Easter 6 A

I wrote my sermon this week (http://www.cityurc.org.uk/sermons.htm) before getting around to this blog, so I am left in a curious position. Do I fake an exploration of the text as if I hadn't yet drafted the sermon itself? No. What I think I will do is collect a few scraps I had in my portfolio that wouldn't fit into the sermon.

There is an implied contrast between the Christian vision and the classics that has run throughout western history. My favourite story is the story of St Jerome's struggle. He loved the classical literature of Greece and Rome, and felt annoyed every time he turned to read the gospels at the rudeness of their style. But as one who would one day be canonised as a saint, he felt guilty about this. He vowed to lead an ascetic life, but did not want to give up his rich library. So he settled on a routine of fasting alternating with reading Cicero. One day, the story goes, he fell ill and in his delirium he had a dream that he was on trial. He protested that he was a Christian. But the judge said, No, you are a Ciceronian. Realising he was a man of divided loyalties, when he recovered Jerome abandoned the classics and devoted himself to demonstrating the integrity and sophistication of biblical literature in his own right.

I like this story, but I am quoting it from memory so it may not be all that accurate. Another thing I like about Jerome is his confession to wasting so much time daydreaming, wishing things weren't as they were. But that has nothing to do with Acts 17, which I am preaching on. The gospel lesson, continuing from last Sunday's reading in John 14, has that core proclamation in John that God abides in us as we in our discipleship abide in him. In the sermon I pick this up in connection with Paul saying, in Acts 17, that in God we live and move and have our being.

The Areopagus, where the street preacher Paul is taken to speak more formally, by the way, was the criminal court north west of the city centre. The story here doesn;t make much of this, but I find it interesting.

Underneath this story I find a fundamental tension between classical culture and the emerging Christian culture. The popular religion of multiple gods was a religion of anxiety in which people saw themselves pulled by irrational forces in all sorts of directions. Religious practice was a means of propitiating the gods so that their influence would be benign rather than distructive. The centre of personality was exterior to the individual in this sense. (Bruno Snell tells this story in The Discovery of the Mind). Another story in this direction is the one about Augustine coming across Ambrose reading silently. The custom was always to read out loud, but Ambrose confessed that he always read silently. Augustine was amazed, as if to discover that the world of ideas was not just something that happened outside the person (out loud), but inside.

In a sense both the Stoics and the Epicurians represented efforts to overcome the way the gods pull us in so many directions by resisting extremes of passion all together, with the Epicurians resisting the popular fear of the gods and fear of retribution in life after death by embracing simple this-world pleasures (not hedonism), and the Stoics cultivated a dispassionate life that formed the philosophical background to British stiff-upper-lip-ism. Both schools therefore represent a flight from the wholeness of experience. Luke's Paul introduces a way of life that is wholly integrated in what is, using the Greek philosophical language of that in which we live and move and have our being as the ground of consciousness of an individual capable of both self-consciousness and a capacity to transform life into relationship with what is fundamental to a creation of which we are a part, and not separated from, a relationship that is manifested in action--acts of healing and compassion. This is self-consciousness that is also conscious of life with God that looks to me like a pretty good cure for anxiety.

Easter 5 A

When Jesus, in John 14, says “I am the way,” I think we are invited to see what he says in parallel with other explorations of “the Way” like Dharma (धर्म), Tao (道) or Torah (תּוֹרָה).

In all these examples of “the Way” we find the understanding that there is an underlying structure to the fecundity and flourishing of things that is also the structure of the self. Such an underlying structure also gives shape to society. In Christianity such a structure takes shape around the metaphor of “the kingdom of God”. In Torah, the Way becomes an Exodus-like path to Law as a characteristic of a free society. The Way is a dynamic journey to liberation from unjust structures, from worlds like the worlds of Pharaoh and Robert Mugabe. In this lesson, however, the focus is on the actualisation of the self. The one who believes in Jesus (verse 12) will do what he does. The implication of this text is that if we follow the Way we become like Jesus. We, too, make the Father visible. The Father dwells in us, too. We, too, are able to say “I am.” Christ ‘Я’ Us. This kind of thinking is central to the Gospel of John from the beginning (John 1.12) to the end (John 21.15-17). The Word becomes our flesh and dwells among us in our discipleship, in what we do.

I find it interesting that Carl Jung says “Christ is our nearest analogy of the self and its meaning” (“Christ, a Symbol of the Self”). And I find it immensely helpful in today’s world to look at “the Way”, shrouded in metaphor as it is in the Gospel of John, in terms of the process of individuation as described in Jung’s work. For Jung, individuation comes through a process of integrating consciousness and the unconscious that discovers the self as an undivided whole. Consciousness alone is exclusive, selective and discriminating, and thus only part of the meaning of the whole person. The true self, whole and complete, will include the unconscious as well. While consciousness and the unconscious are often in conflict, and the ego-consciousness in its effort to remain loyal to what we call “reality” will swallow or suppress the unconscious, or, to the contrary, the unconscious psyche will disrupt and impair consciousness like an unwelcome intruder bent on creating chaos, the process of individuation is “a course of development arising out of the conflict between these two psychic facts” (“Consciousness, Unconsciousness and Individuation”). The healthy individual is one who can acknowledge the truth of the whole self, even the bits one would like to bury and forget.

There is a funeral prayer in the United Reformed Church’s Service Book that says

Reconcile us through your cross to all that we have rejected in ourselves, that we may find no part of your creation to be alien or strange to us, and that we ourselves may be made whole.

The prayer goes on to say

Help us to confess any hurt, and wrong we feel we have done to A . . ., and help us to know that we are forgiven, even as we hear your words: ‘Those who come to me, I will not cast out.’

Here in the Church’s liturgy we have the concern for integration and wholeness that is envisioned in the process of individuation, but also in the gospel call to confession, which is also an acknowledgement of the whole person, not a denial or suppression of what Jung calls our “shadow” but an awareness and acknowledgement of it. We speak in the presence of grace of what we can otherwise barely acknowledge in ourselves. Notice, moreover, that the prayers I have cited are for ourselves the worshippers at the funeral service. While at a funeral service we are unavoidably collectively aware of the one who has died as a whole person (warts and all”, or, as Jung would say, “animus/anima, shadow, and so on, and all), and our awareness is, in the best instances, buoyed by grace, worshippers are encouraged to have this same gracious awareness about themselves as whole persons. That is what the act of confession and the assurance or pardon are all about, after all, and such self-reflection helps us face our own dying as whole persons (persons whose lives include death).

Jung says “It is . . . well to examine carefully the psychological aspects of the individuation process in the light of Christian tradition, which can describe it for us with an exactness and impressiveness far surpassing our feeble attempts, even though the Christian image of the self—Christ—lacks the shadow that properly belongs to it.” The problem, Jung says, is the doctrine of the Summum Bonum. To a Protestant theologian’s assertion that “God can only be good,” Jung says Yahweh could have taught him a thing or two. As for Jesus, I recall growing up with those saccharin images of a clean, innocuous, unsullied Christ so dominant in suburban America as to serve for a kind of mascot for the middle class and reinforce the pressure to bury the dark side of human nature below acknowledgement, at great cost to our social, domestic and individual mental health. Everyone knows what the pressure never to acknowledge failure can do to a marriage and to individual minds.. The same pressure is experienced in society as a whole. Urban sociologist Richard Sennet, in The Uses of Disorder, describes the post-war American flight to the suburbs as a flight to a clean space where the richness of human diversity is less important than the desire to avoid pain by creating an order of living that is free of diversity and so free of conflict. Similarly, Gibson Winter, in The Suburban Captivity of the Church, tells how the post-war suburban building boom meant “exclusion from the central city and confinement to the iron cage of conformity” where local churches became “the instruments of middle class conformity rather” than a reconciling force in racial, class and ethnic diversity. This is the kind of social pattern that accompanies an inauthentic image of Christ and gives me a feeling of revulsion every time I have to sing a hymn with the word “sweet” in it.

Similar psychological pressure to deny the dark side of the self occurs in politics and international relations. Richard Hofstadter, in his classic essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” describes a mode of social behaviour motivated by “social conflicts that involve ultimate schemes of values and that bring fundamental fears and hatreds, rather than negotiable interests, into political action.” The fear of the other is a projection of unresolved fears lurking within the fragmented self.

But the image of Christ in scripture is the image of the one who is “not put off by the affliction of the afflicted” (Psalm 22.24), who was “numbered among the transgressors” (Isaiah 53.12), who was made by God “to be sin” (2 Cor 5.21), who “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” (Philippians 2.7). The very doctrine of incarnation that is described as the descent of God into our humanity is, in ordinary human experience, the acknowledgement of the wholeness of one’s own humanity as it is described in these references, an acknowledgement that, in the process of individuation, is not at all easy to make but is the very heart of the journey described here as “the Way”. This is the incarnational journey Paul calls us to make when, in Philippians 2, he challenges us to have the mind of Christ and do what he did in embracing the life of the condemned as his own. I would say the mystery of the incarnation is something very like the mystery of individuation, the challenge to become a whole person.

Furthermore, the journey of discipleship that is largely a journey acknowledging failure in a culture only honouring success and a journey confronting the consequences of denial on the path toward wholeness is similarly a journey illuminating the dynamics of individuation. The goal of integration is characterised in the apostolic experience of Christ’s resurrection (= Paul’s conversion, Peter’s call to carry on the work of Christ).

Doesn’t it add immense significance to this teaching about discipleship, by the way, that it is presented in the context of anticipating the death of Jesus as their leader? The significance is twofold. In the first place, in this journey toward integration we call “the Way” death and life cease to be opposites but become integrated in the person who learns how to live by “emptying” himself in this way (Philippians 2.7 again). The Gospel of John plays with this paradox of death as life in the ambiguity of the phrase “lifted up: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself" (John 12.32). “Lifted up” refers equally to crucifixion and exaltation.

In addition, as the gospels tell the story of a journey toward integration that takes place within religious and political conflict that closely resembles conflict experienced in the process of individuation discussed above, the end of the story intensifies the fundamental paradoxes that have operated throughout the story. Jesus is crucified between two thieves. For Jung, this can mean, on the one hand, the collapse of the ego caused by the uncontrolled irruption of the dark side of the self, or the ego's submission to a higher and more spacious part of the self that is given the final word. In either option the ego seems to be "defeated", but the one option is the story of failure and the other the story of victory. Karl Barth described the crucifixion of Jesus between two thieves as a community that defines the first church—the kind of community Jesus intended, the company he wished to keep. In the eyes of the world it looks like failure. As the trajectory of “the Way” it is victory, it creates a new world that is unlike Caesar's world, and we are invited to do what Jesus did, finding our integrity in similar community.

Easter 4 A

On the fourth Sunday of Easter, the 23^rd Psalm is assigned for all three years of the lectionary cycle, A, B and C. In the Gospel, the fourth Sunday of Easter pursues the metaphor of the Good Shepherd in John 10. Year A give us John 10.1-10. Year B gives John 10.11-18, and Year C John 10.22-37. While the general theme for the fourth Sunday of Easter is a northern hemisphere springtime vision of green grass, skipping lambs and the traditional biblical and middle eastern image of the good shepherd, the particular vision of this Sunday's gospel reading, John 10.1-10, is less one of comforting custodial security and more one of challenge. We have to wait for Year B (John 10.11-18) to get the actual Good Shepherd image. Here, Jesus is the gate to the sheep fold. “I am the gate,” he says. “Whoever enters by me will be saved.”

So in the same way that Jesus says, in John 14, that he is “the way” and that no one comes to the Father “except by me”, here he says he is the gate. Who’s in and who’s out constitutes a theme with profound relevance to our time, as this Mondays G2 special supplement to The Guardian on “Immigration to Britain since the 1940s” testifies. The whole question of immigration quotas for migrant workers and restrictions for asylum seekers and stringent citizenship tests has a spiritual dimension that is a critical element of this metaphor of Jesus as the gate. And the metaphor in John 10 emerges from a similar cultural tension.

The story of this tension is told in one of my favourite commentaries on John, Raymond Brown’s The Community of the Beloved Disciple: The Life, Loves and hates of an Individual Church in New Testament Times (Paulist, 1979). Brown says, for instance, that “the Johannine prayer for unity with the Apostolic Christians [that they may be one, John 17.20-21] carries a price tag—those other Christians would have to accept the exalted Johannine christology . . . if there was to be one sheep herd, one flock” (p. 90). There is a deep sense of “us” against “them” in John. Brown points out that while John’s christology became the Church’s dominant christology, it is a christology quite foreign to the other gospels, and the gospel lives in tensi0on with its own people (1.11), whom John characteristically refers to as “the Jews”, as if Jesus and his disciples had not themselves been Jews. All this tension is present when John defines Jesus as “the way” and “the gate”.

In her chapter on “Gospels in Conflict: John and Thomas” in her book Beyond Belief (Macmillan 2003), Elaine Pagels remembers being an enthusiastic 14-year-old member of an evangelical church that offered what she then craved—the assurance of belonging to the right group, the true “flock” that alone belonged to God. As Brown described the “price tag” of such unity, so Pagels experienced leaders who charged her not to associate with outsiders, except to convert them (p. 31). They said her Jewish friend, killed in a car accident when she was 16, was eternally damned because she had never been “born again”. John’s gospel, written, Pagels says, “in the heat of controversy, to defend certain views of Jesus and to oppose others” (p. 36), was the focus gospel for this evangelical community.

When I took a sabbatical in 1998 I attended seminars at Chicago’s Center for Congregational Development, which in those days had become aligned with Lesslie Newbigin’s The Gospel and Our Culture movement. I will never forget how agitated a fellow member of one seminar got when the leader began pursuing themes from the Gospel of John. He’d grown up with the Gospel of John, he said. The seminar was bringing back all the pressure to be born again and dissociate himself from “the world”. He described the emotional pain he had experienced by the way a narrow, Gospel of John-driven evangelical agenda had dominated his family and his youth, and what it had taken to extricate himself from all this. The memory of this shared pain came back to me when I first read Pagel’s Beyond Belief.

I think such pain needs to be remembered when we consider the “gate” metaphor in John 10. To be sure, the Christian life is a specific way of life that includes choices and discipline. It is not a matter of wandering about like sheep without a shepherd. Last year I put together a course called “The Way: An Introduction to Christianity as a Way of Life”. One course member did object to the basic idea that there had to be some specific disciplined “way” that implicitly distinguished itself from other ways. But at some point choices have to be made. Engaging in human trafficking is different from offering someone the gift of abundant life (John 10.10). Taking up the way of life we call Christianity involves choices and disciplines. There was a cartoon in The Guardian recently that was a take-off on the all-for-one-and-one-for-all motto of the Three Musceteers. It portrayed the Free Marketeers, a trinity of competitors going at one another with knives. The Christian way of life challenges us to choose. The gate is real.

A solution can be found outside the family, in a traditional Buddhist meditation I once heard from Gyomay Kubose, now dead, the founder of the Buddhist Temple in Chicago. Kubose and I co-presided at interfaith weddings from time to time, and we became friends. I remember him speaking about the “Gateless Gate”. He put it more eloquently than my memory can, but, basically, he said the spiritual path we take does have a gate that must be passed through, like a barricade that must be overcome, and the spiritual path we walk in order to cross through this gate will necessarily be arduous, disciplined and intentional in every way that we can imagine. But once we pass through the gate, we realise that there had never been a gate at all. What we find on the other side is simply life, complete and abundant. For the Christian, this spacious terrain on the other side of the gate is the place where there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. All are one in Christ, in a unity that is the opposite of exclusion. Of course there is a cost, as Bonhoeffer has reminded us that all discipleship is costly. But at the end of the day it is free. It's all about liberation.

Here at City United Reformed Church we have declared ourselves to be an “open and affirming” church, open to the gifts and participation of a wide variety of folk regardless of economic status, race, mental stability or sexual orientation and so on. Those who have been with the church long enough to know the hard work it took to get to this point know the truth of Kubose’s meditation. The path took us to the deep foundations of what it meant to be Christian together. It may have felt like we were simply being "liberal" at first, but we soon became aware that such a choice was no wishy-washy liberalism but a radical commitment to what Christ was all about.

Is this kind of vision absent from the Gospel of John? Brown and Pagels speak of the exclusive nature of John’s high christology. Jesus may be called the Son of God in John, but so is the ordinary believer who accepts Holy Wisdom (“the Word”) as the shape of his or her own life, as Jesus himself had, and this tension between Jesus as “the” Son of God and the rest of us is never resolved here. Jesus and the Father are "one" in John in the sense of solidarity, not identity, and this solidarity is an option offered to all believers. John’s high christology is also an anthropology, the light of our most fundamental humanity. Commentators who read John as a theological treatise about Jesus rather than as an invitation to the reader to take up a life-changing discipleship miss the point. For me, most readings of John stop at the narrow gate and never go in, as it were. If the Gospel of John says one thing, it is that we are invited into a way of life in which we will do what Christ does and in which the Father will be as fully present in the life of the disciple as the Father was present in Jesus. This is the invitation made by this gospel, and this is what it looks like on the other side of the gate. Christ ‘R’ Us.

Easter 3 A

Luke 24.13-35, the Road to Emmaus story, celebrates the way breaking bread with strangers makes the life of Christ present in ordinary space and time. The table fellowship that comes toward the end of the story is an Imitatio Christi, an imitation of the life of the Messiah, in which his life becomes our life. The resurrection of Christ is made known in concrete actions like breaking bread, that is to say, in our discipleship.

The disciples in the story are depressed because the story has not turned out as they had expected. As the story unfolds, we might ask what was actually the more unexpected—the cross through which they experienced defeat, or the ordinary experience of broken bread through which they experienced such a profound sense of undefeated “presence” that they could proclaim that Jesus remained alive? The story is about a conversation with Scripture that unfolds in a new understanding, metanoia (conversion, literally “change of mind), that becomes explicit in action, in the breaking of bread. It is in this concrete but meaning-laden act that their eyes were finally opened. “My thoughts are not your thoughts,” says the Lord (Isaiah 55.8), “nor are your ways my ways.” The conversation we have with Scripture becomes an interweaving of his ways with ours until they become one. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?

Let me share another conversation that, for me, connects with this story of conversation emerging in discipleship. The week after Easter I booked a study leave at the URC’s Windermere Centre to bone up for teaching “Advanced New Testament Greek”. I was the only resident that week, so I felt overjoyed when Lawrence Moore, the centre’s director, popped around one evening to relieve the isolation. I like Lawrence. We resumed the on-going conversation we’d been having since we first met about seven years ago.

One of the things we discussed was the “Vision4Life” programme the United Reformed Church is promoting these days as the latest effort in resuscitating a moribund church. It’s not just supposed to revitalise the church. It’s also supposed to be a meeting place for the evangelical conservatives and the liberals. The programme consists of local churches concentrating on the Bible one year, prayer the next and, in the third year, evangelism.

I have always tried to embrace our denomination’s agendas, but I confessed to Lawrence that I myself had never been either conservative or liberal. Either option seemed ill-focused to me. My own self-understanding came from a third term, “radical” Christianity. I think I formed my sensibilities in my young adult years working with Catholic Worker-Movement-type people who were engaged in doing things in places like inner-city Chicago. We exercised our discipleship in what theologians at the time were calling “praxis”—action that embodied consciously shared values. We met—a community of Presbyterians, Catholics and a few Baptists—every Friday evening in a house where a couple of nuns lived that was a kind of community base for us. We shared a pot-luck meal and an informal, guitar accompanied Eucharist, sitting around on the floor. The emotional stresses of sharing our lives in ministry were given healing therapy by this gathering, by shared liturgy, shared prayer and broken bread. For me, radical Christianity is an imitatio Christi, a way of living rather than believing, or perhaps a way of believing that is inseparable from praxis.

The often tense division between evangelicals and liberals in our denomination seems to me more a matter of believing, and more of a Protestant phenomenon, resulting from the unnatural weight of authority we have given to the Bible, and to the question of believing what the Bible says. In the sixteenth century Reformation we ditched the authority of the Pope and, to fill the vacuum, gave supreme authority to the text of the Bible.

It was more than that, of course. The Reformation in large part emerged from the broader concerns of Renaissance humanism. These scholars were editors who sought the authoritative clarity of the best possible manuscripts from classical Greece and Rome, texts shorn of layer upon layer of medieval commentary and corruption. The scholars who provoked this intellectual revolution exposed the ways the encrustation of medieval perspectives had corrupted biblical texts in the same way they had obscured Cicero and Galen and Aristotle. The very concept of the “Middle Ages” derives from the value given to the recovery of ancient learning. The Reformation came on the heels of the Renaissance, the re-birth of classical learning.

The result was to give the biblical text a weight of authority that it was not suited to carry. As John Campbell points out in Being Biblical, biblical authority doesn’t come from the text as text, but from the voices of those blessed in the Beatitudes and from the cross, from the voices of those enslaved in Egypt and those exiled in Babylon. This is the authority of those who suffer from the structures that the “world” considers to carry authority. It is, as Bonhoeffer said, authority from below. And this is the biblical narrative being unfolded to those two disciples on the Emmaus road when their hearts were burning. It is the story of radical commitment to those who suffer that is born out in the cross and in broken bread. It is the story that unfolds in the life of Jesus. It is the story that unfolds in the life of the faithful disciple. It is the story that underlies the stories of the Bible rather than the literal text itself. It is a story to be lived.

The first year of the Vision4Life programme is to be a year of living with the Bible. If Vision4Life is to become a meeting place between conservative and liberal in the United Reformed Church then we are going to have to grow beyond the way we use the text of the Bible as our final authority, so enshrined in the creeds and constitutions of the Reformed churches. Conservatives lock onto the biblical text as a clear guide to life verging on inerrancy. Liberals, in reaction, seem to focus on what they don’t believe, as if the hole was more important than the donut. Where conservatives and liberals need to come together is in their discipleship, in ways their lives re-tell the story in the challenging, uncharted context of the present moment. Both conservative and liberal in our denomination are too tied to the cerebral dimension of Christianity—what we believe and what we cannot believe. What both need to re-discover is a Christianity that is primarily focused on a Christian way of living that is itself a means of interpreting the biblical text, a way of life that is what John Campbell calls “being Biblical”. Being Biblical unfolds in all the classic Christian disciplines, like the faithful, generous giving we are so bad at in the United Reformed Church, in prayer and in the kind of accompanied living for which the road to Emmaus has become proverbial, and particularly in the way we accompany the lies of the dispossessed. It is not to live like puppets on strings in mechanical obedience to the letter of the text, but rather to live in a way that allows the text to continue to speak through us as we imitate Christ. What we do in obedience, far from an uncritical response to authority from on high, is a creative, imaginative response to the situations we find ourselves in as neighbours. We live not for ourselves but for others. As the hymn says, echoing Book Three of Calvin’s Institution of the Christian Religion, “we are not our own”.

I think the Road to Emmaus story says we see such a life lived in the real presence of Christ most vividly in the Lord’s Supper, for it is in the breaking of bread that the disciples’ eyes are opened, and this story seems obviously to be an interpretation of early Eucharistic practice as embodiment of the living presence of Christ, in the same way that Paul challenges us to discern the presence of Christ in this shared meal in 1 Corinthians 11. From all that has been said above, of course, it is clear that this feast of the Church cannot remain entombed in mere ritual. In order to have any meaning at all the breaking of bread needs to be connected to radical acts of inclusion and affirmation. It should never be a ritual designed exclusively for initiates alone but must be opened up to become a welcoming, reconciling feast with strangers. It needs to have a direct relationship with those who are really hungry in the world, not just through charity, but in actual table fellowship. When our Christian life is practised in this way, then we, too, can run from this feast with the exciting news that “the Lord is risen!” The next unexpected step in this story, of course, is when we discover that the presence of the Lord has already been recognised in all sorts of other faithful but otherwise very ordinary acts of shared discipleship. “He is risen indeed,” they say. It should not come as disappointment when the good news is no news at all, but simply the way things are when our eyes have been opened. Christ 'R' Us.