Jesus taught. 

You shall not kill, said the Law of Moses…  Well, said Jesus, if you’re angry you are already in peril.  The point, he taught, is to be reconciled with your adversary.  You shall not commit adultery, says the Law...  Well, says Jesus, lust, greed and possessiveness condemn you, whether you commit adultery or not.   An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, decreed the Law…  No, says Jesus.  As Gandhi put it in our day, an eye for an eye simply makes the whole world blind -- which is more or less what is happening.  You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy, said the Law…  Love your enemy, said Jesus.  He stood conventional wisdom on its head.

When you give money… do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing…  When you pray, do not heap up empty words -- go into your room and shut the door…  Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth…  Life is more than food, and the body more than clothing…  Do not judge; first take the log out of your own eye…  If you forgive others, your heavenly Father will forgive you… as though the unforgiving are simply unforgiven.  Of course all this is hard, and complicated, in practice.  It is a lifetime of effort – made simpler for us, many have found, in a discipline of prayer and silence in which we are open and consenting to these changes being built in us by God’s Spirit, the same Spirit who empowered, motivated and taught Jesus.   He said, My yoke is easy, my burden is light.[2]  But it is not that we are trying our best to imitate him – that would indeed be a heavy burden -- it is that we are learning to receive the spiritual power and inspiration he knew.  We are learning to set ego aside, to take ourselves less seriously. 

I think the Spirit can use the experiences we have accumulated by our senior years, and the lessons we have learned along the way.  We can be alert to this.  We have, if we’re halfway sensible, developed a sense of what matters and what doesn’t and perhaps never did.  The many ways in which human frailty and error surface, in cruelty and stupidity, selfishness and blindness… there are few surprises for us now.  The way of the Jewish Jesus makes profound sense, especially in the context of the prayer of silence and stillness he himself used. 

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[1] The “Sermon on the Mount” is in Matthew chapters 5-7, and in parts of Luke.

[2] Matthew 11:30

Lent III, 2 March 2018 – Using a whip

Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.  He told those who were selling doves, “Take these things out of here! (John 2:15-16)

I wonder if there exists, in some church in Italy or Spain, a tattered grubby bunch of cords claiming to be a holy relic, Jesus’s whip.  Given the state of religion, it might even have special powers attributed to it, such as repelling tax inspectors.  This is one of those irritating times when the lectionary gives us a major event in the gospel story, something attested in all four gospels… and it’s an embarrassment.  Jesus furiously charged through the temple precinct, overturning tables, scattering money, chasing traders and their wares out.  And I can assure you, if you consult 100 different preachers and commentators on the numerous websites available, there is nervousness and an inability to come to terms with the fact that Jesus raged, shouted and hit people.

During Lent we are looking at the pre-Easter Jesus, various pictures provided by the gospel records – and we are asking what we find there for our grown-up faith and our senior years.  One writer I came across this week was remembering his childhood and youth, and how, on entering church he would be reminded at the door to be quiet and still.  Yes, we were expected to compose ourselves.  The writer’s point is that he mourns the loss of reverent stillness in worship and in the sanctuary.

But this story is not about how to behave in church.  Jesus found the house of God given over to a racket.  You have to imagine the sacrificial animals waiting to be sold and slaughtered, their vendors calling out the prices and herding the animals, the racket in more than one sense of the money changers – because you had to buy your animal with the temple currency, not Roman.  Ordinary folk coming to Jerusalem to fulfil their religious obligations were being royally ripped off, exploited by the powerful of the temple cult.  So Jesus was angry.  My Father’s house, he quoted[1], shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of thieves.

Jesus taught and practised a very different response to God.  In returning and rest you will be saved, in quietness and trust will be your strength, said the prophet Isaiah.[2]  Prayer is not trying to impress God with how busy or sacrificial we are, but entails the opening of the heart in stillness and silence, in love and trust.  It is a matter of being fully present to God – which is often difficult amid liturgical busyness and chatter.   The church doesn’t always make it easy.  Jesus intervened on behalf of ordinary folk, and in the interests of peace and simplicity.  The temple had got between God and the people, and was making money out of it.  Yes, I think he was very angry.

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[1] Isaiah 56:7; Jeremiah 7:11

[2] Isaiah 30:15

Lent II, 23 February 2018 – Compassion

The talk today is about what Jesus seems to have meant by “compassion”.  But as we know there is an immediate problem for any of us in any of the helping professions, dealing often with people in pain and stress.  “Compassion” has problems for teachers, lawyers, doctors and nurses, counsellors, ministers… and so on… where it is necessary to have protocols, boundaries, and to know how to maintain objectivity… for the sake of the practitioner as much as for the client or patient.  My own view is that, first, we do need to understand how Jesus saw “compassion”, and then to work out our own response to this in our own situations, as we are able.

Last week we heard how this Jewish man emerged in Galilee, writes Mark, proclaiming the good news of God.  And we are asking, what is this Good News? why is it Good News?  Moreover, we are asking this partly from the perspective of our senior years, which some of us know a lot about – the years when we have learned to be inwardly suspicious of candy-floss faith and things that don’t add up, and believing six impossible things before breakfast.

Jesus, wrote Marcus Borg, was unimpressed with any religion of fulfilling obligations and measuring up.  He showed rather… a life of relationship with God… a life centred in God.  This life, Jesus showed, is deeply sustained by prayer.

Now, we find, repeatedly in the gospel records, Jesus showed and taught compassion.  This is an important word, and we need to be clear what Jesus meant by it.  He would frequently have heard this word, compassion, in the Hebrew of the synagogue and the scriptures of his people[1].  There are various Hebrew words more or less meaning compassion, but the interesting one is racham, because this is also the word meaning “womb”, or “bowels”.  Hebrew anatomy was not up to much at times, but they were sure that our very deepest reactions, from anger to compassion, were seated in the lower abdomen.  Jesus shared that culture and understanding.  Moreover, in the Greek of the Christian scriptures, for instance at the point where the Good Samaritan comes across the wounded traveller, we are told he had compassion – and that Greek word also[2] means the gut, the viscera, the inward parts.

So, what is having compassion…?  In Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son, when the young man returns home, Jesus says his father saw him from afar and had compassion, and ran…  The essential thing for the father is that it is now beyond blame, let alone punishment.  That is not what the older brother thinks, but the father will take upon himself what his son is suffering, including his guilt, he will bear his son’s burden.  That is compassion.  The English word is from Latin and literally means to suffer with.  It does not mean saying, “I know exactly how you’re feeling”, because we don’t and we can’t.  It certainly doesn’t mean feeling sorry for someone.  To have compassion is to bear pain.  This father never felt inwardly, “I’m glad it wasn’t me”… he wished it had been him instead.  I am sure you recognise compassion, then.  We may be able to do precisely nothing – that is frequently, if not usually the case.  But we see the pain and we are hurt too.  To be human is never to be weatherproof, and to be a disciple of Jesus is never to be safe.  To be capable of compassion then does mean that we have lowered our self-protective mechanisms, we have come to terms with pain and mortality and a deeply unfair world.  All of this is a product of the prayer of silence and stillness, as Jesus showed.

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[1] eg.  I Kings 8:50; II Kings 13:23; Psalm 103:13.  Hosea 1:6 where his wife Gomer’s child is named Lo-Ruchamah, “Not Pitied” – the name is a form of racham.

[2] τα σπλαγχνα (splagchna) = heart and bowels… innards.

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