Being who we are - 19 June 2020

What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. (Matthew 10:27) 

Jesus speaks in aphorisms, and if you listen to the gospel for next Sunday you will hear a string of them.  They are all, one way or another, about what the great 20th century Catholic theologian Hans Küng called simply, Christ sein, Being a Christian.  For Hans Küng it means living one’s allegiance to Christ as a liberal and well informed Catholic.  For Donald J Trump it means Protestantism in the American version, propping up capitalism and white male supremacy.  One person I know, who never goes near the church, was however a boarder at a Christian college, and now therefore sees himself as a sort of Honorary Christian.  My point is that 10 people will have 10 differing concepts of what it means to be a Christian.

It differs also from one age to another.  In my youth it meant having been converted (as we understood the word) to Jesus, and witnessing in our lives... and, as I recall, being happy all the time.  Others around that time would have said it meant being baptised in the true faith and living according to its precepts.  It meant something else in the time of Henry VIII…  something else again in 1st century Rome or Antioch, Ephesus or Alexandria …  it meant one thing to the Pilgrim Fathers, and another to the Spanish invaders of Mexico and South America.

   

I don’t think Jesus ever heard the word Christian, but what he clearly expected was that his followers would be bound to him in love, and he would be bound to them.  Abide in me and I in you.1  He expected that the essential part of us would be inspired and led by him, given to God, inwardly, day by day.  He called it where your treasure is.  It is a quiet place where some things are settled, and ego has assumed its proper function which is not in charge.  In St Paul’s writings this relationship is called being in Christ;  in the writings of John it is described as abiding.  

And so Jesus says this aphorism: What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.  His followers have an inner life.  It is in this inner room, nourished by prayer, informed by scripture and by wisdom from other disciples of Jesus, that wounds are healed and the sting is drawn from memory, it is here that faith is renewed and humility reigns.  This is what he calls, what I say to you in the dark… what you hear whispered.  It is wisdom, imparted in love, it is steadiness.  In John we find Jesus calling it living water, bubbling up.   

This is who we are, who we are becoming, in Christ.  It is our truest self.  And discipleship is being who we are.  Tell it in the light, says Jesus, proclaim it from the housetops.  I think he means, don’t hide or pretend... if someone wants to know, then tell it in the light.  But in any case be who you are.  Don’t imagine that Christian discipleship can somehow be neatly harmonised with the culture of secularism, consumerism, hedonism or greed.  I do, I admit, have difficulty with proclaiming it from the housetops… maybe with a violin, if I could, like Fiddler on the Roof… on a nice sunny day… some quiet tune about love and loss, joy and sorrow.   

Harassed and helpless – 12 June 2020

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.  (Matthew 9:36) 

 

Matthew is describing how he thinks the crowds affected Jesus.  He had compassion for them.  You may remember that word compassion – in the Greek it is rather more colourful than our politer English.  The Greek word literally refers to the bowels, the viscera – that is the way the old KJV sometimes translates it – and indeed that is where some people experience emotion.  Jesus was disturbed and upset by what he saw.  Why…?  They were harassed and helpless, it says. 

 

Harassed… well, some manuscripts have one word for this and some have another.  If you choose word #1, it means they were torn, vexed, troubled, annoyed; word #2 means they were exhausted, fainting, despondent… unstrung says one authority.  You get the picture... they didn’t have a lot going for them.  And “helpless” is a Greek word which literally means thrown aside, discarded.  So, they are anxious and confused.  There was anger and defeat.  They seemed to Jesus, says Matthew, like sheep without a shepherd. 

  

Theologians like to talk about “the human condition”.  Whatever that is, it’s pretty dire.  In New Zealand, beautiful, blessed and remote… even here we have the classic indicators of distress... eruptions of violence, inequalities and social injustices, prejudice and paranoia, diseases we shouldn’t have, insecure employment and income, serious damage to the environment and natural resources…  Our anxieties are there when people meet. 

 

A funeral I attended was bereft of inspiration, faith or living hope.  There were good people there, but one or two generations removed from any vital faith or ideals, living now on sentimentalism, sport, Steinlager and shallow clichés.  I would say, sheep without a shepherd.  But if you say that it’s heard as patronising… and the religion people see they widely dismiss as compromised and irrelevant.  And they are not entirely wrong about that.  The religion the 1st century crowds saw – the priests, scribes and pharisees, the temple system -- which Jesus also saw, was compromised, exploitative and élitist. 

 

Jesus’s visceral reaction to crowds of needy and anxious people is echoed by contemplative teachers of our time, who highlight what they call Jesus’s preference for the poor – not only poor economically, but starved of hope and ideals, dependent on divisions and discrimination.  You can’t read the New Testament gospels without seeing how, time and again, Jesus is drawn by human need, rather than by celebrity or achievement, status or power.   Nicodemus, the Woman of Samaria… just two, by no means economically deprived, but whom Jesus met in the poverty of their minds and hearts.

 

It is time (kairos) for contemplative life and prayer, not as a solution or panacea, let alone as an escape, but as a way forward in faith, a way to live in wisdom and peace.  We learn to be at peace, as Jesus put it, without enemies, without hostility.  We learn not to be afraid, not to be ruled by our fears of the future and of mortality.  We learn to speak peace, and to love our neighbour by seeing our neighbour as God sees, and as we ourselves are seen, in truth, realism and love.  In stillness and silence we are consenting  to change in ourselves, and a realistic appraisal of what we can and cannot do.  Go in peace, says Jesus – and one reason at any rate for that is that we are unlikely to be much use in human need otherwise. 

Trinity Sunday – 5 June 2020

Trinity Sunday, I always thought, was a good day to take off and go away for a week.  But better brains than mine are still writing enthusiastic accounts of the doctrine of the Trinity… and I wonder, is there something the matter with me?  It is not recorded that Jesus ever talked about what we call the Trinity.  But then, having thought it was time we got back into the lectionary for these Friday talks, I consulted the lectionary for next Sunday, Trinity Sunday, and the first lesson is the opening words of the Bible:  In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God moved on to the face of the waters.  Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.  (Genesis 1:1-3)

Reading these scriptures we are best to leave our literal, categorising, problem-solving minds at home – and also, it may be, if we can, the legacy of dogma taught years ago.  We need our imaginations here and our sense of wonder.  In these first sentences we find three elements.  One is the Creator, in the Hebrew simply elohim, a generic term for God.  The second is the Word – dabar in Hebrew, but in the Greek of the Christian scriptures, logos, the creative word of God, the word that changes things – God said, Let there be light!, and there was light.  The third element is the wind from God, in Hebrew ruach, and it can mean wind, breath, spirit.  So there is the picture.  There is a formless abyss… void, and dark.  But the Creator is present.  Over this void, says this timeless mythology, is the ruach, the wind from God, and this wind, this breath, was brooding (the Hebrew verb rachaph), waiting, poised and ready.  And the Creator speaks the Logos:  Let there be light!  And there was light.

It is an embryonic awareness of something basic to understand, something for us to know about God.  One God… who not only makes everything ex nihilo in love, but who continues the creation, sustaining, making all things new, in love… the Logos, the Word, flooding the dark abyss with light, made flesh writes John – the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us… full of grace and truth[1]… and the Spirit, the wind from God, inspiring, refreshing, converting, in love…  This is the Spirit who inspires art and science, healing and truth, forgiveness and restoration, service and peace… never safe or predictable[2].  James K Baxter wrote how the Spirit blows both inside and outside the fences… certainly inspiring Baxter to push the boundaries.

So, on Trinity Sunday, if you want some lucid explanation of the Christian Doctrine of the Trinity, go to Thomas Aquinas, or Karl Barth, Hans Küng or the latest I know of, Cynthia Bourgeault.  What I know, from the distractions of a viral pandemic and from 80 years of Christian profession, is that God made the world, the universe, in love, and sustains it, in love; that Jesus shows us life, in good times and in bad, lifts the veil on what God wants of his creation, which is love and justice; and that the Spirit of God brings these to birth in our hearts by inspiration, by newness, by change, and quite often by surprise.  A good prayer on Trinity Sunday would be silence and stillness, in awe and gratitude, for life and sustenance, for faith and hope in God who dwells in light and love… for Jesus who is God’s Word… and for the Spirit who is making all things new.

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[1] John 1:14.  “Dwelt” in Greek is eskēnōsen (ἐσκήνωσεν), from skēnē, a tent.  He “pitched his tent” among us.

[2] See John 3:8-9