The Presence of Absence – Pentecost 2018

The thing about Pentecost, it has always seemed to me, is that you can’t get a grip on it anywhere... and that is pretty well the point.  For the umpteenth time I consulted the gospel readings about Pentecost, and what leapt out at me after some 5 decades of trying to explain it (to myself initially) was one sentence in John 16.  Jesus is quoted saying to his disciples:  I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. 

It is about Jesus going away.  Moreover, it is emphatic – “going away” is said three times in that sentence.  He is not going to be here.  What will be here is what John’s Gospel calls the Paraclete.[1]  And if we refer back in John’s Gospel to chapter 3… Jesus is talking here with Nicodemus who is described as a leader of the Jews and a pharisee.  So Nicodemus is expert in the Torah, the Law, the way of living and believing.  Jesus introduces this man now to something else, called born of the Spirit – and he goes right on to talk about the wind.  Wind and Spirit are the same word in Greek.[2] And wind is the analogy Jesus chooses to teach this scholar of law, morality and order what it means to be as Jesus puts it, born anew, born of the Spirit. The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

So… Jesus leaves – this departure is emphasised on the Sunday prior to Pentecost, Ascension Sunday... whatever we may make of that.  Then the Paraclete comes, like the wind.  Luke actually says, a rushing mighty wind.[3]  The disciples start to discover a different reality blowing through their lives and their company.  It is not now a matter of conforming to patterns or precedents, of seeking safety and security – it is now a matter of getting out in the wind... informed and inspired by Jesus, enlightened by him, we now find that his resurrection life in us is real but also elusive as the wind.  He comes, this way, unexpectedly, often strangely.  Our own poet James K Baxter memorably reminded Kiwis that this wind blows both inside and outside the fences we have constructed in our attempts to keep order and control.  One of the important teachings in John’s Gospel is that the Spirit is, as we used to express it in theological college, unoriginal.  In John’s words:  When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears… He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.[4]  The Spirit’s role is to be the teacher within, to bring Jesus to the heart, to inspire us in living what Jesus said and showed.

So it is, we employ silence and stillness to sit, as it were, in the wind. 

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[1] Paraklētos - Παρακλητος

[2] Pneuma - πνευμα

[3] Acts 2:2

[4] John 16:13-14

Greeting the stranger…2 – 18 May 2018

Christine Valters Paintner is a Benedictine Oblate who lives with her husband John in Galway in Ireland.  She leads an on-line “monastery without walls” called Abbey of the Arts, focussing very much on visual art in spirituality, and on pilgrimage.  In a paper on the important Benedictine obligation of hospitality, she writes:  I love this invitation of the Rule. I consider what this means at its foundation: that everything that seems strange, foreign, or uncomfortable, is the place where God especially shimmers forth.  This hospitality applies to those who arrive at the door to my outer world in terms of people and experiences I find difficult or challenging.  In a world struggling with a refugee crisis, we would do well to remember this radical invitation.  We had some thoughts about that last week.

But equally important, she says, is to understand that there is an inner aspect of hospitality – indeed, in us, as it were, is where hospitality either lives, or is suppressed.  The Hindu Sufi poet Rumi writes about the inner guest house, with new arrivals each day such as joy or sadness, anger, depression, anxiety.  Just as we are taught regarding so-called distractions in our silent prayer, not to resist them (because it won’t work), but to recognise and honour them first – then let them go on their way – so with these “guests” in our inner life it is important not to fend off or deny admittance, but to be open to what may be happening at a deeper level than our fears.  Contrary to common belief, God does not appear only in what is familiar or comfortable or safe.  God may manifest in events which may starkly challenge our assumptions about how things should work, or how they should be.  We are strangers and pilgrims, says the Letter to the Hebrews.[1]  That’s actually a tautology – the word pilgrim derives from an ancient word meaning stranger.  Wisdom teaches that we are careful to offer hospitality to our inner fears and negativities, because we ourselves are strange, and strangeness is one of the faces of God.

Now, I think it is time also to be reminded that contemplative life and prayer is always marked by gentleness – if it’s intimidating, not gentle, there’s something not right.  My yoke is easy, said Jesus, my burden is light.[2]  And in the matter of hospitality, including hospitality to our own inner “visitors”, good and bad, says Christine Valters Paintner, it means trusting that the brokenness we experience, or the wholeness, is God’s healing, leading path.  Of course we must always do what is sensible and possible to relieve pain.  But in bereavement and grief for instance, denial of reality is scarcely sensible or even kind.  Inner hospitality means greeting the “stranger”, remembering that we can do so without fear. 

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[1] Hebrews 11:13

[2] Matthew 11:30

Greeting the stranger – 11 May 2018

One of the better known quotes from the Rule of St Benedict is about welcoming guests:  Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ, for he is going to say: "I was a stranger and you welcomed me".[1]  And so down the centuries Benedictines have practised hospitality, a privilege and obligation which is part of their Rule.  This theme has resonance in our day and our world, in which so much is now about shutting doors, building walls, being suspicious of strangers – living, in other words, in fear of the stranger.

If we prioritise hospitality we have powerful support from the Bible and from the earliest days of Jewish understanding.  Repeatedly in the Torah, and especially in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy… you shall not oppress a resident stranger; you know the heart of a stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.  Or in Deuteronomy:  You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.[2]  The Jews are given two reasons for this teaching on hospitality.  The first is that that is what God is like, and the second is that they themselves were strangers, once, and wanderers, refugees and needy.  And so, in numerous ways, were most of us.  My great-great-grandfather came ashore on the beach at Nelson in 1843.  That must have felt quite strange.  Our cultural history is full of accounts of people migrating, arriving as strangers, often with considerable hardships, learning new ways, acquiring a new language.  I am a stranger… hide not from me, calls the Psalmist.  The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow.[3] 

In the Christian scriptures, much the same… Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers -- by doing that some have entertained angels unawares.[4]   The wisdom here is the startling reminder that what may seem foreign to us, strange or frightening, may be the event, the experience, in which God comes close.  How often did Jesus find crucial meaning in such situations…?  The Samaritan woman at the well… Samaritans were indeed strangers and foreigners – you didn’t talk to Samaritans, let alone their women!  …the Samaritan who stopped to help the injured Jew on the road to Jericho… the woman condemned for adultery… the woman who invaded the dinner party of Simon the Pharisee…  One way or another the stranger may teach us something from God.

But increasingly we choose safety, preferring to be among our own people, and we erect fences, visible ones and invisible but none-the-less real, and we even legislate against the stranger and the needy.  It is not the way of Christ.  I want to pursue this next week, but also to turn it inwards, because the stranger may not be actually standing at the door, so much as arriving in strange guise, in the form of unexpected events or sudden sorrows, illness or injury, ruptures in relationships…  I think the wisdom Jesus taught applies equally in the ways we deal with these things.

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[1] RB 53:1; Matthew 25:35

[2] Exodus 23:9; Deuteronomy 10:19

[3] Psalms 119:19; 146:9

[4] Hebrews 13:2

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