Brought to silence – 27 October 2017

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:34-40)

Next Sunday the devout churchgoer is likely to hear about All Saints Day (November 1), or All Souls Day (November 2), or Reformation Sunday – and in that respect 2017 is the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door of All Saints Church at Wittenberg.  It makes a good story… but he did trigger the vast protestant reformation which took Germany and much of Europe at the time by storm.  Luther said a lot of things, but his basic message was that God’s favour is not earned by good deeds or any other way, but is received as the free gift of God's grace and love to all, through the believer's faith in Jesus Christ.

In this narrative from Matthew we learn how Jesus brought the religious practitioners, the pharisees and the sadducees, to silence.  The sadducces wanted to debate with him about aspects of religious practice, while the pharisees decided to test him more cunnngly by asking which was the greatest, the most important religious law.  There comes a time, I think, when there is little energy for this sort of debate.  And indeed, the way many Christians talk and argue about God tempts me towards atheism.  Jesus goes to the heart of life and belief with two statements, both of them from the Hebrew scriptures – and they are not about the mind but about the heart:  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind… you shall love your neighbour as yourself.[1]  In the first of those, about loving God, Jesus inserts “with all your mind” – but what he was quoting from says not “mind” but “might”.  Jesus amends that, he says that mind – that is to say, intelligence, intellect, our opinions -- all that also is brought into captivity to love of God, God’s love and ours.  One outcome of that is humility about belief.

The point of contemplative life and prayer is that it leads us and helps us to put first things first in our heads and hearts.  On our dying day, if we still have our wits, we will be saying yes to God in love – despite all that we still don’t understand.  The point is love, and always was.  That is the willingness to set self aside.   And the climate in which love is born, grows and thrives, is silence and simplicity.

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[1]  He is quoting Deuteronomy 6:5, the central Jewish cry of faith, “Shema’ Yisrael…!” where we are to love God with heart, soul and might (Heb: me’od).  But Jesus says: …heart, soul and mind (Greek: dianoia).

Fear of God – 20 October 2017

Father Laurence Freeman, in a recent article entitled Muddling Through, writes about what our grandparents and their grandparents, to say nothing of earlier translations of the Bible, called the fear of God.  The fear of God, says the Bible, is the beginning of wisdom[1].  But “fear”, often as not, connoted being afraid of God.  They saw the world and human events as under the control of God.  What happened was what God ineffably willed – disease, wars, pregnancy or childlessness, a nice sunny day for the church picnic, or for your granddaughter’s wedding...  You have heard this sort of talk.  Prayer then becomes a matter of conveying our hopes to this all-powerful God.  Death is understood as God “taking” you.  So God gets both feared and blamed.  This kind of religion, the only kind millions of people know, owes more to superstition than to anything Jesus lived or taught. 

Secularism deals with this uncertainty of events by strategies of planning and control.  If there is no one to blame, then it was an Act of God.  You plan your wedding day so that nothing will go wrong.  You may plan your family for the right balance of male and female, at the right intervals, and plan your lifestyle accordingly – may it all go as you hope.  I suppose most of us have had annual ‘flu shots, as a sensible defence against the virus… I presume it wasn’t any fear that God might zap us with influenza.

But “fear”, Father Laurence points out, is a bad translation.  Fear evokes punishment or guilt, or the fear of getting hurt.  If something bad happens it must be because we did something wrong.  A hefty chunk of American religion – but there are echoes of it in NZ too – adds the corollary:  If you prosper and have a “successful” life, you must have done something right.  God is rewarding you… the so-called prosperity gospel, hopelessly unlike Jesus.  When some tragedy occurs, often as not you will hear the lament, “He didn’t deserve that…” -- as though it would have been understandable if he had.

In Hebrew thought, fear of God is not about being frightened.  It is about wonder and curiosity, awe and excitement at seeing how our familiar world can be changed.  It is what you experience when a child is born.  You are now encountering new ways of being.  God makes all things new[2].  English language finds it hard to express this.  In the prayer of silence and stillness, letting go not only of words and images, but also being ready to let go of fear and any need to control, we may find life becoming suffused with confidence.  This is how Fr Laurence puts it:

In saying the mantra, we recognize and accept the muddle of our minds and lives.  We find ourselves becoming less fearful.  We walk through the minefield of life with a lighter step.  In that acceptance we begin to see potential and pattern in chaos.  We remember that the Spirit of God can do what management consultants cannot.  It brings cosmos out of chaos…   

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[1] Proverbs 9:10

[2] Isaiah 43:19; II Corinthians 5:17… etc.

Silence is golden - 13 October 2017

(Adapted from Sister Joan Chittister OSB: Radical Spirit, 12 Ways to Live a Free and Authentic Life)

The silence of the heart, that deep-down awareness of where we are right now, is our monk’s cell.  It is the place Jesus referred to when he said we should go into our room and shut the door.[1]  It is in that place of honesty that we refresh our acquaintance, over the months and years, with ourselves and who we really are.  We may learn there what we are afraid of and what we are resisting.  We hear there the voices we normally block out with seductive noise or busy activity.  It is in silence that we hear the sounds of our better angels calling us to rise above our lesser selves.  It is in silence, beyond words, that it becomes possible to be truthful, forgiving and compassionate.

Hence, in much of our contemporary culture, silence is very much the enemy.  We don’t know what to do with it.  Also, many live in fear of being bored or perhaps helpless.  Restaurants and shopping malls and supermarkets are filled with mindless music, while parties and nightclubs drown any useful thoughts or communication under a tidal wave of decibels. 

A gentle discipline of silence throws us back upon ourselves, unveils our wounds, and perhaps our untruthfulness.  Silence is a healing process – because it is not possible to pretend all the time.  Silence distances us from our public selves so that we may have more to give to the rest of our world in the future.

It is not uncommon to hear people who are nervous about silence, when they consider the kind of prayer we do here, call it selfish, or self-indulgent, or label it as unhealthy “introversion”.  Well, silence can of course become something else.  It can become our private game of escapism.  We can come to like and enjoy silence, and try to use it – for instance, to reduce anxiety or lower our blood pressure.  We can begin to substitute feeling better for being right.  We can withdraw from the real world and call withdrawal a spiritual life.  We can use silence to avoid the world, its menaces, and our responsibilities.  We can simply dissociate from the people around us and tell ourselves that we have done a holy thing.  But if we do, we are misusing silence, debasing its spiritual value, and making ourselves our own god, whom we go inside to worship.
 
Silence is not for its own sake.  It is the silence in which God, who will not shout at us, offers the love and mercy of which Jesus spoke.  It is a silence meant to help us -- healed of our anger and fear – to do what we can to see that the world around us becomes more a graceful and peaceful place.

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[1] Matthew 6:6.   In Scetis, a brother went to see Abba Moses and begged him for a word. The old man said, "Go and sit in your cell and your cell will teach you everything." ( Saying From the Desert Fathers)

Looking forward – 6 October 2017

Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:12-14)

Paul makes several statements here which are indicative of what we might call, perhaps a little provocatively, grown-up faith.  The first is his acknowledgement that he remains a work in progress – he has not obtained certainty, he says, he has not reached the goal.  I don’t know how old Paul was, but it could seem a little striking around here when someone in their senior years says, I am still finding out, maturing, exploring.  Paul does not say, I know what I believe[1]… that’s the way I am, I’m too old to change… that’s what I think and that’s what I’ll always think…  It is still for Paul a journey, a trail awinding.   Indeed, he may feel that there is less he can be sure about. Mystery increases and questions abound. 

Then he says, Christ Jesus has made me his own.   Paul has come to see that it’s really not so much my faith, my belief, my discipleship…  You have not chosen me, Jesus told his disciples[2], I have chosen you.  With mature faith has come a sense of being called, and held -- a sense that wherever the truth lies, it is certainly with Jesus, and it is down the path of surrendering, relinquishing, simplifying. 

Next he says he forgets what lies behind…  Well of course he doesn’t.  We may forget some of the past, or distort it, but mostly it remains in our memory.  There are cogent reasons not to forget the past.  Good and careful historians should always have an honoured place in human society wherever people are willing to listen and learn.  But also, every family in every generation can do with someone who knows the story as accurately and honestly as possible, and can tell it with understanding and compassion.  The church’s story too… including its darker aspects in our lifetimes. 

What Paul seeks to leave behind, I think, is any legacy of bitterness, blame, or the need for revenge, or lying awake with unfinished business.  He emerges from the past certainly wounded, as many do one way or another, but not as any career victim.  Father Laurence Freeman puts this better than I can, when he writes that mature faith is about looking back and discerning patterns and resonances in life, which we could not see at the time.  We learn never to settle for just one level of meaning.  We know now that there are and always will be new ways of being, and we are not afraid of newness or change.  These are concomitants of grown-up faith, and they include prayer, especially the prayer of stillness and silence, our mature and grateful yes to God.

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[1] Paul, or whoever wrote II Timothy 1:12 does say, I know WHOM I have believed… that is a different matter.

[2] John 13:18;  15:16, 19.

Order of precedence – 29 September 2017

What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’  He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went.  The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go.  Which of the two did the will of his father?  They said: The first.  Jesus said to them: Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. (Matthew 21:28-31)

I find that at least slightly enigmatic?  Do you?  Jesus seems to be saying that everyone winds up in the kingdom of God eventually.  It’s just that the tax collectors and the prostitutes get there earlier and easier than the overly righteous, those whom Robert Burns called the unco’ guid,[1] who are delayed because they don’t do what they claim to do, or perhaps because their egos are in the way.  The tax collectors and the prostitutes make only modest claims about righteousness, but they fulfil the law in deeper ways.  Is that right, and is that what it means?  Or does he mean that vain self-righteousness is actually worse than anything the tax collectors and prostitutes are up to…?

At any rate it does have echoes of last week’s parable, in which the owner of the vineyard pays the same to those who had worked only one hour, as to those who had worked all day.  When they complained, the proprietor asks, Are you envious because I am generous?[2] 

“Generous” is the key to it…  The usual biblical word is Grace – in Greek the lovely word χαρις – in the Hebrew scriptures it is chesed, grace – along with love, the closest language gets to the nature of God.  Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in a sermon in California, put it inimitably:

This family (God’s kingdom) has no outsiders. Everyone is an insider. When Jesus said, "I, if I am lifted up, will draw..." Did he say, "I will draw some"? "I will draw some, and tough luck for the others"? He said, "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all." All! All! All! – Black, white, yellow; rich, poor; clever, not so clever; beautiful, not so beautiful. All! All! It is radical. All are to be held in this incredible embrace. Gay, lesbian, so-called "straight;" all! All! All are to be held in the incredible embrace of the love that won’t let us go.

In our prayer we are present in that generosity, that grace.  It is altogether too much, too impossible, too inequitable, for the church at times to stomach, let alone we ourselves in our times of guilt and failure, or our times of anger with others.  But our place in the queue as it were, in the order of precedence of God’s kingdom, depends upon none of that.  It depends on grace, generosity and love.

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[1] Robert Burns: Address to the Unco Guid or the Rigidly Righteous.

[2] Matthew 20:15.  The Greek for generous is agathos (αγαθος) which usually means simply “good”.  This generous, gracious goodness, overturning human assumptions about worth and deserving, is simply what God is like.

God’s welcome – 17 September 2017

Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables.  Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgement on those who eat; for God has welcomed them. (Romans 14:2-3)

Paul is writing to the church at Rome.  He has not yet visited Rome, he hasn’t met these people, but he has heard that divisions have developed among them – between conservatives who want rules to prevail, and others for whom the rules may be unnecessary or even a hindrance to real faith.  Of course the problem may be between Jewish and Gentile Christian believers, but in Rome I would think it was rather more complex than that.  Some in the Roman church feel free to eat anything they like, while others want to prohibit meat.[1]  Interestingly, Paul refers to the abstainers as “weak in faith”[2].  Undue reliance on rules and prohibitions, he thinks, is actually a weakness, something we can grow out of.  He had a furious argument with the Galatian church about the same issue – in Galatia it concerned circumcision or uncircumcision.[3]  Back in Rome it was also about the keeping of holy days… whether that was compulsory or not. 

Paul’s passion about this issue is that the divisions and disputes simply miss the point.  God has welcomed them, he writes – that is the point.  God has welcomed the ones you think are out of order.  Would they be, more likely, in the 21^st century, the couple living in a same-sex relationship?  God has welcomed them.  The divorced person…?  The person with a criminal record…?  The psychiatric survivor…?  God has welcomed them.  In some places… the woman minister or bishop…?  God welcomed her.  In hearts of mature faith these disputes are settled.  Informed both by the Bible and by the Spirit of Christ, we don’t have time or energy for them anymore.

In contemplative life and the prayer of inner silence and stillness there are no discriminations between people because our own status and importance and ego have ceased to be the agenda.  Moreover, creating space for God inevitably means space also for our writhing, hurting world.  The Spirit of Jesus, as we are consenting to God, opens us gently into the widest hospitality to difference and need.  Most of all, we are surrendering our fears.  This has suddenly become more pointed in apocalyptic times.  We may fear for others and what may happen to them, but love casts out fear for our own possessions and survival.  We acquire an inner freedom, and an instinctive regard for truth.  Jesus was notorious among the respectable classes precisely because his inner freedom and truth, the grace he received in prayer, took him as a practising Jew across the boundaries of Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, good and bad, black and white.  And that is what hospitality means in faith – welcoming whom God welcomes.

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[1] They refused possibly because the meat supply came mainly from animals sacrificed in Roman pagan rituals.

[2] Even if they are not weak in haemoglobin.  Also see Acts 11:1-18.

[3] Galatians 5:1-7… but indeed the whole epistle.

First do no wrong – 8 September 2017

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. (Romans 13:8-10)

That is the Epistle for next Sunday.  I turned to it in hope, having been defeated by the Gospel lesson in Matthew 18 – which I cannot think is authentic words of Jesus.  The many commentaries available online similarly struggle with that passage.  Once upon a time I would have sweated over it until I had wrung something more or less intelligible from it… but not any more.  Part of grown-up faith is a keener sense of what seems right… and what does not.  So St Paul came as a relief.  Our only debt to each other, he says, is the debt of love – love is the fulfilling of the law, the commandments.  Love does no wrong to a neighbour.  

I have just read what is called a graphic novel trilogy… three volumes, all under the title “March”[1].  They tell the story of the United States civil rights movement from the 1950s, through towards the Obama presidency.  It is done brilliantly in graphic comic book format, but very much for adult understanding.  These books tell of the early lunch counter sit-ins, the Freedom Riders, the reactions of many white people who turned to violence to preserve their segregated way of life.  The principal author is John Lewis, a black leader now a US congressman, who was in the movement from the beginning.  He tells of the interminable and brutal struggle simply to get black people registered to vote, the terrible retaliations and injustices, corrupt courts, and hatred.  From the beginning – and this is the point this morning -- most of the civil rights movements adopted a strict discipline of non-violence.  So… they went to hospital, they went to gaol, but they did not retaliate.  Love does no wrong to a neighbour.  Non-violence was personally very costly, and some of them died, or were permanently injured.  Their determination to be non-violent was often severely tested. 

We work out our discipleship, our personal response to Jesus, in individually different ways.  No two Christians are the same, or necessarily agree with each other, or experience the same things.  But our differences are not the problem – it is simply the way God has ordered creation.  In mature discipleship we learn always to be suspicious of uniformity and conformity.  But what we have in common through all the differences, in company with Jesus, is the priority of love – rescuing that word, if we can, from the repellent sentimentality the secular culture reduces it to.  Love requires truth and it requires courage.  It does no wrong to another.  Part of love therefore is that we have made peace with ourselves, and this we seek in the prayer of silence, stillness, simplicity – as Jesus said, Go into your room and shut the door… 

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[1] MARCH Books 1, 2 and 3 – John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell (Top Shelf Productions, 2013, 2015, 2016)