Resurrection…4 – The heart of prayer

We come to what Archbishop Rowan Williams describes as the fourth aspect of resurrection good news -- Jesus’s resurrection carries good news about prayer.  This is another tricky one, because it challenges what many might assume.  The common assumption about prayer is that we are petitioning heaven.  We ask God for things, sometimes urgently.  In some quarters it is assumed, or hoped, that the more people praying, or the more fervently they pray, or the more often, the more potent is the prayer and the likelihood that it will be “answered”.   That is exactly the religious, I would say superstitious carry-on of the priests of Baal, ridiculed and condemned by Elijah the prophet in the 9^th century BC, some 3000 years ago.[1]

In his resurrected life Jesus invites us to be where he is.  Prayer is being where Jesus is.  Where I am, there you may be also.[2]  They are familiar words, usually heard at funeral services.  But this in John’s Gospel is the teaching of early Christians, not conducting funerals but experiencing the risen Jesus with them now, present reality – and that is the whole of prayer.  Rowan Williams puts it this way: …we are being introduced into a new world, the place where Jesus is.  Prayer is most deeply allowing God to happen in us, the Spirit bringing Christ alive in us, being in the place where Christ is real, with the Spirit coming into us to bring Christ alive in our own hearts.  Prayer, in Christian understanding, is possible because Jesus is risen.  Whatever the form of our prayer – and it may indeed be petition and intercession, it may be confession and repentance, it may be the great prayer of praise in the Eucharist, it may be Mozart’s Ave Verum – whatever sort of prayer it is, it is that we are present where Jesus is present.  Our hearts are paying attention.  We are not asking for anything, but we are saying Yes to love and mercy, justice and peace, deeply and abidingly.

So, some of our teachers like to say, we can think of prayer as joining the risen Christ in his eternal prayer to the Father, in the Spirit – a prayer, even a song we might say, or a dance, of the peace and unity of all creation.[3]  It is not that we are choosing our prayer, so much that we are joining with the risen Christ in his eternal prayer for creation.  He is praying in us, as we are still, silent, consenting.  We are suspending our own concerns, writes Rowan Williams, our words and fussiness, and we are letting God be in us.

Prayer leads you to see new paths and to hear new melodies in the air. Prayer is the breath of your life which gives you the freedom to go and to stay where you wish and to find the many signs which point out the way to a new land. Praying is not simply some necessary compartment in the daily schedule of a Christian or a source of support in a time or need, nor is it restricted to Sunday mornings or mealtimes. Praying is living.

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[1] I Kings 18:20ff

[2] John 14:1-7

[3] I think this prayer is deeply reflected in chapters 14-17 of John’s Gospel.

Resurrection…3 – Death and Resurrection

The third dimension of good news, resurrection news, according to Archbishop Rowan Williams, is about death.  You will perhaps forgive a little cynical story.  Some ministers, when first ordained and turned loose upon decent people… if they do some good, it may very well be a triumph of grace over stupidity.  It’s also smart, generally speaking, for parishioners to beware of ministers at this early stage if they have just read a book.  I had just read a new publication from a fine Lutheran teacher, Oscar Cullmann, and it was entitled, Immortality of the Soul or The Resurrection of the Body.  The book is somewhat dated now, but Cullmann makes an important point, very startling back then, that Christian scriptures do not teach what we call immortality.  This is indeed so, but as I found out it is tricky territory for the novice parish minister.

Rowan Williams however who is not a novice puts it quite bluntly:  Christians really ought to be much more critical than they often are of the idea that we survive death.  We don’t.  We die… and God restores our relationship with him.   Dr Williams says we don’t have a little bit of us called Immortal Soul which hangs on after death.  John Brown’s body lies a’mouldring in the grave, but his soul goes marching on…  This is the glib sentimentalism of many about death, including many Christian adherents.  We do not know what lies beyond death.  Neither, I may say, do atheists or anyone who insists, as though they have some special insight, that we return to the cosmic dust and there is nothing more to be said.  Resurrection people die in the confidence that, as with Jesus, life is transformed (“changed”, writes St Paul), and restored, and love is unbroken.  That is what we call resurrection.

Jesus repeatedly counselled us not to be afraid.  Why are you fearful?  And indeed a major consequence of a discipline of contemplative life and prayer is the calming, over time, of our most earnest inner fears – often simply variants of the fear of death.  The fear of defeat, for instance, of dying without having done what we thought we would or should do, or without having been able to repair what we damaged.  The fear of change, because I might not be able to cope with it.  The fear of powerlessness, perhaps, of not being there any more to influence what happens, not being present to others we’ve always been present to, not being able to make our will prevail any more… leaving it to others.  A dear church lady, within hours of death, and quite at peace with that, still thought it necessary to say, “Please tell those women to make sure someone gets the milk…” She meant, for the cup of tea after the funeral service.

Jesus’s resurrection says that God calls us through death to life.  I have no idea how.  But then, the process of growing and maturing in faith has become in numerous ways a process of unknowing, of choosing to be still, of trusting, relinquishing control... which includes not needing, necessarily, to understand.  We journey towards our own mortality in just the way Jesus did – in quiet trust.  It is as well to have as little unfinished business as possible, but sometimes that turns out to be a luxury too far.  Time or circumstances may mean there are still loose ends and unresolved issues.  In contemplative life and prayer we are always aware of our mortality.  We go on in company with the risen Christ and by faith in him.

Resurrection…2 – The world can change

The first dimension of resurrection truth in the 21^st century, according to Rowan Williams, is that humans and humanity matter.  We visited that theme last week.  The second (and these themes certainly overlap) is that the world really can change.  One of the fascinating features of secular philosophy is the apparent commitment to not changing.  We have all met the person who takes pride in not changing.  There are people who claim that “some people”, especially certain offenders, “will never change” – and therefore should be locked away permanently or eliminated.  Human history up to the present day, it may seem in our gloomier moods, scarcely fills us with confidence that the world will ever change…

Jesus says otherwise.  Jesus’s resurrection is to say that God can turn human inevitability and human mortality and human history on its pivot (to borrow words from Rowan Williams) – it is to see that in all sorts of human situations it is possible for things to be different. 

Rowan Williams, who can be a little bit mischievous, then goes on to point out that this is why Christians so often turn out to be a nuisance – as Dr Williams himself was more than once, from his episcopal chair – a nuisance to people who want a tidy world.  The Roman Empire was a very efficient administration – so much so that it couldn’t find room for another vision of humanity which called for difference and a re-valuation of human dignity.  Christianity was a terrible nuisance also to Hitler and the Third Reich, as it was to Stalin, is now in China where the church is acceptable and permitted only as the state can control it.  Even in the UK or the USA the Christian prophetic resurrection voice is scarcely what the powerful want to hear or find comfortable.

It is because of the resurrection that Christians insist that things can be different.  In many cases this is because the believers have found that they themselves have been changed.  It is reinforced in many cases by the difference in values and attitudes they may see in their own families and tribal gatherings, between some who are resurrection people and some who are not, never think about it, ridicule it, or find it incomprehensible.  Indeed, there are some people who can’t and won’t change because of brain damage or psychological trauma of some kind – we assume then that we care for them, as and if we can, but certainly not traumatise them further. 

Yes, the world can change.  The Spirit of God, whom Jesus said would come, whom Jesus described memorably as the wind, blows through the ruins, creating, re-creating, enlivening, making all things new.  Resurrection people can see the signs of that.  The most powerful and movingly understated story of resurrection I ever encountered is[1] in German.  Nine-year-old Jürgen, in the rubble of Berlin, June 1945, is determinedly guarding the body of his 4-year-old brother.  “Why?” says a stranger who appears.  “Because of the rats,” says the little boy.  “But rats sleep at night,” says the stranger.  It’s a lie, as we know, but the stranger is able to persuade the boy to share some rabbit meat he has got, and some edible leaves growing up in the rubble.  And so they set off, towards the rising morning sun.

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[1] Wolfgang Borchert: Nachts schlafen die Ratten doch.

Resurrection…1 – Human beings matter

During Lent I returned to one of my best teachers, Rowan Williams,[1] and in particular his recent book, The Sign and the Sacrifice, the Meaning of the Cross and Resurrection.[2]  In the final chapter he lists five ways in which the resurrection of Jesus has deep meaning for our 21^st century lives. My hope is to take one of these on each of the next five Fridays, the first one today.

First, he says …if Jesus is risen, there is a human destiny.  That is to say, there is a human worth and dignity, a purpose and an identity way beyond that assumed by the state or the secular culture.  The creator of our life proves to be also re-creator, making all things new.  Jesus is our sign that the dehumanising tyrannies of our day are not God’s last word on any person God has made.  The human race may have, and does have, a capacity for destructiveness and cruelty and for reducing this world to chaos and pain – Jesus tells another narrative.  In the lovely poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins:  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.[3] 

And then, still struggling how to think, let alone write or teach clearly, or sensibly about resurrection, I was sent, on the 50^th anniversary of his murder, this prophetic quote of Dr Martin Luther King.  I think it is from one of his sermons: When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

The lectionary for these Sundays in Easter provides epistle readings from the First Letter of John.  These are almost the last writings to make it into the canon of Christian scripture.  God is light, we read there, and in him is no darkness at all.[4]  If we are walking in the darkness, says John, we cannot claim to be in company with Jesus – we cannot be resurrection people.  But if we are walking in the light of resurrection, as Jesus is, we are in company with all others doing the same.  This is the new humanity.  We know who we are, and to whom we belong, in life and in death.

Another teacher, this one long ago and I have mentioned him before, was Dr Helmut Rex.  As Dr Helmut Rehbein, refugee pastor from Nazi Germany, he was received by the NZ church and obliged to change his name to Rex to avoid abuse and discrimination.  Dr Rex taught us Church History for 3 years.  His health had been broken by malnutrition and by Nazi abuse.  A brilliant scholar and a true disciple.  And one day he said in class (I am quoting from memory):  In prison, you know, it’s not very happy.  I was allowed a Bible, and that was good of course.  But the main thing at that time was my trust in resurrection.  Jesus lives.  Nazism cannot.  That is God’s signal to us.

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[1] Former Archbishop of Canterbury, now Master of Magdalen College, Cambridge.

[2] Westminster John Knox Press, 2017.

[3] G M Hopkins: God’s Grandeur.

[4] I John 1:5ff

He speaks her name…Easter 2018

Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher).  Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me… (John 20:16-17)

It is tantalising how little we know about Mary Magdalene.  One of the three Marys… Mary his mother, Mary of Bethany (sister of Martha and Lazarus), and Mary of Magdala.  The idea that Mary Magdalene was a reformed prostitute is probably a silly libel – there is no primary source that says that about her.  What does seem sure is that she was one of Jesus’s disciples, just as were James and John, Peter or Andrew.  On the Easter morning, early it says, and still dark, she is at the tomb, sunk in grief, all the more because the tomb is empty.  Mary knows Jesus is dead.  She saw him die, she saw him buried.  Someone has stolen the body.  How will she ever cope with that?

Jesus says to her, “Mary”.  That is the first kairos in Mary’s Easter.[1]  He interrupts her grief and pain.  He calls her by name.  In her darkness and loss, she is addressed from the heart of God’s love, which is greater than death.  Such a kairos may happen to any of us in any of a myriad of ways, usually just as unobtrusive, through the events of life.  Dag Hammarskjöld[2] wrote in his journal at Pentecost 1961: I don't know Who, or what, put the question, I don't know when it was put.  I don't even remember answering.  But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone, or Something, and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.  He knew himself addressed, by name, by risen love.

The second kairos is her response.  She turned and said to him “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher).  That is the way she knew him – as her Teacher.  It may not seem to us like full-blown Easter faith, but it is perfectly fine that she sees Jesus in her own way, according to her own encounter, and in her own time.  In time to come the church would prescribe all manner of titles for Jesus, and exalted ways of responding to him, complete with incense.  I am content to be with Mary of Magdala, for whom he was, at least initially, Rabbi, Teacher.

The third kairos is when, understandably, she moves to keep him, embrace him.  The Greek verb used here means to take hold, possess.  But he is not available now to be enlisted, used, possessed, by the church or anyone.  Mary receives, accompanies the risen Jesus in the same way we do now – not by intellect or dogma or the most inspiring creed, but by the heart’s quiet response.  Her yes to Jesus is an answer of love.  She will learn to recognise his summons in time to come, in the varied circumstances of life and of death.  And he will call her through her own death.  She has encountered the love over which, as Paul put it, death has no dominion – neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else.[3]

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[1] Remember our Greek word kairos… it is the biblical word meaning a special moment, the moment that changes things, God’s moment, the moment of newness.

[2] Dag Hammarskjöld, Swedish Lutheran diplomat, Secretary-General of the United Nations, 1953-1961.

[3] Romans 8:38-39

Passion Sunday, 23 March 2018 – Obedient to death

…he humbled himself and became obedient to death. (Philippians 2:8)

The usual way, in the church, of dealing with the next week or so is to follow the drama.   It begins with Palm Sunday and the children singing Hosanna… all the events of Holy Week leading up to the Last Supper… the cruel horror of Good Friday… the empty abyss of Saturday… the lighting of the Easter flame, and the Good News of Easter morning.  People involve themselves in the drama – and in the human realities of cruelty and pain -- as much or as little as they choose.  Some make sure to remain securely within their comfort zones.

Not having to preside at these things any more as I once did, there is space to look at it in other ways.  I was struck by Paul’s phrase about Jesus, in the middle of the lyrical passage in Philippians 2… he became obedient to death.  We have encountered that word obedient before.  The Greek word Paul uses here is formed from the verb meaning to listen.  The only difference is a prefix which intensifies it – so it means to listen intently, constantly, to devote attention.[1]  “Obedient” certainly does not mean that Jesus doggedly obeyed an imperious divine will that decreed death for him.  Obedient to death, rather, means that he trusted the mutual bond of love with the Father, even down the path which led where it did.  It is such a shame that the words obey and obedience denote in our day mainly some slavish adherence to authority or to some law.  The biblical word by contrast implies a life of listening and consent, in love.  Jesus knew, I think, that that bond, enlivened by prayer, continues through and beyond death.

Approaching Easter 2018, then, what I seem to see is a civilisation (if it can be called that), at any rate a generation marked increasingly by death, swamped almost everywhere by guns and other ways of killing.  State-sponsored assassination is the latest, nothing new in history admittedly, but it has become more blatant.  I see a western culture terrified of ageing and of vulnerability – and more recently for some reason, the growing phenomenon of senility, like a premature extended goodbye…  But whoever we are, as we know, we are walking that same trail of mortality. 

Chris Nichol, who runs the Sunday morning hymn session on channel 1, last Sunday described Jesus’s path to the cross evocatively as “Me Too”.  Jesus identifies in his own life and body the path we follow… which for many, often, becomes bloody, painful, pointless or humiliating.  “Me Too”, the phrase that has emerged for women to identify with the abuse of women, serves quite well to describe Jesus going to Jerusalem and Calvary.  But the point is deeper than that.  Jesus walked that path not as some grim inevitability, but in loving obedience, in the bond of abiding.  It was no less terrible for him, no less frightening, and I think the gospel narratives reflect that.  But he was hearing a call of love, as we might.  When Pilate cynically asked “What is truth?” Jesus was in touch with light and truth, and the love that rules sovereign over life and death.  Moreover, arraigned before Pilate, bound, flogged and humiliated, he witnessed to it, you may recall, by silence.

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[1] ὑπηκοος  (hupēkoos) = hearkening, listening to.

Lent V, 16 March 2018 – I will write it on their hearts

The lectionary Hebrew scriptures reading for next Sunday takes us to the Prophet Jeremiah:

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.  No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.  (Jeremiah 31:33-34)

Jesus would have been familiar with these ancient words, read in the synagogue, taught and studied.  And indeed, there is a certain maturity of faith in which “the law” – we would be more inclined to say God’s Word, perhaps – becomes inscribed on our hearts.  Remember, a couple of weeks ago, we were thinking about Jesus and compassion, and how the ancient world assumed that our deepest thoughts and emotions are seated in the inner parts, and they use the Hebrew words meaning bowel or heart… well, here it is in Jeremiah: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. 

Inscribed on our hearts, however, does not mean that our minds are therefore closed.  In Christian terms it means that the way of Jesus has become the focal part of us, deeply affecting our choices and decisions, and the ways we react to events.  Perhaps in computer terms it is our default position.  It may be that we derive a deep inner satisfaction (what the Bible sometimes calls joy) from our awareness that this the way we choose, the path less travelled, with all its implications.  But at the same time we are not afraid of newness, of hearing or learning other things.  The way of Jesus opens our minds.  Truth is not fenced in to keep it safe and unsullied.  We don’t have to protect God’s Word.

And moreover, we are not engaged in some nervous continuing conflict with God.  Jesus teaches and shows a stable, confident relationship of love.  We do not live in fear, then, of offending God, having to ask, “Where did we go wrong? why is God punishing us?”  Jesus frequently taught, “Don’t be afraid… why are you fearful…?”  Jesus counsels living without fear of God, of life, or of tomorrow.

The relationship is within.  We encourage each other, of course, and always should, but this inner bond is at another level than discussion groups or trendy spirituality.  The writer of the 1^st Letter of Peter counsels:  Let your adornment be the inner self with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit.[1] 

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[1] I Peter 3:4