Wisdom’s house – 13 August 2021

 

Wisdom is a special word in the bible.  We have encountered her before.  Wisdom is always feminine – in the Hebrew cochmah, and in the Christian scriptures the lovely Greek word sophia[1].  So it is that the lectionary alternative OT reading for next Sunday takes us to the Book of Proverbs:

Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars.
She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine,
she has also set her table.
She has sent out her servant-girls,

she calls from the highest places in the town,

“You that are simple, turn in here!”
To those without sense she says, “Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.”  (9:1-6)

Now, sitting a lifetime in the pews you don’t get to hear much about Lady Sophia, Lady Wisdom, because it seems hardly to belong in the familiar biblical message, we never heard of it in Sunday School…  This writer personifies Wisdom as a woman to be reckoned with, equipped with her team of female servants.  She builds a house of wisdom, with seven pillars – seven signifies completeness in Hebrew thought.  She has meat and wine… and she vigorously invites in the simple, those without sense…  Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.  It’s an astonishing image in the patriarchal culture of Judaism. 

But it’s more than that…  Lay aside immaturity… walk in the way of insight.  Lady Sophia is inviting us to grow up.  St Paul writes: Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise… because the days are evil.[2]  It is not a time for nominal, conventional faith, what Bonhoeffer called cheap grace[3]; it is not a time for reliance on any tribal god of miracles, rewards and punishments, a god who has to be placated and beseeched, who keeps a running score of merits and demerits.  We must no longer be children, writes Paul[4], tossed to and fro… but speaking the truth in love, we must grow up[5] in every way into him who is the head, into Christ… 

In Lady Sophia’s house, as it were, we learn to set aside infantile religion and to walk as Jesus taught.  We shed our fears of change and of mortality… and discover one sunny morning that we are not so charmed, not so anxious, about ourselves.  We learn to pray in a suitable, simple, disciplined way, and we learn the riches of silence, and the distinctive way of Christ. 

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[1] חָכְמָה (cochmah), σοφία (sophia).  In both languages the noun is feminine, and wisdom is personified as a woman.

[2] Ephesians 5:15.  Paul distinguishes between unwise (asophoi… ἄσοφοι) believers, and wise (sophoi… σοφοί).

[3] Bonhoeffer: The Cost of Discipleship -- …billige Gnade, eine Gnade ohne Nachfolge, ohne Kreuz, eine Gnade ohne Jesus Christus, die Quelle der Gnade. Cheap grace, a grace without discipleship, without the Cross, a grace without Jesus Christ the source of grace. 

[4] Ephesians 4:14-15

[5] auxanō (αὐξάνω), to grow up, in this verse contrasts with nēpios (νήπιος), an infant.  Even in the 1^st century church Paul has found that some believers are already preferring to remain in infantile dependency, which may be religion but is not faith.

Into the wilderness – 6 August 2021

 

The lectionary provides an alternative Old Testament lesson for next Sunday.  Elijah has had a dramatic confrontation with Jezebel the queen and her prophets of Baal.  Elijah had publicly ridiculed and humiliated the queen and the state religion.  As a result, he had received a message from Jezebel, not a very nice lady, to the effect that she would see him dead by this time tomorrow.  Elijah takes flight, and now in the far south, at Beersheba where the desert takes over, he is exhausted and depressed:  Elijah went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. (1 Kings 19:4-8)

Elijah asked that he might die.  This is a little more than low spirits, melancholia.  We have to think then about depression.  Melancholia is one thing – anxiety, weariness, under par, fit of the blues -- it may be an entirely appropriate reaction to all that’s going on[1].  Depression however is another matter, and it seems to be increasingly prevalent.  It may at times be hidden, more or less successfully.  It can come out of the blue.  It afflicts young as well as old, good and bad, faithful and faithless, wise and simple.  I am sure those who know will tell us that real depression is complex, takes different forms and has different causes – what seems to be common is what it feels like, a black hole, devoid of energy, an abyss of despair.  And of course, depression is a major challenge to faith. 

This lovely story tells us how Elijah, out in the desert, exhausted and wanting to die, with sleep seeming all that is left to him… is nourished by an angel.  A cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water, sounds wonderful.  And the reason for this sustenance…?  The reason is the journey – otherwise the journey will be too much for you, says the angel.  So it is about faith at the end of your resources.  It is about the presence of God even when the evidence is the absence of God.  It is, as we often say (I hope not tediously), about being able, or being enabled, simply to take the next step, to be able to put one foot in front of the other, to do what has to be done next.  Elijah got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food. 

And when we read on in this narrative we find how Elijah arrives at Horeb (Mount Sinai) and stands on the mountainside.  This great story describes the apparent absence of God, the experience of many… there is a great wind, but the Lord was not in the wind.  There was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.  And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire – and after the fire, a sound of silence[2]… and Elijah knows himself addressed by name, accompanied, set back on his feet, given purpose and direction, a path to walk.

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[1] Melancholia, distinct from real depression, is something we could understand better.  In our kind of world melancholia may have quite a lot going for it.

[2] The two Hebrew words are untranslatable precisely in English. What followed the fire was something like a whisper, whispered.

Bearing with one another in love – 30.7.2021

 

The lectionary epistle continues in Ephesians with this passage:  I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. (Ephesians 4:1-6)

Bearing with one another in love has always been the tricky bit for me.  I can manage humility, gentleness, even patience, on good days…  But it was a dark day in christendom when someone, possibly American, turned the decent biblical noun fellowship into a verb, and churches seemed suddenly to consist of compulsory fellowshipping, which quite often, at any rate for ministers, meant dissembling with the difficult…[1]  I know that’s just me – my daughter thinks fellowshipping is a really smart idea, the religious version of hanging out.  She thinks I am the odd one.  But it comforts me to realise that Paul also found Christian fellowship to be a sore trial at times – and as his letters show, there were occasions on which he was seriously impatient, and anything but humble and gentle[2].  Yet he writes feelingly about …the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace…  There is, he says, one Lord, one faith, one baptism.[3]  That sentence is not about everyone in agreement.  It is about unity at a level deeper than our personal preferences, our likes and dislikes and points of view. 

There is a poignant little verse in Paul’s Letter to Philippi – near the end he writes: I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord.[4]  We have met Euodia and Syntyche before… two women at odds with each other… we have no idea why.  It may seem to them that their conflict is beyond repair; perhaps there has been too much hurt to ignore now or set aside.  Paul urges them to be at peace.  No matter how they may differ, Euodia and Syntyche have the same Lord, the same faith, the same baptism.  The realm of Christ is full of differences… but we may not settle for disorder or alienation, disrespect or rancour.

Rowan Williams points out that when Jesus commanded, Love one another as I have loved you,[5] the love he practised and exemplified was able to include some difficult people.  Just as we learn to love ourselves (as he commanded), despite aspects of ourselves we might devoutly wish different, so we learn to love these people at this time in this place in these conditions, understanding that they too have their mountains to climb.  The command to love is very specific, not some vague general rule.  It may indeed take a lifetime to learn… but in the graces of stillness and silence, we are getting there…  One of the gifts of contemplative life and prayer is that we learn how, in Paul’s words, the one God and Father of all is above all and through all and in all.

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[1] eg… the reaction of the vicar and the church ladies, in Keeping Up Appearances, when Hyacinth Bucket arrived.  My Scottish grandmother colourfully advocated “swallowing your spittle”.  The church does not always bring out the best in people.

[2] eg. Galatians 5:12

[3] The Greek numerals have three genders, depending on the gender of the nouns they qualify.  So we get one Lord (masculine), one faith (feminine), one baptism (neuter) -- εἷς κύριος, μία πίστις, ἓν βάπτισμα.  Very elegant writing by Paul… the whole gender range in this unity.

[4] Philippians 4:2.  The Greek verb parakaleō (παρακαλέω) is more than “ask”, more even than “urge” – Paul is requiring that they reconsider, set ego aside.

[5] John 13:34-35; Matthew 19:19

Breadth, length, height and depth – 23 July 2021

 

I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:14-19)

John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion is in 2 substantial volumes, and once long ago I read it.  Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, from the late Middle Ages, runs to some 61 volumes, unfinished, and I haven’t read it.  Aquinas said the Summa is a work suited to beginning students… but just before he died he told his long-suffering secretary: …all that I have written seems like straw to me[1].  The great Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics runs to over 6,000,000 words and 9,000 pages, in 5 volumes, unfinished.  I have read some of it.  St Paul had read none of those things, but those writers had all read Paul.  And Paul had written: I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth…  There is a story about Karl Barth (it may be apocryphal) when someone asked him to say in one simple sentence, what it is all about, he said: Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so… 

Jesus himself wrote nothing that we know of.  By contrast the 19^th and 20^th centuries saw a huge flood of spiritual and theological writing and research… some of it priceless, indispensable… some of it less than memorable… continuing to this day.  In ineffable ways the best of it teaches that wisdom may eventually require an willingness also to set the books aside, at times, to pause the debates and discussions and study groups, and to delay the surveys and reports… and to know instead how to be still and wait.  Some theologians have always known that, and someone said recently, if you don’t know how to pray you can’t be a theologian.

Breadth and length, height and depth, after all, is Paul’s way of saying in words that we don’t have words, however finely crafted, to convey what Lutherans call the whole counsel of God... love and truth, mercy and justice.   When we learn to be still, somehow we open a door to admit change, sub-verbally, to allow the departure of fear, to see things begin in us that we could not achieve ourselves, to become more loving if only because we are less afraid of life and death and tomorrow… or of doing or believing the wrong thing.  Paul writes, to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge… to know what words cannot express, what cannot be imagined or represented… surpassing knowledge.  In silence and stillness this faith, hope and love begins to be instilled in us, as we stop trying to possess it, define it, or to own it or to boast – or to trivialise it by our human need to be always happy and admired. 

So now, as you see, I have just used a lot of words to say that it’s not about words.  The Word of God is, as we learn in John’s Gospel, not a book but Jesus Christ, a person, incarnate, risen and present, as he said, to the end of the world.

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[1] …mihi videtur ut palea.

Singing peace – 16 July 2021

 

In the epistle for next Sunday, Paul mentions peace[1] four times: …he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.  He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.  So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father.  So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. (Ephesians 2:14-20)

Paul spells out something utterly basic in Christian understanding.  What he calls the hostility was between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christian believers who had never been Jews.  It was a big issue in Paul’s time… and you can imagine how born and bred, “cradle”-Jews would assume that they did not stop being Jews because they now belonged to Christ.  Jewishness was not something you could simply shed.  And it is a short step from there to the assumption that non-Jewish Christian converts should at least observe the ancient Jewish laws and customs, as Jesus did.  That issue is the whole purpose of the Letter to the Galatians, and other passages such as this one.  Paul says this dividing wall is broken down; the law of commandments and ordinances (religious requirements, preconditions) is abolished… all who are in Christ are one new humanity.  He signals to the non-Jews: So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. 

Christians have always been easily tempted to expect, even require, that you should be like us, think what we think.  The peace Paul so stresses is a new life without dividing walls; there can be no strangers and aliens in the household of God.  Inevitable differences, such as between Jews, Romans and Greeks, Catholic and Protestant, black and white, even saints and sinners, are to be understood and appreciated, with bridges built everywhere they should be.  In mature faith, in any case, there is no longer energy or inclination for the maintenance of walls or animosity, or building fences.  I was fascinated to read[2] how, in the 1950s, the Trump family in New York attended the very wealthy and upmarket Marble Collegiate Church.  Its minister then was Norman Vincent Peale who preached what came to be called the prosperity gospel, based on ego and on privilege—you too can be like us – so Donald J Trump learned it not only from his dysfunctional family ethos but also from that church at that time[3].  These people divided the world into winners and losers.  But that is precisely what does not happen in the household of God …if you have ever read, marked, learned and inwardly digested the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, the spirit and the way of Jesus.  In contemplative life and prayer we are daily learning and being equipped, in silence and stillness, for living in peace, without walls, and also without fear.

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[1] In Greek “peace” is eirēnē (εἰρήνη) from which we get the English name Irene.

[2] Mary L Trump: Too Much and Never Enough (Simon & Schuster 2020)

[3] The Marble Collegiate Church is a very different place now.

Leaping and dancing – 9 July 2021

 

The Old Testament reading next Sunday is the long story of David bringing the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem.  You may not get to hear it, partly because it is so long, and partly because this ancient tale is pretty odd in places.  Here is a bit of it… So David went and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obed-edom to the city of David with rejoicing; and when those who bore the ark of the Lord had gone six paces, he sacrificed an ox and a fatling.  David danced before the Lord with all his might; David was girded with a linen ephod.  So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet.  As the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal daughter of Saul looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart. (II Sam 6:12-16)

The Ark of the Covenant was the wooden box containing the stone tablets of the sacred Law Moses had received on Mount Sinai.  On it were two bronze angels, and between them was believed to be the Shekinah, the very presence of the invisible God among his people.  It is important now to David to have the Ark in Jerusalem, for political as well as for religious reasons.  And so we have this curious account of the long procession to Jerusalem.  The Ark is on a new cart.  David goes ahead wearing, we are told, only a linen ephod, a priestly garment, a sort of apron.[1]  They had songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals[2]. Every six paces, we learn, David sacrifices an ox and a fatling sheep, which must have been seriously unpleasant…  He danced before the Lord with all his might.  At one point the Ark topples, and Uzzah steadies it with his hand – for this Uzzah is struck down by God, somewhat to David’s dismay, and the place is thereafter called Perez-Uzzah, Uzzah’s Mistake.  Saul’s daughter Michal, watching from a window, thinks it is all contemptible… we are told.

…and I admit, it doesn’t have a lot to do with Christian Meditation, or with contemplative life and prayer.  King David, much revered in Israel and Judah, as also in the Christian narrative, was in fact a decidedly mixed blessing.  The Hebrew scriptures give us a few stories of David… and quite soon you realise that he exemplifies the kind of power all too familiar these days… confusing exuberance and image with quiet wisdom and responsibility, treating other people as secondary always to his own ego, distorting religion until it becomes a superstitious cargo cult.  David could swerve between repentance[3]… and lies, murder and adultery.  But mercifully, this kind of narrative in our sacred story includes also the voice of the prophets... Nathan, for instance, David’s external conscience… or Amos comes to mind:  I hate, I despise your festivals, I take no delight in your solemn assemblies… the offerings of your fatted animals I will not look upon.  Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.  But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.[4]  True faith, whether in Israel or in the realm of Christ, is the conversion of our hearts, and this is much more likely to be in silence and in stillness, listening and waiting… learning love and truth.

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[1] See I Samuel 2:18; II Samuel 6:20… evidently a bit like those execrable hospital gowns you put on over your nakedness, trying to keep them closed at the back.  You need something modest under your ephod.

[2] II Samuel 6:5

[3] eg. Psalm 51, if it indeed originates with David.

[4] Amos 5:21-24

My grace is sufficient – 2 July 2021

 

Another affectingly simple little Psalm is part of the lectionary next Sunday.  It is Psalm 123…

To you I lift up my eyes, to you enthroned in the heavens.

As the eyes of servants look to the hand of their masters, and the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, until he show us his mercy.

Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy, for we have had more than enough of contempt, too much of the scorn of the indolent rich, and of the derision of the proud.

This is linked with the epistle reading for next Sunday --  Paul speaks movingly of his personal, evidently chronic illness or handicap… whatever that was… and how God said to him, My grace is sufficient for you, my power is made perfect in weakness.[1]

But first, the Psalm.  Servants (or slaves… the word is the same in both Greek and Hebrew) are completely reliant on the will and protection of their master, and serving maids on the hand of their mistress… the Psalmist similarly is totally reliant on God… he is lifting up his eyes to God enthroned in the heavens.   It is not about servility, so much as need, even desperation.  He repeats: Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy…  And he says why… we have had more than enough of contempt, too much of the scorn of the indolent rich, and of the derision of the proud.  Contempt, scorn, derision. 

It leads me to think of the plight of many in our culture, powerless or defeated by life, or by bureaucratic indifference or delay or incompetence, or by ritual public humiliation… the ever popular compulsion to name, blame and shame.  This treatment of already wounded, sad, beaten, needy people gets dignified with righteous words such as seeing justice done, public right to know, achieving closure, holding accountable.  Our enlightened culture can be blind and cruel -- there is no healing in what the Psalmist calls contempt… the scorn of the indolent… the derision of the proud.  God’s solution is mercy and care, understanding, restoration. 

Turning now to Paul… he reminds us how proud he is of his status as a Roman citizen, his reputation as a pharisee[2], his considerable learning.  But nothing alters the fact, that he is struck down by some persistent disorder… epilepsy perhaps, or recurrent malaria, even alcoholism has been suggested.  He tells us how he is treated with contempt by some.^[3] But there is what the Hebrew prophet called balm in Gilead[4].  He encounters grace.  My grace is sufficient for you, my power is made perfect in weakness.  That word sufficient is the interesting one.  Grace is sufficient.  Paul is not overwhelmed by remedies or solutions… or answers[5]; he is given what he needs for this day, and the next…  That is the walk of faith.  We don’t live from one miracle to the next – we live from one day to the next, enabled by grace, inspired by mercy and love, guided by the Spirit of the Risen Christ.

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[1] II Corinthians 12:9  Ἀρκεῖ σοι ἡ χάρις μου· ἡ γὰρ ⸀δύναμις ἐν ἀσθενείᾳ ⸀τελεῖται.

[2] Acts 23:6; 26:5; Philippians 3:5

[3] See II Corinthians, chs 11-12

[4] Jeremiah 8:22

[5] Notice outside a church in Warkworth: “Google doesn’t have all the answers – God does”.  This is the kind of shallow, trite claim that simply drives thinking people further away.