Response – 14 September 2018

…on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”  And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”  He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:27-29)

On the way… is a popular motif in the gospels.  They typically talked as they walked, on the road.  It’s a picture to trigger our imaginations – they learned as they went along, as we do, day by day, if learning and growing are what we want.  Not everyone welcomes learning new things or changing.  If what we hope for is things to stay the same, with certainty, safety and security, then learning and growing are scarcely going to happen.  But in Jesus’s company, evidently, the changing scenery facilitated developing hearts and minds. 

He asked them first, what are people saying about me… who do they say I am?  The answers show how we feel better if we can categorise, simply pin a label, good or bad, on someone[1] – that way, we have pigeon-holed things in an orderly manner, we know what we think, and best of all, we may have established that we are not threatened, life can continue…  So, reply the disciples, some say you are John the Baptist back to life again, some say Elijah, others say some other of the prophets.   It is a warning about labelling Jesus – if I want to know who Jesus is, really, it’s pretty pointless to ask around, conduct a poll, do a street survey, even around the church. 

So Jesus asks: But you… who do you say I am?  Peter knows the answer.  You are the Christ, ὁ Χριστος, the Anointed One – Messiah, in Hebrew.  It is a catechism answer, and the implication is that, since it is the “right” answer, it is the answer for everyone.  In some Christian circles defining Jesus correctly (or Mary, or the Trinity…) is used as a test of orthodoxy… as every parish minister discovers before long. 

But Jesus asks a crucial question.  Who do you say I am…?  It is an invitation to discover, in our own personal experience, over the years and through the mysteries and setbacks and sadnesses, as well as the triumphs of life, who he is.  What matters is not the catechism answer, but my answer.  Moreover, my answer today might differ significantly from my answer 30 years ago, or even last year – because I am further along the road, learning as I go.  The issue is not whether I am “correct” in my answer, but whether my answer is what I am living by, enlightened by, whether my answer is coming from doing justly, loving mercy, walking humbly.  What matters is not the labels I put on Jesus, even labels prescribed by church or bible, although they may be helpful… so much as what he is making of me as I take step after step, as I remember the great gospel themes and teachings, as I review what has happened in my life and among the people I know and love, and as I value the times I am able to spend in silence and stillness, simply present to God as God in Christ is, and always was, present to me.

(In our group's discussion later, one member said Jesus might have been clearer if he had asked, "But who am I to you...?"  I agree.)

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[1] Eg. I was labelled, on Facebook this week, “a racist low-life”.  The person feels better now, having categorised me.

Joy without a cause – 7 September 2018

"But you and all the kind of Christ
Are ignorant and brave,
And you have wars you hardly win
And souls you hardly save.

"I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.

"Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?"

It’s G K Chesterton, Ballad of the White Horse, written over 100 years ago, 1911, as he watched events building up to the First World War catastrophe – and, as a convinced practising believing Christian, he watched the posturings of a compromised church blessing battleships.  Then it was for him, as it is now for many of us, increasingly and urgently a matter of how to express the way of Christ in a world rife with menace and mendacity – the sky grows darker yet, the sea rises higher -- when the church too seems to have lost its way… but to remember also the joy that remains at the heart of it all, in Christ – joy without a cause, faith without a hope, writes Chesterton…  It is reminiscent of another of Britain’s 20^th century poets, T S Eliot:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.[1]

It is the poets who come to our help, the psalmists, the Hebrew verse we usually ignore in the Book of Job, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, not afraid of mystery and unanswered questions, speaking to our hearts, often in imponderables, paradoxes, expressing our conflicts.  Did you notice in Eliot…waiting without words… the faith the hope and the love are all in the waiting, he says… wait without thought… the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing.  He describes exactly what we do in Christian Meditation.

I profoundly believe, our basic duties in discipleship -- doing justice, loving mercy, walking humbly -- will need to be sustained in the church and the world of the days ahead by simple disciplines of silence, stillness and consent to God.  It is what the poets call waiting.  Down that road lies what St Paul named joy, the fruit of the Spirit that comes next after love.[2]

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[1] T S Eliot: East Coker, in Four Quartets.

[2] Galatians 5:22

Merton’s epiphany – 31 August 2018

Here are words you may have heard before, from Thomas Merton’s “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”, written back in the mid-1960s:  In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people… that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.  It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud…

He was a Cistercian monk, master of novices at the Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky.  He had gone in to Louisville on some errand for the monastery.  To this day,[1] at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, a notice commemorates “Merton’s Epiphany”, which changed him deeply and permanently.  So what had happened?  I would like to express this as clearly as I can, because we need to understand the changes that begin to occur in contemplative life and prayer.

Merton had set himself, over more than 20 years by now in the monastery, to be a good monk.  It was difficult for him, partly because of his independent, questioning nature, partly because he and his abbot were at odds.  The Rule of St Benedict is actually a liberal and flexible way of life and faith, but Merton had set out to do it perfectly, and to teach it to his novices…  Now, somehow, spontaneously, in downtown Louisville, he was turned from being occupied with his personal faith and obedience – and thus inevitably, what he saw as his frequent failures and fallings-short – to seeing that the miracle of the kingdom is there anyway.  Merton didn’t have to achieve it, he had to join it.  It wasn’t about Thomas Merton – it was about being surrounded and enveloped anyway by grace, which on the corner of 4^th and Walnut he could see already embraced all the world including him.  To become a giver he had first to be a receiver.  It is not about measuring up, it is about saying Yes, in all our inadequacy.  It is not first our love for God, but God’s love for us, and for all.

I am putting these things in my way, 60 years later and outside any monastery.  Merton experienced a kairos, a moment of grace and truth.  These are moments when there is no bargaining and no regret, writes Fr Laurence Freeman.  We are not doing deals with God.  We are empty-handed and consenting at the deepest levels of our consciousness.  We enter the kingdom in the only way, by a humble Yes.  And in this we are deeply at one with all the world and all its pain and injustice.

Merton points out that it is inseparable with joy.  He experienced relief and freedom.  It informed and inspired the rest of his life and teachings.  We are here to do justice, love mercy, walk humbly.  There are failures and sadnesses ahead.  But we are moving from the charmed circle of me and my needs and my fears and my ego – and all my doings and possessions and anxieties.  Priority has shifted… and it is such a liberation.

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[1] You can see it, if you look carefully, on Google Earth.

Powers of darkness – 24 August 2018

For our struggle is not against blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.  (Ephesians 6:12)

Paul was a man of his time, he was educated in both Greek and Roman thought as well as his native Hebrew culture – and all of these, like all ancient cultures, in various ways assumed an invisible realm of spirits, both good and bad but certainly perilous.  Powers,[1] Paul called them, invisible but potent.  Spiritual forces of evil, is another phrase he uses.  Earlier in Ephesians he actually tells them that before they came to Christ they followed the course of this world… the ruler of the power of the air… the spirit at work among those who are disobedient…[2]  But most importantly, he saw Christ as having defeated the cosmic powers[3].  Jesus by his resurrection became what Christian theology eventually called Christus Victor, Christ the Conqueror.  Jesus’s death and resurrection initiated a battle in which the outcome in time and beyond time is certain.

Now, somehow this sweeping cosmic view has to be rendered in terms meaningful to 21^st century intelligence and spiritual experience.  I suppose there are plenty of people who still assume that we are surrounded and threatened by evil spirits – in I Peter we read about your adversary the devil prowling around, looking for someone to devour…[4]  Well, some might think that good for putting the frighteners up recalcitrant children…

…until we take serious notice of what is going on in our world, in which...  Truth, if inconvenient, becomes arbitrarily labelled as fake, untruth…  Mindless violence is increasingly seen as the way to resolve differences…  People make war on children…  Cruelty is used as though its victims are of no account.  Religion is warped and distorted into credulity, superstition and fear…  The natural environment is plundered...  Power is routinely possessed and misused, rather than being held in trust for good.  There is a force of evil which takes possession of people and of communities, usually masquerading as righteousness, but sometimes quite undisguised. 

And I believe it remains true that Jesus confronts and defeats this power, even if it is just that he shows us another way, and holds our hearts true to doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God.[5] But he also empowers and inspires us by the Spirit he promised.  The prayer of silence and stillness is our reminder, daily, of truth and wisdom and the way of Christ in our desperately wounded world.

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[1] Greek archē (ἀρχη)

[2] Ephesians 2:2

[3] See eg. Romans 8:38; I Corinthians 15:24-28; Colossians 1:13; 2:15… etc.

[4] I Peter 5:8

[5] Micah 6:8

Making melody – 17 August 2018

Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 5:18-20)

The phrase in there which arrests my attention is where Paul writes: …singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God.  He adds other little bits, such as at all times, and for everything…  It reminds me about a human reality so humdrum that normally, unless it is annoying us, we scarcely give it a second thought – and that is the common experience of having a tune, some song perhaps, or hymn, or a theme from pop or some classical work, replaying incessantly in our heads.  It can continue until we’re sick of it, but still can’t expunge it.  Maybe Paul didn’t have exactly this in mind – making melody in your hearts – Paul didn’t have radio or TV or smart phones.  But they had melodies, and here, to the church at Ephesus, Paul advocates singing in your hearts as an alternative to getting drunk with wine which is debauchery. 

I know I am already sounding facetious.  If you don’t ever have some relentless tune taking possession of the neurones, then you may not know what I am talking about.  But I realised that inner singing, another kind of mantra, you might say, can be turned to good effect.  But if the tune that installed itself uninvited in my synapses is, as recently, a wretched song they had played on TV1’s Hymns for Sunday Morning, to the accompaniment of Salvation Army ladies swinging tambourines, both words and music equally execrable, then it strains my slender virtues of hospitality.  It was eradicated finally by my donning noise-cancelling headphones and playing Fauré’s lovely Cantique.  By spiritual defiance I turned it into an inner song of thanks and praise to God. 

Possibly Paul is having a bit of fun here.  It may be that the Ephesus Mothers’ Union had sent him a complaint about wine consumption in the Ministers Fraternal.  So he alludes to two radically different approaches to life.  One of them is prevalent and powerful in our day, and I recently heard it called, repeatedly, at a funeral, “Having a Laugh”.  Plenty of things had gone wrong, various speakers said, and it had all ended in disaster, “but we had a laugh”.  Whether these choices for life are fuelled by alcohol, or obsessive sport, or drugs or partying… it is essentially a feeding of self.  An sizeable proportion of the population seems to know no other way.  There is another way.  It is living by gratitude and wonder, what Paul calls giving thanks.  Self is dethroned.  These changes begin to happen in the silence and stillness of prayer.  We discover our wonder and thanks for the gifts that are sustaining us… life itself, and breath, air, forests and oceans, birth and death, memory, understanding and forgiveness, the lessons of adversity and pain… everything we did not create, and can by no means control.   In Paul’s words: giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything.  He wrote that in prison, you know, in Rome.  And he has music in his heart, songs of love and gratitude.  Perhaps one way you can describe the Christian contemplative life is just that – simply making melody, and being thankful.

Bread of life – 10 August 2018

I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry… (John 6:35)

In this Sunday’s gospel lesson, Jesus tells his followers he is the Bread of Life.  But then he makes statements I have difficulty following, such as whoever eats this bread will live for ever… and the bread which I give for the life of the world is my flesh…  This seems strangely foreign to the ways many of us find we can respond cordially to Jesus and his way.  Perhaps what we are reading in John reflects more the understanding of the early church at Ephesus, or wherever it was that John’s Gospel came together, at that time, and their developing teachings about the sacrament.

I am personally inclined to keep it simple – and bread, as we know, is an analogy with built-in simplicity.  The ancient, even primeval combination of flour and water in all its varieties sustains human life to this day,[1] from the most delicious Selkirk Bannock to the ship’s biscuit which they knocked on the deck first to shake out the weevils.  People come together to break bread.  Thanking God for bread, and thanking God for life, are much the same thing.  The very word companion, in its derivation, means someone who has bread[2] – the word company implies meeting around bread.   When gluten intolerance was discovered, we quickly found ways to keep making bread without it, because bread is basic and life-supporting. 

Jesus applies to himself the expression Bread of Life.  Quite a claim… I am the bread of life. What bread is to us in our daily lives, so Jesus is to us.  Sustenance, nourishment, strength…    So we – practical, sensible, 21^st century people – have to ask, how is this so, in any way that makes sense?  For some it is a sacramental reality.  Jesus is present in the bread and the wine of Holy Communion, and to join in the sacrament is to be nourished, strengthened and sustained.  The altar of Iona Abbey, of exquisite white Iona marble, has carved into its front, I am the Bread of Life.  The sacrament is, for many, the principal way of encountering the Risen Christ, and is paramount in their faith and life. 

There is another path which for some opens up more easily.  We are fed by his word, his teachings, confirmed in us by the presence of the Spirit he promised, and likened to the wind.  In a daily life which admits prayer and mindfulness, attention and humility, we are sustained by the Spirit of the Risen Lord, so that the teachings we know from Galilee and Jerusalem are received in ever new and fresh ways.  The facts of Calvary and the empty tomb inform and inspire our attitudes and decisions and actions.  It dawns on us one day that we are scarcely capable of living in any fulfilled sense, any other way.  This is being fed by the Bread of Life.  The two paths are not mutually exclusive – most followers of Jesus walk them both.  One or the other may predominate.  But if at your table at home you still give thanks for simple bread, while friends, it may be, or grandchildren, look on somewhat mystified, you are remembering also the bread that will sustain you far beyond today.

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[1] Archaeologists in Jordan have found a site with traces of bread which have been carbon-dated to 14,000 years ago. 

[2] From Old French etc… COM + panis (bread).

Speaking the truth – 3 August 2018

We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming.  But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ… (Ephesians 4:14-15)

On Coronation Street, the truth is routinely suppressed, concealed or distorted.  That is how you handle the truth.  Children are instantly sent upstairs if there is any chance someone might tell the truth.  The truth is not to be heard and believed, so much as approached as you might approach a live land mine, or else concealed, manipulated and eventually used against someone.  In the world’s high places these days the truth is negotiable.  What is plainly true can be flatly denied if necessary.  Lies can be paraded as truth.  Poor old Pilate had lost sight of truth amid all the grubby realities of political life – What is truth? he plaintively asked.

But we well know the consequences of claiming in some circles, or even suggesting, that we have the truth.  It is to risk being labelled as arrogant, or deluded, or at any rate getting above ourselves.  Or hypocrisy… it will be rapidly pointed out that our lives are not always shining tributes to truth, let alone infallibility.  It is a curious thing:  Kiwis actually love, at times, making dogmatic, ex cathedra pronouncements, especially about issues in sport or politics, or what’s wrong with the church.  It’s the way blokes “debate”.  But any conflicting opinion, however intelligent or researched or manifestly true, easily evokes anger and ad hominem responses.

Well we can’t claim infallibility, and would scarcely want to.  In the company of Christ we do not claim to know what’s right every time – and wisdom has taught us to be careful about prescribing what other people should do or believe.  We make mistakes, and as the monks say, we fall down and get up again.  We have found Jesus to be, as John’s Gospel teaches, the Way, the Truth and the Life,[1] but this turns us into disciples – that word in Greek means a learner, one who seeks to understand – it does not turn us into demagogues or pharisees.  Jesus himself taught that we should be transparent, our Yes should be Yes, and our No should be No.[2]  Part of “no” is “I don’t know”.

To St Paul it is the intention to be truthful that matters.  Negatively it means developing a sense to discern untruth, deceit, dishonesty.  It also means the willingness to speak truth to power and exploitation in whatever ways we can, which usually isn’t much – but always with humility.  Paul sees this gift of discernment as “growing up”.  No longer children, he writes, tossed around by winds of politics or fashion or trendiness, or religion.  We are constantly asking, at least inwardly… is it Christlike, is it accurate and generous, is it true…?  We speak the truth in love, he writes, growing up in every way into Christ.  These things are formed, not in argument, but in silence and stillness.

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[1] John 14:6

[2] Matthew 5:37