Christ Я Us

Proper 16 A

2008-08-21T04:58:00.000-07:00

It is interesting to consider the messianic language observed in the post 9/11 George Bush presidency in relation to Constantine, whom Eusebius called the thirteenth apostle and the one in whom the Logos expressed a new divine initiative. The messianic status assumed by Constantine was a pre-Christian messianism, uninformed by the crucifixion’s interpretation of that story and, indeed, embracing a vision Jesus himself rejected. Constantine’s motive in calling the ecumenical councils was to maintain imperial unity rather than the critical pursuit of truth. The distortions of Christianity brought by Constantine have in many ways been reborn with new vigour in the conflicts and aspirations of recent Western history.

In the Matthew story for this Sunday (Matthew 16.13-20), Peter confesses his understanding of Jesus as the Messiah. Some were saying the life of Jesus was interpreting the life of John the Baptist or that of Elijah or Jeremiah or one of the prophets in this contemporary moment. Peter says Jesus’ life interprets the story of the Messiah, or that he “is” the Messiah. Unlike Mark’s Jesus, Matthew’s Jesus does not immediately explain the Messiah’s necessary suffering, to which Peter famously objects. In Matthew, Jesus congratulates Peter on his inspiration, puns on his name to call him the rock on which he will build his church, and promises him that what he says will go. The addition is part of Matthew’s characteristic emphasis on the life of a church that embodies the presence of Christ (Emanuel) in its common life and acts as God’s presence in the world.

Matthew’s vision of the church does not merge the divine agenda with the agenda of the world, or the state, as under Constantine. While Jesus affirms Peter’s ministry in the world in the deepest possible sense, as a partnership with the transcendent God, what Peter has yet to understand is how such being-in-the-world is a matter of embracing the suffering of the world, identifying with the godforsaken and the abandoned in a way that shapes life in opposition to imperial Rome and the principles of the pax Romana.

What Jesus will say here about the Messiah is not so much something new, spoken against a Jewish understanding. Jesus interprets the faith of the people of exodus and exile ad the compassionate God who lived with his people through these experiences. The life of Jesus interprets his people’s Messiah story in one particular legitimate way that nevertheless sharpens oppsition to alternative interpretations—that Constantine would make, for instance, or George Bush or ancient Near Eastern religious culture in general, interpretations made from different social locations. This is the conflict of interpretation that will catch Peter as the story unfolds here.

What Peter must learn is what our reading from Romans teaches (Romans 12.1-8): to those who may be tempted by a faith that seeks accommodation and self-preservation in the world, a triumphalistic faith that is politically uncritical and therefore merely “spiritual”, to these Paul says the kind of spiritual worship he wants is one in which we put our bodies on the line. Being in the world is not accommodation to the world but transforming the world. Our “bodies” belong not just to God (and therefore to the future to which God calls us) but to the believing (and acting) community: we are “members together” (Romans 12.5). We are not our own. It is this kind of vision that animated Jesus on the cross and allowed the cross, a symbol of abandonment and death, to interpret the joyful solidarity of the kingdom. The cross, in a new understanding, becomes the new life of the resurrection. This is the new messianic vision, there at the very beginning in the OT heritage of transformation and liberation into new futures, but always new and unexpected. It is because of this necessary and painful engagement with the real world and the powers of history that we speak of the resurrection in terms of history, not because of the factuality of the appearance stories.

Connections to the Exodus 1.8 – 2.10 story ae obvious. The Hebrew midwives, unwilling to live subservient to the state, become midwives to a new future for their people. Bringing this story into our general theme, I am reminded of Matthew’s emphasis on engagement with an actual world as (often subversive and certainly suffering) agents of transformation. As “members together” the body of Christ shares in a messianic calling to transform our world to God’s future vision. Christ ‘r’ us. This is what is so scary for Peter. The messianic vision interpreted by the life of Jesus is not just about Jesus. It is about the Christian way of life. It is the pattern of our discipleship.

Proper 15 A

2008-08-13T05:49:00.000-07:00

Isaiah 56.1-8, Matthew 15.21-28

Isaiah 56 marks the beginning of what has become known as Third Isaiah, which is characterised by the kind of inclusivist vision we have here in the embrace of the eunuch and the foreigner. This embrace effectively counters the exclusions announced in Deuteronomy 23.1-8. Just as pointedly, the pairing of eunuch and foreigner raises questions about the nature of the Abrahamic promise of children and land that has so fundamentally defined the Judean identity.

One of the things I find utterly delightful about our sacred scriptures is this habit of undermining or at least re-interpreting their own tradition. Here in Isaiah 56 we have an earlier instance of the attitude Jesus expressed when he said, “You have heard it said, but I say….” What Third Isaiah is saying is further intensified when we see it against the background of Ezra and Nehemiah laying down strict boundaries for who is in and who is out. This, along with the Holiness Code (Leviticus 17-26) and the idea of a Promised Land, constituted the inheritance of exile, a time when Israel not only preserved but in large part created and codified its identity in hostile surroundings.

The inclusive vision of Isaiah 56 is an alternative response to exile that goes back to more fundamental roots, to a faith that is based on justice rather than inheritance and the maintenance of identity and ritual purity over and against what is “other”. The chapter begins with the appeal to maintain justice, and one of the ways of doing this is to keep the Sabbath, which according to Deuteronomy is a way of maintaining justice rooted in the experience of exodus. Sabbath rest is Sabbath freedom, release from oppression and drudgery, a redefinition of the human being who is no longer seen as a beast of burden. Such freedom is inherently a universal principle limited neither to ethnic identity nor to place, and, indeed, a gift specifically given to the stranger as a way of remembering a people’s estrangement in Egypt.

Sadly, what seems to me the more fundamental vision of my faith tends to be the minority position. The land question, for instance, is still in control of the Ezras and the Nehemiahs. In the Sojourner’s ‘Daily Digest’ I receive via email I read today that "In exchange for West Bank land that Israel would keep, Olmert proposed a 5.5 percent land swap giving the Palestinians a desert territory adjacent to the Gaza Strip. ... The land to be annexed to Israel would include the large settlement blocs, and the border would be similar to the present route of the separation fence." How long can such injustice prevail? Good old Bob Dylan used to say the answer to that is so obvious it is blowing in the wind and defining an imminent future. So much for 1960s counterculture prophecy. The dispossession of the "other" is even worse now than it was then, as bad now as it was when Israel first returned from exile to insist on (re)claiming land rights.

The gospel lesson raises the perennial question. What does it take to listen to the voice of the Canaanite woman? To the eunuch? To the asylum seeker or the homosexual? According to the story in Matthew even Jesus (read ‘Christianity’) wears the traditional blinders. Even Jesus can forget that his tradition is inherently inclusive, as, indeed, it proved so infectiously to be after his death. The Ezras and the Nehemiahs have made of the so-called “Great Commission” at the end of this Gospel a mandate for proselytising, for building an imperial Church. It seems to me if we are going to teach what Jesus taught and do what Jesus did we will be sent by these words to liberate and affirm people, Sabbath-style, maintaining justice. Such a vision may always be against the grain. It always seems to be, anyway, even within our own tradition. But that doesn’t make it any less the gospel imperative, one that Jesus carried all the way to the cross. And in today's time of tension and disagreement within religious communities, the Church needs to be doing its creative best to carry this imperative forward in an articulate, public and forceful manner.

Proper 12 A

2008-07-23T04:48:00.000-07:00

Genesis 29.15-28, Romans 8.26-39, Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52. I learned a lesson early in my ministry. There are plenty people out there who want to be part of a church community. The trick is to take down the barriers that keep them out. The readings we have for Proper 12 A are all about overcoming obstacles. Jacob wants Rachel, and works seven long hard years for her hand, only to come up against the principle that you can’t marry off the second daughter before the first. So, accepting Leah unquestioningly, he works seven more long hard years for Laban before he finally gets the bride he wants. And thank God for polygamy.

Paul teaches us to let nothing stand in the way of the love of God we have known in Jesus Christ. And in Mathew the merchant in the parable lets nothing stand between him and the pearl he desires. Seventeenth century Puritans spoke of the experience of conversion as “buying the pearl”. For once, life has a centre and a meaning that reconfigures everything else, an Ultimate Concern worth having, in Paul Tillich’s words.

The pearl and the treasure in the fields are secrets, hidden things like the mustard’s seed’s proverbial status as the least of all seeds. Jesus quotes Psalm 78, which is worth chasing up a few verses further:

¹Give ear, O my people, to my teaching; incline your ears to the words of my mouth.

² I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from of old,

³ things that we have heard and known, that our ancestors have told us.

⁴ We will not hide them from their children; we will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might, and the wonders that he has done.

The parables disclose fundamental mysteries that have been forgotten, according to this psalm, in the perverse behaviour of a previous generation. I think of what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15: “Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed” (verse 51). The idea is disclosure, not mystification. It’s like Pane and Teller explaining what the secrets are behind the trick they have just performed. And the secret is God’s unconditional love. You are accepted. In the context of Psalm 78, this secret comes in the gift of Torah, a way of life that is freely given to a people, without their deserving, that they might live as compassionately as God is compassionate. Freedom from servitude, land (the root meaning of salvation in Hebrew is “spaciousness”—a place in which to be free), a way of life that is compassionate and just, all this comes to us as a gift from what Burns called “the Giftie”.

This giftedness of the essential divine love that is the foundation of all of life is what theology means by “providence”. When Paul says (verse 28) all things work together for good for those who love God, he doesn’t mean a home in the suburbs with a paid-up mortgage or a holiday villa in Majorca, let alone peace in Zimbabwe. He gives this assurance in full awareness of the hardships and persecution surrounding the Christian life. Tillich, in The Shaking of the Foundations, says,

Providence means that there is a creative and saving possibility implied in every situation, which cannot be destroyed by any event. Providence means that the daemonic and destructive forces within ourselves and our world can never have an unbreakable grasp upon us, and that the bond which connects us with the fulfilling love can never be disrupted….The content of the faith in Providence is this: when death rains from heaven as it does now, when cruelty wields power over nations and individuals as it does now, when hunger and persecution drive millions from place to place as they do now, and when prisons and slums all over the world distort the humanity of the bodies and souls of men as they do now, we can boast in that time, and just in that time, that even all of this cannot separate us from the love of God…..Providence means that there is a creative and saving possibility implied in every situation, which cannot be destroyed by any event. Providence means that the daemonic and destructive forces within ourselves and our world can never have an unbreakable grasp upon us, and that the bond which connects us with the fulfilling love can never be disrupted.

What Tillich says is born out in the organic images of growth in the parables, the mustard seed, the yeast. The “creative and saving possibilities” that Paul speaks of as the Spirit moving within and through us in prayer and unvoiced desire are prior to human agency, divine, ultimate.

The business about predestination in this reading from Romans that has exercised the community of Reformed churches so painfully over the years can thus be understood in terms of this general priority of God’s love which becomes, for us, that pearl of great price. In our tradition, it became a rather frightening doctrine, leading to sermons like Jonathan Edwards’ notorious “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. Probably influenced as much by sixteenth century theories of the divine sovereignty of kings as anything, John Calvin’s understanding of God’s complete sovereignty over human affairs combined with this passage to create something of a theological monster. But I doubt Paul was intending to speak systematic theology here. He’s picking up on prophetic language of covenant and promise, the general proclamation of a fundamentally gracious God: “A God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” Exodus 34:6-7). The message is, God’s love is something you can count on, a fundamental sense of companionship in the midst of whatever disasters we may confront, a companionship we proclaim most visibly at the Lord’s Table, and in the Christian life to which we are called. At the end of the day it is in our discipleship that God’s promises become publicly visible. As we love one another no matter what, God’s Providence finds its place in the world. As Promise Keepers, we keep the promises that were made to us from the beginning of time, the mysteries the parables disclose. What gets in the way of us keeping the promises God has made to us?

Proper 11 A

2008-07-16T14:39:00.000-07:00

Genesis 28.10-19. I suppose my mysticism comes from the influence of the late medieval mystics on Calvin. This is a rather unsung feature of Calvinism that the more stolid burghers who more generally represent my tradition have missed. But it is there. Mystical moments come as fleeting instances of insight incapable of verbal reproduction. You need to be there. Three mystical experiences, more intense, rivalling Jacob’s vision of angelic traffic, were all from my young adult years. Two of the three were induced by literature rather than by what we have defined as strictly orthodox religion. The earlier experience came the first time I heard Alan Ginsburg read. It was Wichita Vortex Sutra in a huge auditorium of a lecture hall in Indiana University, as arid a place as the wilderness at Luz where Jacob stopped for the night, but crowded to the rafters with desperate undergraduates who had, like me, grown up spiritually hungry in the small towns and farm communities of Midwest America. It was an incredible experience, as if I had been transported to a nowhere emptiness like West Texas or as if Ginsberg’s incantation had raised me several removes from ordinary earthbound experience. The second experience came as I finished reading Melville’s Moby Dick for the first time. I was sitting on the floor in the late afternoon by a roaring fire. And then it was like a second later the room was dark, the coals in the fireplace had gone cold. In between time, any sense of ego had disappeared as who I was merged with the universe. That is the only way I can describe it. Clearly, I hadn’t fallen asleep, as when I returned to ordinary consciousness I was still sitting erect on the floor beside the fireplace, now gone cold, hours later.

The third experience occurred following my first real experience of desperate poverty on the twelfth floor of a public housing project in South Side Chicago. I don’t need to go into the experience itself, only to say that when I returned to my flat I sat there in a trance for the whole weekend, eyes wide open but not really seeing anything as the wheels of my consciousness slowly reconfigured themselves.

Jacob’s experience of the angelic traffic at Bethel gives a clue to a patriarchal narrative in which the main characters are not so much free agents as they are figures in a bigger story for which God is the protagonist. We saw this most vividly in the story of Abraham and Isaac at Mount Moriah in which it is clear how little Abraham understands about the story he is caught up in. Here at Bethel we get the connection that explains what is happening, and what is happening is what all mysticism opens a window to. The story in which we have always considered ourselves to be the heroes are not, in fact, our stories at all, but God’s. This is the mystical vision. For all Jacob’s efforts to throw the dice in his favour, at the end of the day it is the grace of God that shapes his life. Jacob, unsure what to say, says that if God sticks with him, providing for his subsistence (“bread and clothing” was shorthand for the provisions given to slaves and seasonal workers—“daily bread” as we say in the prayer), then this cairn he has set up will be the God’s dwelling place, Bethel (house of God). He doesn’t even have to say this. God will stick with him, willy nilly, and this is God’s abode, a “thin place”, as George MacLeod described Iona, where earth is in easy access of heaven.

I remember with great embarrassment the time earlier in my sojourn here in the UK when I was reading this lesson from Romans (8.12-25) when I was still getting my bearings with British pronunciation, learning to say “garage” with the accent on the first syllable and “controversy” with the accept on the second. Over here, we pronounce the “h” speaking of a “herb” (it’s silent in the States) and often don’t when speaking of an “horse”. How were we supposed to do it when we said, verse 17, “and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and join heirs with Christ”. It certainly did sound odd when I gave “heirs” a hard “h”. All three times. How stupid. This has noting to do with explicating the actual lesson. I just wanted to confess it.

It continues to fascinate me that Paul unfolds the meaning of Jesus as the Messiah by bringing our own spiritual experience in line with his—sonship with God Is something we share. As last week’s lesson spoke of the same Spirit of God that raised Christ from the dead (at his conversion, at his baptism?) being within us to raise us to new life (at our conversion, baptism?), so this week “all who are led by the Spirit, they are sons of God” (Romans 8.14). We, like Jesus, are adopted as God’s sons (and daughters)—Paul’s language is much more in line with Mark and John, and he seems to know nothing of the kind of birth narrative we have in Matthew and Luke.

There is a big “if” qualification here. If we suffer like him, we will be glorified like him. Suffering, here, is a broader, more essential condition of our humanity than the specific, historical experience of persecution, but it is nevertheless a stance taken and a witness made. For Paul, the great visionary, any mystical experience like the exuberant sense of entering into adoption as a child of God at baptism is lived out practically, and here this is a suffering taken on as solidarity with creation itself, a fundamental one-ness with a world that is always in a state of becoming, as Aristotle would say, or a state of flux, more Platonically conceived. In order to grasp what Paul is on about I think we have to get into the messy, eclectic mix of Hellenistic philosophical discourse. For the Stoics, for instance, the spiritual goal was to rise above the essential “suffering” the self (ego) experienced in the world through the pursuit of an inner harmony and self-control that in turn resulted in public responsibility and civil order. Paul takes a different tack. We are to suffer “with [Christ]” as a way of living in solidarity with all who can only hope for a better future. There is this sense of companionship that is there from the very beginning, or lived out from baptism, as we live out a sense of oneness with the Spirit of God that is inseparable from our sense of oneness with others and with creation itself. This solidarity is of course the key to that future we hope for but do not see. In a sense, it is already the fulfilment of that hope, though the realisation of that may only come in fleeting visions, like Jacob’s fleeting vision of the traffic of angels between earth and heaven.

The story in Matthew is the story of the weeds sown among the corn in Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43. Think about what this parable may have felt like had it not been so awkwardly interpreted by Matthew’s follow-up allegorical explanation, allegory being a mode of interpretation foreign to Semitic practice. What if the original parable had gone something like, “The kingdom of heaven is like what happens when the farm workers refrain from pulling up the weeds lest they inadvertently pull up the corn in the process." Clear judgement will come. But the emphasis is thrown not so much on the weeds and the evil one as it is on the sense of forbearance, a fundamental Christian virtue. Those who refrain from condemnation have the mind of Christ, who was a servant of all, who suffered in solidarity with all. To refrain from judgement, then, is to live in a sense of oneness with the Spirit of God that flows through who we most deeply are. Todd Weir has a brilliant take on this reading, quoted on The Text This Week website: "The psychologist Carl Jung would have approved of the parable of the wheat and tares. Jung explored the nature of the unconscious “shadow” that lives in each soul." Several weeks ago I explored Jung’s concept of the unconscious “shadow” in terms of the process of individuation and the sense of accepting ourselves as whole persons, shadow, warts and all. The parable invites us to see as God sees, to open our lives to God’s world- and self-transforming Spirit. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ. This is an extraordinarily difficult lesson to learn about ourselves. Sometimes it takes a bit of a mystical vision, to get the whole picture.

Proper 10 A

2008-07-09T05:21:00.000-07:00

Genesis 25.19-34; Romans 8.1-11; Matthew 13.1-23

Did you ever hear the story of the two Bole Weevils who were rivals for the hand of a lovely little female Bole Weevil? We used to enjoy telling this story when I was studying for my PhD in literature back in the 1970s, because one of the Bole Weevils was a slight, scholarly type. In the comic books we grew up with there was always an ad for the “dynamic tension” Charles Atlas body-building programme. The ad showed a skinny kid getting sand kicked in his face by a beach bully. This was the familiar type being portrayed by the scholarly Bole Weevil in the story. His rival was an athletic type, rather dense, like Esau in the Old Testament story—one who would enjoy hunting and knew how to do car repair and lay tiles. The girls always went for this type. The scholarly Bole Weevil knew he didn’t have a chance as a suitor. But at the end of the day he was indeed the one chosen by the lovely little female Bole Weevil, to everyone’s surprise. And why? Because he was the lesser of the two Weevils.

This joke explains an awful lot of the Genesis narrative, and indeed the self-understanding of the Israelites throughout their history—the story of the triumph of the underdog. This is the story of Gideon, the story of the slaves in Egypt, the story of those who were exiled to Babylon for their own damned fault, but for whom God’s grace nevertheless became real once more in their homecoming. The story of Israel is the story of God’s grace for the underdog.

In Jacob’s case this story is dramatised as the unwillingness of the second child to settle for the cards he has been dealt. In traditional societies everywhere the older child gets it all. The Patriarchal narrative in Genesis is about patrimony going to those one would least expect to receive it—Isaac, born so late and unexpectedly in Abraham’s life just when all hope of promise would seem to have been dried up, Jacob the second son, and then when the disaster of famine hits it is the youngest, the good-as-dead Joseph who saves the day for his brothers. These are all stories of hope in defeat and exile, and they form the theme behind the child who grabs onto his elder brother’s heel as he is born.

The point of the story of course is not just that the grace of God saves the underdog. The underdog refuses to settle for the cards as they have been dealt, as I said above. I think of community organisers like Saul Alinsky or some of the famous Twentieth Century martyrs, Martin Luther King, Jr, Ghandi, Oscar Romero—people who refused to accept the way things were and acted to change them. The story of Israel is both the story of God’s grace and the story of those who carry the will of God in their own hearts to work for change.

Paul’s explication of the struggle between “the law of the spirit of life in Christ” and “the law of sin and death” in Romans 8 needs to be seen in terms of this underlying significance of the Jacob story as it broader biblical context. It certainly won’t do to diminish the significance of what Paul is saying by limiting it to a merely personalised concern for what we do with our silly members. The law of sin and death is not only that incurvature of the spirit to the concerns of self and security as described by Augustine but the limitation of hope to preserving the stability of what has been known in the past. What Paul is speaking about is a dynamism of a living spirit that breaks through all fundamentalisms and literalisations and power structures in family life, society, church and geopolitics that fear the future and fear vulnerability and fear what compassion for others might require of us—power structures that so often form the scaffolding of our very identities and leave us unable to grow and mature. It is one of the greatest mistakes of Christianity to see what Paul is talking about in terms of biological death and life after death. These are merely the vehicles of a metaphor articulating a dynamic that takes place in the ordinariness of our lived lives, in our experience of transformation and liberation. The church has hijacked this powerful language of personal and social transformation that lies so deeply in the heart of Scripture and literalised it as palliative assurance to the emotionally vulnerable at the time of funerals, and, as a consequence, severely impoverished the spiritual life of its people. When Paul says, verse 11, “If the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his spirit that dwells in you” (my emphasis). The real death Jesus died, after all, was the same death we die at our conversion, the death to sin: “The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God” (Romans 6.10). Death, for the baptised, is not something we either dread or anticipate in the future. For the Christian, death is located in the past. As the baptised, we can say, “I died” (Romans 7.10). This for me is a core theme in the Christian life, and so much works against us addressing it openly.

The opening of the parable of the sower in Matthew 13 always reminds me of the huge cottonwood tree that stood outside our house across the street from the church I served in Chicago. Once a year the entire neighbourhood was covered with its seeds—billions and billions (to quote Carl Sagan) of white downy little things carried on the hot summer air—a perfect image of the prodigality of God’s grace. But who understands God’s grace, and who can receive it? The inability of some to hear and see has been proverbial from the year zot, as Matthew indicates by quoting the words of the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 6.9). Those who can hear (i.e., whose lives are fertile ground for the seed) are described more clearly in the Beatitudes of Matthew 5. They are those whose spirits have been crushed, those who mourn and are not comforted, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, those who are peacemakers, the anawim. The very experience of brokenness, in other words, is a prime factor in being able to hear (and therefore receive) the grace of God that remains opaque to others. The “others” are those who for reasons of social position, power, wealth and so on lead them to so focus in upon themselves and the anxious preservation of their own securities that they remain deaf to the gospel call to let go and to allow God to be God. Those who grasp lose, those who let go for the sake of Christ gain.

Matthew throws in a verse that in Mark is part of a parable about stewardship: “For those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” Again, this needs to be read alongside the blessings of the Beatitudes, I think. In both Mark and Matthew this wisdom is about how unfair the gospel is, but in Matthew those who have been most blessed with wisdom are those at the bottom of the pile. In the upside down world of the gospel the voice of authority comes from below, from those who know what righteousness is because they have been denied it, and from the crucified, not, that is, from Caesar or from Pharaoh, the usual sources of authority. The wisdom of the parables has been denied to the clever.

Those who constitute poor soul for the gospel therefore are those whose life encumbrances make it virtually impossible for them to hear. They are poor stewards, unable to risk themselves in giving, and poor hearers of the Word. The seeds may be broadcast, but these seeds are pitched toward those who hold counter-values to the prevailing social order, which, like religion, always has this tendency toward a conservativism and resistance to change that guarantees oppression of the weak.

But it's not just politics we’re speaking of here. I had a conversation with a lovely young woman at a party a few weeks ago that lead to a question about what books we liked to read. Her favourites were those personal motivation books I see dominating the shelves at the airport W. H. Smiths shop. It came out later that her mother had died a couple of years ago, and that she was still struggling with this, and that she and her mother had both expected her mother to get better even at the last moment of an obviously terminal illness. I thought to myself as I listened how typical this young woman must be in representing the anxieties Matthew is so concerned about in his gospel, and how her anxieties are encouraged by being surrounded by a culture that pushes us to be all we can be without limits. Read The Fat Jesus by Lisa Isherwood. We can’t hear the gospel because we are possessed by the culture we live in.

A few years ago, thinking about my looming retirement (this coming January), I responded to a programme the county council was running giving free training to those who might wish to start up a business. I had a few interviews with an advisor in the programme. He saw the business of business as an ideology, and saw the church as the great enemy. The best thing about life was to get there first and climb to the top of the pile. He had no use for Fair Trade or Fair Trade, let along our work with destitute asylum seekers or other marginalised people like the gays and lesbians our open and affirming policy attempts to serve. It struck me how business damages people, and why there are so few business people in our churches today, whereas back in the fifties, when culture and church were more congenial bedfellows, we had plenty of business people in church. I believe it is still this way, in certain churches, back in my home country.

And then of course there is all this resistance to women bishops in the Church of England. What are the cultural factors that lead so may people to think this way? Who can explain the misogyny and the homophobia and the biblical literalism championed by the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans?

In any case, there are multiple factors that lead the seeds to fall on infertile soil, and most of them have to do with the cultures in which we live and move and have our being. The gospel teaches us to break free, with the spirit that raised Christ from the dead, because at the end of the day these concerns that cause us to be deaf to the gospel are the sources of sin and death, in the Pauline sense of those words.

A final comment on Matthew 13 is that while Mark ended this story celebrating the superabundance of the harvest from the good soil, Mathew gives a variety of yields, a hundred, sixty, thirty-fold. Life is complex. Not even the good soil will give you consistent results.

Proper 9 A

2008-07-03T13:47:00.000-07:00

Genesis 24.34-38, 42-49, 58-67;
Matthew 11.16-19, 25.30

John, in prison, wants to know what the Messiah is up to. He sends his disciples to find out. Jesus invites them to see what is happening. At the end of our reading, Jesus says wisdom is made known by its results, and the results, in this case, are the fruits of the kingdom: the lame walk, the deaf hear, lepers are healed, the dead are raised and the poor for once hear some good news.

The idea that wisdom is known by its results connects the idea of wisdom with the idea of prophecy in a very useful way. The true prophet, for instance, the one who actually speaks with the Lord’s voice, is the prophet whose words come true (Deuteronomy 18.22). The connection of prophecy to wisdom illuminates both traditions. Wisdom, with God at the creation, speaks out of the depth and purpose of what is. So does the prophet. And the prophet speaks in the name of God to make judgements and promises accordingly. I think of Jeremiah and Hananiah hammering it out over which one is really speaking the word of the Lord (Jeremiah 28.15). Which one has the greater wisdom?

The story that comes to my mind will not be familiar to British readers of this blog (if, indeed, there are any readers whatsoever!). When I was in my late teens and young adult years (1960-1968, a long, long time ago) The Andy Griffith Show was a weekly series on television telling the adventures of a dependable, level-headed small town sheriff named Andy Taylor (played by Andy Griffith). In American culture, the small town sheriff, like the small town mayor, is the epitome of wisdom. Andy’s role in each episode of the series was to straighten out the madcap, comic complexities brought on by the rest of the show’s characters, his son Opie, his maiden Aunt Bee and particularly his deputy, Barney Fife, played by Don Knotts. Week after week Sheriff Taylor is obliged to restore a community to order that has been rendered chaotic by Fife’s seemingly endless professional gaffes and social faux-pas. Sheriff Taylor’s homespun wisdom represents to me the best of the prophetic tradition. His typical response to Fife’s latest hare-brained scheme is to say, “I just don’t think that’s going to work around here, Barn.” This was the model of wisdom that was imparted to me by Harvey Lord in my internship at University Church in Hyde Park, Chicago Harvey said a pastor has to be like the typical small town mayor who knows the people and knows what is going to work and what is not going to work. That’s the way it was with Sheriff Taylor in The Andy Griffith Show. He was the prophet who could tell ahead of time what was going to work and what wasn’t.

In the biblical wisdom tradition, of course, we have the added factor that wisdom connects with the mind of God, to use a convenient anthropomorphic metaphor. It’s deep stuff. It involves understanding our scriptural heritage on the deepest level of significance and knowing the opposition as well. It involves a grasp of politics and an appreciation of the critical aspects of the historical moment. There may be an element of mania, but if prophetic mania is all we have, we wind up with prophets like Barney Fife when what we need is one like Sheriff Taylor.

Sheriff Taylor is not only able to predict what will happen if Barney Fife has his way. He is an agent in the plot—not just an observer. He sorts out the mess, recovering stability and order in the community. On a more serious level, this is Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. The figure of the community doctor often took this role in medieval literature. In the New Testament we have Jesus. His wisdom is known by its results. Wisdom, like good prophecy, doesn’t just speak of what will be. Wisdom makes things happen.

And what does happen? The lame walk, the deaf hear, lepers are healed, the dead are raised and the poor for once hear some good news—this is the standard formulaic way of saying the kingdom has arrived. But specifically, it means a party atmosphere has descended on this place. This is pure celebration. In the presence of Jesus, unlike John, fasting is impossible (Matthew 9.14-15). Jesus is the bridegroom, and through him the world becomes a wedding feast. This, too, cues in the messianic age in richly traditional language, and connects the gospel reading with the story of Isaac and Rebecca in our Old Testament reading. Blessing, in Hebrew Scripture, is the joyful fecundity celebrated in the coming together of men and women. In Genesis the image of God resides in men and women together. As for Adam and Eve, try reading Matthew Fox to understand this story as original blessing alongside the more familiar story of original sin. The story of Noah and his wife (Jewish tradition calls her Naamah) is all about blessing. The Abraham and Sarah story is all about blessing, as is the story of Isaac and Rebecca and Jacob and Rachel. In the light of these stories of original blessing, we need to see the stories that show how we get it wrong, like the story in Judges 19 that begins, "And the Levite took unto himself a concubine...." In the early monarchy David's adulterous affair with Bathsheba and the multitude of wives and concubines that lead Solomon to idolatry are to be seen as betrayals of this original blessing that will prefigure national collapse in the Babylonian exile. This dark, self-critical seam runs throughout the biblical narrative as a confession of primal betrayal. But that is another story. I digress.

The point is, there is something about wedding feasts and human fertility that connects centrally to the Hebrew vision of life with God, and this is the whole substructure of the tradition of the messianic banquet in subsequent prophetic tradition (well, some of the Patriarch narratives may be commenting on the prophetic vision, rather than vice versa).

There are always kill-joys who will not respond to anything. Enthusiastic children in the marketplace get frustrated because they play their flutes but their friends will not dance. They wail, but no one will weep. This, complains Jesus, is the story the world over. It is the kind of block-headed insensitivity to life that puts the bean-counting bureaucrats in charge of the churches and gets the visionaries crucified. But at the same time, everywhere, there are those who have enough wisdom to prophesy and there are others who are sensitive, or in need enough, to get the point, and weep tears that can neither be defined as tears purely of joy or purely of grief. They are both. At the consummation, at the wedding feast of the Lamb, and at the crucifixion, which is the same thing, the world's deepest joy and the world's deepest sorrow meet, and this is the kingdom. Barney Fife will never understand this. But Andy Taylor will tell you that this is where the best in human solidarity passes its test, and brings on great celebration. And this is what the Messiah is up to, even today. Go tell John the Baptist what you have seen and heard.

Proper 8 A

2008-06-24T15:53:00.000-07:00

The tension in the Abraham and Isaac story (Genesis 22.1-9) is intensified by the spareness of the narrative. Abraham gives no word of consent to God’s command that he slaughter his son. Abraham gives no acknowledgement, neither yes nor no. He simply saddles his ass and prepares for the three day journey to Mount Moria. Abraham’s silence is only broken by his instructions to the two servants who have accompanied him. Wait here, he tells them. He and Isaac will shortly return. But Abraham believes he will return alone. He thinks he is keeping the servants from knowing the whole picture. We know that it is Abraham who doesn’t know the whole picture.

As Abraham and Isaac walk off together up the mountain, the silence is broken once again, this time by Isaac. Where is the sheep for the sacrifice, he asks his father. Again Abraham hides what he knows. God will provide, he says. And again, it is Abraham who doesn’t know.

Abraham prepares an altar, ties up his son, lays him across the firewood and reaches for his knife. Curiously, all this again happens in silence. The narrative is not interested in what Isaacx may be “feeling” or whether or not he is crying out. This is a story about Abraham. Abraham alone is the focus.

An angel of Yahweh calls his name, Abraham! Abraham! Abraham answers as he had to the voice of God in the beginning. Here I am. Yes. Abraham is told to lay down the knife, for God has seen how dedicated he is. A ram is provided for the sacrifice, and Abraham is promised once again that his descendents will be as numerous as the stars in the skies and the sands of the seashore.

This bare, skeletal narrative of the Abraham and Isaac story won’t allow us to ask the kind of questions today’s reader might like to ask, questions about the horrors of such blind, unquestioning obedience, for instance. This is no psychological novel.

We need to look elsewhere for meaning. This is the Abraham who proved his faith by leaving family behind in Mesopotamia in order to become the father of a new family. The definition of his life is gripped in paradox. Accordingly, here, the son who embodies this promise of countless descendents in future generations is being taken up to Mount Moria to be sacrificed. Again, Abraham must prove he is the one who will be blessed by offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky by his willingness to sacrifice his “only” son. To make an analogy with the gospel, those who seek to gain their lives will lose them, Jesus says. Those who lose them for his sake will gain them. This is the mystery we are confronting on Mount Moria. Despite the vividness of this narrative, it is not a psychological thriller, but the explication of a paradox as old as the hills. Those who die will live. Those who, like Abraham, empty themselves in selfless hospitality gain. Those who withhold hospitality (the sin of Sodom) lose. The meaning of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice the single means of God’s promise coming true for him is the same meaning we saw in his selfless hospitality. Here we meet the paradox in its starkest form, and in the paradoxical journey away from family to become a family.

The gospel (Matthew 10) has said that anyone who subordinates the demands of discipleship to family is “not worthy” of Jesus. Likewise, in the reading for this Sunday disciples who are willing to risk rejection, hatred, even death in order to bring the truth of Christ to the ends of the world are welcomed not for themselves but for this Jesus who sent them; and, ultimately, they welcome the presence of the one who sent Jesus. The mystery is the same: those who die will live. Our discipleship makes our lives transparent to the presence of God. That is life. When our lives become opaque, that is death. But through baptism we have moved from death to life.

When Paul says (Romans 6.23) that the wages of sin are death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord, he picks up this paradox. Death, here, is something you have to work for, a life of burdens, slavery to weariness. Life, on the other hand, is liberating and free. The real death Jesus died was a death to sin (Romans 6.10). We are invited to see ourselves, in our discipleship, as dead to sin and alive to Christ (Romans 6.11). Eternal life is what the Gospel of John says it is: knowing God and knowing Jesus Christ, whom he has sent (John 17.3). It has to do with hospitality, the capacity to empty ourselves in imitation of Christ, discipleship. The invitation is to a way of living, not to pie in the sky when you die, as the song says.

Proper 7 A

2008-06-19T01:01:00.000-07:00

Genesis 21.8-21, Matthew 10.24-39.

This is Refugee Week. Sarah, jealous for Isaac of Abraham’s son by the Egyptian slave Hagar, demands that Hagar and the child be banished. Abraham obeys, even while he is full of regret. In Islamic tradition, all this comes as a command from God, not Sarah, by the way. Hagar and her son Ishmael (Ismael in Arabic) go out into the wilderness of Be’er Sheva to die.

One agenda excludes another. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, he doesn’t come bringing peace, but conflict. His agenda must have priority, and so it is with the promise to Abraham and Sarah. So the story of Hagar’s exile informs not only the stories told by the many displaced people seeking asylum in our world today and their vulnerability. It also informs what is perhaps the primary conflict of our time, the conflict between the sons of Abraham, the Jewish/Christian community and the Moslem East. Ismael is the father of the Arabs.

The story is concrete and contemporary. I thought of Ismael’s exile the other day when I was speaking with an Iraqi man we know, a failed asylum seeker living in destitution, shunned by the people he is living among because his story is not their story. When he came to this country nine years ago asylum seekers were allowed to work, and he had landed a job with Royal Mail working in a local post office. But then the immigration authorities changed the rules. He was no longer allowed to work, and had to live instead on the meagre allowance given to those who were seeking asylum. But even that support has been exhausted, and as he awaits an appeal of his failed petition, he lives off the good will of friends and acquaintances, the Refugee Council and our church. I thought he was beginning to look quite emaciated. We arranged to give him a lift to Birmingham, where someone he knows may have a place for him to live as he awaits the appeal. We gave him a fiver—all we had—and he wept. Here is the living Ismael, exiled to the wilderness because there is no room for his story in the mainstream story the rest of us were living by.

The meaning of the Genesis story is that God’s concerns are always bigger than ours. No matter how you interpret the inheritance of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, it’s still a tribal thing, a story that excludes, something by nature partial and incomplete. The author of what we are reading is deeply aware of this, and shows God’s care for the excluded. God brings water to the wilderness for Hagar and her son, and promises that the child will become the father of a great nation. There is a tension between tribalism and universalism here that runs like a bright thread throughout Israel’s troubled history. Israel’s literature is acutely aware of the larger narrative, and acutely aware of its own ambivalent position (even though the same cannot always be said about the Zionist ideology of Israel as a modern state). Today at a conference called "Fear, Democracy and Religion" (the third in a series here in Wales bringing Christian and Muslim leaders together in dialogue), Robin Morrison, Church and Society advisor for the Church in Wales (Anglican), said "My trust in God ends when I think I can erect the boundaries of my faith and police them." My trust needs to be in a God that is bigger than anything I believe. If I erect doctrinal limits to God, I am in sin. And yet I cannot avoid speaking of God in language that is limited and culture specific. The Abraham and Hagar story teaches us the pain of this paradox.

The gospel reading from Matthew 10 provides profound commentary on this Genesis story. This conclusion to the discourse on sending the twelve brings home the central good news in Matthew that the sending of the twelve into the world parallels the sending of Christ into the world, a mission to those in peril by one who himself began life as a refugee, a mission to the lost, the harassed, to those whose spirits have been crushed, who hunger and thirst for righteousness. The concern is no longer tribal. It reaches back to Israel’s incipient self-critical universalism to become a mission to “the ends of the earth”, with a God that is the God of both Isaac and Ismael.

We recall last week’s reading, in which Jesus (the Lamb of God) sees his own harassed people as sheep without a shepherd, and sends the twelve to them as sheep among the sheep, as lambs as vulnerable to the menace of the wolves as those they are sent to. Jesus himself has pioneered the way, “numbered among the transgressors”, as Isaiah said. The twelve should not think of themselves as immune from the kind of suffering Jesus endured. Those who read the Gospel of Matthew already know the basic story, of course, and here the cross is mentioned for the first time in this gospel. The path of discipleship is the way of the cross. If Jesus was called the devil incarnate, they will be, too. It’s no easy street, but Jesus says don’t let them get to you. Peacemakers must learn to immerse themselves in the conflict their vision of justice for the dispossessed generates among those wed to the status quo. No truth worth telling is without conflict, and it must be spoken openly and courageously.

The mystery behind the sending of the twelve as unprotected lambs in the midst of such conflict is the mystery of the incarnation itself. What the incarnation attempts to teach through symbolic narrative, “myth”, if you will, is just this sense of being “sent” into a world of conflict, born into a world where Herod’s soldiers are out to get you, or, as Luke would have it, where there is no hospitality at the inn. The incarnation is a metaphor of our own vocation as disciples to put flesh on the Word of God through action and engagement among the excluded. The mission to the “ends of the earth” undertaken at the end of this gospel is not to be understood as expansionist empire building in the way monotheistic religions can too often operate, as if all the values pursued throughout this gospel were suddenly thrown away at the end, but a going out in solidarity with the lost sheep and with those like Ismael who find themselves in exile, or to those who are crushed in spirit, those who mourn, the anawim of the Beatitudes. This is the way of the cross, the new life into which we who have died with Christ are reborn in our baptism.

Proper 6 A

2008-06-11T03:52:00.000-07:00

Genesis 18.1-15, Matthew 9.35-10.23. The mysteries behind our lessons for this Sunday are almost unbearably deep. First of all, the three visitors receiving the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18 are also God in some strange and ambiguous way. They are addressed in verse 3 as “my Lord” (adonai), a word with neither gender nor number, which is either a term for God or a general term of respect. Later in the story, “the Lord” appears to be one of the three, as the other two travel off on their own to visit Lot in Sodom. The three certainly constitute a divine presence—and we remember our favourite Orthodox icon of the Trinity depicting these three. In any case, God in Hebrew thinking seems to have had a plural dimension.

We can imagine, in the light of the Matthew story, these three visitors sent to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God. They are bringing news of an unexpected inbreaking future. The hospitality factor is crucial. The hospitality is a present reality revealing and anticipating the promised future. In India they have this popular yet profound saying, that “the guest is God”. In Calvinism we have a different saying, “letting God be God”, which has to do with God’s sovereign authority. The Hindu saying is much more relevant to this Sunday’s lessons. The godness of God is somehow connected to the hospitality of the host, which, in a sense, allows God to happen. God is more of a verb than a noun, more of a relationship at least than a something. For the Calvinist the godness of God happens when the believer becomes open to conversion, but such moments of conversion are never genuine unless that include concrete acts of hospitality to ordinary others, both stranger and neighbour. The guest is God. Calvin himself would have understood this. For him the foundation of all theology was an understanding of God unavailable apart from the understanding of self, and the self could never be understood without understanding God. Scholastic Calvinism post-Synod of Dort loses this tension, as do the Barthian neo-orthodox, who put too much weight on God and lose the human dimension altogether. God becomes so removed and abstracted from human experience that he becomes an irrelevant cipher, the sort of thing people like Don Cupit and the God-is-dead movement people used to enjoy writing about. I think the Arminians, defeated at Dort, came closer to maintaining that original tension between God and human experience. Oh dear, I fear I am getting much too academic here. Let's go back to the readings.

The link between the Matthew reading and the Genesis reading is not hospitality as such but failed hospitality. Matthew 10.15 warns that for those who refuse hospitality to the twelve the judgement will be worse than for Sodom and Gomorrah, the story immediately following the Abraham and Sarah episode. You will remember that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was the inhospitable reception of the two men who had come to visit Lot, a story that is basically the same story we read in the story of the Levite and his concubine at the end of Judges. Current scholarly opinion is that the Judges story is the earlier of the two. Both stories show that the culture of hospitality so deep seated in the Near East even today is no final virtue. As the Levite gives the crowd his concubine to gang rape, so Lot offers his two (betrothed!) virgin daughters, only to be held back from doing so by the heavenly visitors, who then obliterate Sodom and Gomorrah. Hospitality can be problematic. The promise needs to be bigger than ordinary human convention.

In Matthew of course the story of failed hospitality seems to reflect the trials and persecutions experienced by the early Christian community that constituted his readership. Jesus sends the twelve out as sheep among wolves. Augustine comments that this is a brilliant move. The common strategy is to send out wolves among sheep and, indeed, the well-meaning predatory manipulation of a vulnerable public that passes for evangelical strategy in today’s world tells us what Augustine is talking about. Don’t leave conversions to accident, the professional evangelists say. It is amazing how so many consultants in church growth have adopted the theories and methods of modern marketing. They ought to read Jacques Ellul's book, Propaganda. Ellul's chilling account of how we communicate and how churches have adopted the communication strategies of the business community warns that you cannot adopt the media of communication without adopting the predatory ideology. It comes as a package, and we are kidding ourselves if we think we can separate the two. Most contemporary evangelism operates as wolves among sheep. Jesus wants us to throw off the power evangelism and operate as sheep among wolves.

The twelve are sent empty handed and without resources, vulnerable enough to evoke a spirit of hospitality in anyone with any human sensitivity, and thus enable the God-event to happen. Their unaccomodated journey is stripped not only of its survival kit but of the trappings of office and authority abandoned in the very journey of incarnation, an existential emptiness that, as in King Lear, enables us to touch the deepest dimension of being human, and, so, open to the hospitality of others. This, at the end of the day, is mission in reverse. We allow those we meet to enable the God-event to happen through their hospitality and our capacity to be guests in their presence. Thus the good news, so unexpected and so miraculous that it brought laughter to old Sarah, is experienced when the missionary is able to listen and so confer dignity and authority upon the host. The genius is to be sent as sheep among wolves. This is the way of the cross. It can change the world.

It is interesting to observe that "sheep" occur three times in this reading. First, Jesus describes the harassed and helpless crowd as being "like sheep without a shepherd" (9.36). Second, the twelve are sent to "the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (10.6), to those Jesus has observed in their harassed and helpless state, but specifically to their particular socio-political situation--not to just anyone, as if the good news had some kind of bland, generic applicability to just anyone. And third, the twelve themselves are to contextualize themselves in the very harassed, helpless world of those who will become their hosts. They are to go"like sheep" into the midst of wolves (10.16). They will have no more protection, no more status than those they are being sent to. This is the gospel narrative in little, isn't it? It also repeats the narrative of the Exodus, in which Yahweh sees the oppression of the Hebrews and sends Moses to deliver them. The same promise, "I will be with you", is repeated in this story: "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me" (10.40). The guest is God. Christ 'R' Us.

Proper 4 A

2008-05-28T02:02:00.000-07:00

“Be doers of the word,” we read in James, “and not merely hearers.” That well-known verse from James summarises what we get here in Matthew at the end of the Sermon on the Mount.

I spent last summer writing a course called “Introduction to Christianity as a way of life”. It ran for two months in the autumn. If I had the energy, I would lay it on again this year, but there is just too much going on right now. I think I will recruit someone else to run it.

The course was motivated not just because of my growing conviction that Christianity is far more than a set of beliefs. The motivation also came from a concrete experience early in my ministry. Here’s the story: Mike Sugano and his wife became members of the first church I served, in Chicago. They’d come to St James as many other young adults had, as something like refugees from the narrowness of an otherwise thriving, large evangelical church, looking for something more solid to bite on and for more social action. Mike had literally been converted on a streetcorner. When he and his wife divorced, he naturally found much of his emotional support in his family and in the Chicago Japanese community—Mike worked for a family firm, and he was the only Christian there. So it was no surprise to me when he started attending the Chicago Buddhist temple. Gyomay Kubose, along with his son a friend of mine, was the founder of this community and the leader there.

It was good for Mike to return to his roots. What bothered me was something he said when he came to me one day, and, sitting in my office, explained to me how important this was and what it meant to him. Christianity, he said, was a way of believing, while Buddhism was a way of life. I winced. That wasn't the way it was supposed to be. But that, by and large, was the way it was. And I recognised this as coming from Kubose, too, as Kubose had his arguments with Buddhists who practised a merely cultural form of Buddhism, attending temple and reciting sutras, the kind of religious practice Jesus is complaining about here in those who attempt to ingratiate themselves by crying “Lord! Lord!” Buddhism needs to be a personal, disciplined way of life, Kubose would say, and that is what he taught. But I would argue the same for Christianity.

I could see very clearly what Mike meant. The problem is spelled out right here in this Sunday’s gospel reading, Matthew 7.21-29. Mike had come to us from a Christian community in which “belief” was all important, and in which backsliding seemed to be the greatest sin (one did not dare to doubt these beliefs, therefore). And he had come into a community whose young pastor hadn’t quite got his bearings yet, and a mainline Presbyterian church that was itself only beginning to discover its convictions and its commitment to act on them. We were learning together. In general, I thought, Mike was right about Christianity. Christianity was pretty much being practiced as a set of things to believe in. If you accepted them, you were in. If not, you were out. Liberals, to the great annoyance of the evangelicals, bonded together in the exhilarating freedom of doubt, but often without the further pursuit of taking the next step toward understanding, and without the concomitant commitment to growing in discipleship, or action. The mainline church did not easily find the strength to rise from the miasmal swamp of rummage sales and pot-luck suppers and meetings dominated by concern for membership decline. In any case, belief can’t just be faith seeking understanding, even if, against the odds, it should get that far. Faith needs to grow in understanding, but it also needs fulfillment in action, in discipleship, as a way of life, or it is no faith at all. This option just wasn’t being made available to people, generally, in American mainline Christianity. The practice of Christianity actually seemed to mitigate against what it had to offer people. Sadly, Mike was largely correct. I couldn’t argue against him. The Christianity he knew was a way of belief, not a way of life.

So I was determined from that moment on to explore this whole business of Christianity as the way of life that was itself the foundation of what we professed as belief. The heart of Christianity, for me, is an act, not a set of words. It is that act explicated in the biblical idea of pouring out the self for others (or for God, which is the same thing), which is a new way of life different from a life that is ego-dominated and clings for its security to the false god Mammon. This new way of life is symbolised most perspicuously by the cross. It is an act that demands an Exodus-like departure from social/political structures that are inauthentic, oppressive or crippling, and often requires actual re-location. It is an act that responds to being “called out”. The “ekklesia” therefore (the assembly of those who have been called out) is the community that acts, and the new life in Christ we discover in the way of the cross involves a discovery of new, deeper identity more original than before, an identity formation that is practised as an experience of individuation, but an identity that is fundamentally social. The way of the cross leads to that community of three crosses that expresses the crucifixion not as death in isolation but as life in community, and richly so, in contrast to those who did a runner. The end of the process, “salvation”, is no other worldly affair, nor is it an individual affair. The idea of taking Jesus Christ as one’s personal saviour mocks the invitation to become fundamentally and inextricably engaged with the world around us. Salvation is life together. The cross, therefore, becomes a way of life, resurrection, a re-defining of life and death. The Christian life includes this readiness to empty oneself, to “die”, as it were, without fear of letting go. Those who seek to save their lives will lose them, Jesus says. Ordinary piety never seems to grasp this, and prefers to focus on the promise that, if we believe as we are told, death doesn’t really happen. It is amazing how what goes contrary to Christianity’s fundamental message can become its central orthodoxy.

Too many churches put the emphasis on believing in the symbols and the metaphors on a literal level, symbols and metaphors that are meant to release the Christian from an old way of life and propel us into the way of the cross. An awful lot of Christian orthodoxy still clings to the old securities, too anxious to let go of the ego. Our common human fears are too strong to allow us to respond to the invitation Jesus is giving to live as he lived and do what he did, without fear of death. Churches that fear to proclaim the gospel in this way are churches that have built their houses on sand. They comfort us by saying we don’t have to fear death because death, for Christians, isn’t real. But comfort is cruel if it is a lie. The story of death overcome in scripture is the story of life that lives on a stronger foundation than the anxiety of its on non-being.

On judgement day (to use a compelling poetic image central to biblical literature), Jesus will say he doesn’t know those who attempt to ingratiate themselves to him by calling out “Lord! Lord!” “Knowing” in biblical languages is no mere intellectual affair of the mind. It is an engagement of the whole person, as in the physical act of love making. The late OT scholar Bob Boling used to say it was the Hebrew Hokey Pokey: you put your whole self in. The threat of rejection may seem cruel, until we realize tht this is simply telling, in story form, the condition that exists when the nominal Christian has never truly known Jesus through the life experience of doing, through discipleship, through taking this leap beyond the boundaries of ordinary securities to live without fear engaged with the prayers of the world around you. That’s what it means to know Jesus. And if you don’t know Jesus, well, you don’t know Jesus. All the classic spiritual disciplines are here to introduce us, but for some reason we just haven’t found it important to practise them.

The Sermon on the Mount concludes with the observation that Jesus teaches with authority, not as the scribes. The Greek word for authority, "exousia", is usually translated as "power". It is related to the word for "being", and means power or authority in terms of the freedom to do or create according to one's own autonomous being. The plural form, "powers", relates to governmental authority. The authority of Jesus as the power to act is thus distinguished from the authority of the scribes, whose role is to preserve every jot and tittle of what has been received from the past. What the scribes offer is a kind of paint-by-the-numbers form of discipleship, in which the best disciples are those who do not paint outside the lines. Such mind-numbing pedagogy abhors the kind of self-assurance that can say, "You have heard it said. . . . but I say unto you".

By contrast, Jesus teaches by inviting his disciples to learn through doing, and he promises that they will do even greater things than he does. What disciples do is critical, not what they repeat or what they believe of what has been received. They will be doers of the word, and not merely hearers.

Proper 3 A

2008-05-22T06:23:00.000-07:00

Our reading for this Sunday concludes a section of the Sermon on the Mount focussing on hypocrisy which needs a brief overview in order to open up the “not to worry” business at the end of chapter 6. The section begins with a critique of the hypocritical giving that is more motivated by concern for the reputation of the giver than it is by any concern for those in need. Giving should be done in total secrecy: “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” J. J. Hunsecker, the corrupt, duplicitous gossip columnist played by Burt Lancaster in The Sweet Smell of Success, has an endearingly cynical variation on this: “My right hand hasn't seen my left hand in thirty years.”

Prayer can be equally hypocritical, done for show as the Gentiles do, heaping up phrases that, however poetic and artfully crafted, are empty. The model of prayer given here is not just prayer that is private, but prayer that seeks, primarily, to transform the life of the one praying, as opposed to seeking to manipulate the will of the deity.

Instruction on fasting follows a similar concern about hypocrisy. Fasting should not be done as a public display. Those who do fast in this way have already received their reward, Jesus says. I presume this means they have achieved the kind of recognition they have desired by drawing attention to themselves in a way that builds a public reputation. Fasting in secret ensures that the relationship will be between the one who fasts and God alone. The “reward” that comes from the Father then is that close relationship itself that makes possible the transformed heart, the proper intention of fasting, and a reward similar to the fruit of prayer in the will of God being done in the faithful disciple.

The next bit, concerning the storing up of earthly treasure, extends this exploration of hypocrisy to our relationship with material things and exposes the root of hypocrisy in the anxiety for the security of the self. The common wisdom is that the self will be made secure by the accumulation of things. Along with prayers and fasting that focus on the self, we engage in shopping therapy. The need to prevail that drives our game-theory economy and brings super bonuses to City executives reveals the raw spiritual nerve of hypocrisy. The focus on the self, the need to succeed and dominate one’s world, the fear of failure, the fear of death, all this interprets the life that finds its security in building up worldly treasure.

So when we come to this Sunday’s gospel reading, Matthew 6.25-34, we see the observation that one cannot serve two masters, God and Mammon, in the light of this warning against hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is defined as existential anxiety dressed in the clothing of the classic spiritual disciples. It won’t wash, though it probably defines the way an awful lot of Christians practise their faith. You can’t pursue a life of faith with the goal of security for the self. That’s what the wisdom of the Sermon on the Mount teaches.

Our reading is a summary of the concerns that have come before. Hypocrisy as a form of human behaviour is like irony in literature—saying or doing one thing and meaning another. Here in this Sunday’s reading the story of hypocrisy hints at an undercurrent of social criticism. That Solomon in all this glory was not clothed as magnificently as the lilies of the field is no simple comparison between manufactured and natural beauty. This is what we know about Solomon:

1 Kings 4.22: Solomon’s provision for one day was thirty cors of choice flour, and sixty cors of meal, ten fat oxen, and twenty pasture-fed cattle, one hundred sheep, besides deer, gazelles, roebucks and fatted fowl.

How about that for a cure of existential anxiety? And at what human cost did Solomon live in such luxury? Read on:

1 Kings 9.15: This is the account of the forced labour that King Solomon conscripted to build the House of the Lord . . . . and whatever [he] desired to build, in Jerusalem, in Lebanon and in all the land of his dominion. All the people who were left of the Ammorites, the Hitites, the Perissites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, who were not of the people of Israel—their descendeants who were left in the land, whom Israel were unable to destroy completely—these Solomon conscripted for slave labour and so they are to this day.

So “Solomon in all his glory” is no ordinary citation of your standard manufactured, as opposed to natural beauty. Solomon comes laden with all the prophetic critique of his reign implied in the Deuteronomic history of 1 Kings.

Moreover, this Sermon on the Mount is revisionist wisdom literature, still following here, I think, the spirit of “You have heard it said to those of ancient times . . . . But I say to you. . . ” Solomon was noted for his wisdom as well as his wealth (1 Kings 4.29: “God gave Solomon very great wisdom . . ..so that Solomon’s wisdom surpassed all the wisdom of the east, and all the wisdom of Egypt”). IN contrast to the observations of natural history and human behaviour, the kind of lore that was the substance of aristocratic education throughout the ancient Near East, the wisdom of Jesus will not necessarily enable you to rule or even get a job. What Jesus offers is something far more fundamental: the wisdom of a godly life. In contrast, the entire cultural foundation of Solomon’s world, and ours, looks like hypocrisy.

The Gentiles, says Jesus, seek the kind of wisdom that enables them to pile up earthly treasure, food, drink, clothing, things, in the manner of Solomon. This only leads to further anxiety, and, ultimately, to the kind of defeat and exile described in the Deuteronomic history as it unfolds from the story of Solomon to the end of 2 Kings.

The true voice of wisdom in the Sermon on the Mount is defined by the voices of those who are celebrated in the Beatitudes that set the foundation of the Sermon on the Mount. In the Beatitudes, it is the meek who will inherit the earth (this verse is actually paired with the teaching here on possessions in the chiastic structure of the Sermon on the Mount). This verse of the Beatitudes is quoting Psalm 37.11, “The meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace” where the word for “meek” in Hebrew is “anawim”, the poor, the weak, the afflicted—the word Jesus would have used in in the Beatitudes in its Aramaic form. Those who will inherit the kingdom are the “poor in spirit”, more properly those who are “crushed” in spirit, those who are forced to beg—the opposite of the Solomons of this world who inhabit lists like the Fortune 500.

Probably the most important development of this line of thinking has been in Korean Minjung theology that emerged in South Korea in the 1970s, and, according to its authors, is "a development of the political hermeneutics of the Gospel in terms of the Korean reality," not easily exported as its contextualisation arises from specific Korean experiences of suffering. But a Korean hymn we will be singing this Sunday opens up its story for the ordinary British Christian:

Look and learn from the birds of the air,
Flying high above worry and fear;
Neither sowing nor harvesting seed,
Yet they're given whatever they need.
If the God of earth and heaven cares for birds such as this,
Won't he care much more for you when you put your trust in him?

Look and learn from the flowers of the field,
Bringing beauty and colour to life;
Neither sewing nor tailoring cloth,
Yet they're dressed in the finest attire.
If the God of earth and heaven
Cares for flowers as much as this,
Won't he care much more for you when you put your trust in Him?

What God wants should be our will;
Where God calls should be our goal.
When we seek the kingdom first,
All we've lost is ours again.
Let's be done with anxious thoughts,
Set aside tomorrow's cares,
Live each day that God provides putting all your trust in him.

Words: Nah Young Soo.

Another lovely song, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God” can lead disastrously in the wrong direction. Like the anthems of a lot of contemporary piety, it seems to encourage the practice of praying for a wish list and a model of faith that is geared to health and wealth. Keep in mind what happens if we reverse the terms of the hymn. If we seek first “all these things”—will the kingdom of God be added unto us? What exactly is our attitude to “all these things” to be? The key is that seeking first the kingdom of God creates a proper understanding of what actually is needed in a life that is not centred on the self and its security, but on God.

Trinity A

2008-05-14T05:20:00.000-07:00

When I was a school governor in Birmingham I went with the kids on a tour of the Central Mosque. Our guide made it clear that Moslems didn’t believe in three gods, but one. I would imagine that the Trinity does look very odd from the outside. Sometimes it looks odd from inside Christianity as well. I have a Lego image of the Trinity ordered from The Brick Testament (http://www.thebricktestament.com/), three plastic figures legoed onto a plastic stand: an old white-bearded man in a robe, a young bearded man and a third figure looking like Casper the ghost. I’ve never been able to figure out if The Brick Testament takes this seriously or thinks it is a joke.

There are all sorts of ways to think about the Trinity and I have probably preached on them all over the years. What interests me at the moment as Trinity Sunday looms on the horizon is the immanence of God in what Paul (2 Corinthians 13.14) calls the fellowship (koinonia) of the Holy Spirit.

The third person of the Trinity is not an objective thing capable of representation in Lego. It is a dimension of the faithful community as subject in its experience of God’s presence. It is the godliness of the faithful community—the community that proclaims its devotion in service as well as hymn singing. Its prayers are never separated from its compassion for the broken and excluded. Its common life is shaped by God’s presence in its faithfulness.

Though this concept of God’s presence in the faithful community is a Christian concept, it is deeply embedded in the Jewish idea of God “tenting” with the people of God, God living in the midst of the sojourning community as shekinah (שכינה). The presence is a dynamic presence. Without getting gnostic about it, God always feels a bit out of place in the world, as do those faithful disciples who are in the world but not, as the Gospel of John says, of the world. The fellowship of the Holy Spirit is a dynamic fellowship that finds its proper location in the world, engaged in specific locations and concrete historical moments as a matter of vocation, but being there in ways that drive toward re-location and new moments of history.

I was visiting a friend here in Wales and wanted to move from where I was sitting, and he used this quaint Welsh expression: "Stay where you're to!" The church is dead if it stays where it is to. It's whole reason for being where it is in the world, as a matter of vocation, is to move on. The model is Exodus and Exile, personal, social, political and institutional transformation. The church dedicated to preserving its past in formaldehyde is not Trinitarian.

Then there is the second person of the Trinity. This is “the Son”—but it is not simply “Jesus”, however much we want to identify the Son with the historical figure of Jesus. The mystery of the second person of the Trinity interprets all discipleship that embodies the life of Christ as its own. Trinitarian theology thus reminds us of the agenda of the biblical Jesus in calling his disciples to do what he did in mediating God to the world. “As the Father sent me,” he says in the Gospel of John, “I send you.” In John we are born again as sons and daughters of God (John 1.10-12). In Mark and in Paul we are witnesses to the resurrection through our own death and rebirth in conversion. The agenda of discipleship is to embody Christ in daily life and thus embody God just as the Messiah does. The mystery of the incarnation, at the end of the day, is the mystery of our own conversion. In faith, we come off our perches as servants and lovers down into an ordinary world that is by turns exhilarating and painful. We put flesh on the Word in our discipleship. The incarnation isn’t just about Christmas. It’s about us, and it’s about every day in the real world.

So the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, lived out in discipleship, is, communally, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. God permeates human experience, wherever we let God in, in a process that transforms people and communities in ways that transform the world. Maybe that’s the difference between Christianity and Islam. I don’t know.

The love of God is that funny kind of love that is full of desire but is nevertheless not possessive or demanding. It is self-emptying. Christ “emptied himself” (kenosis, Philippians 2.7). It’s like wine being poured out at the Eucharistic feast, like costly perfume being poured out by the woman on Jesus himself (Mark 14.3), like the suffering servant who pours himself out to be numbered among the transgressors (Isaiah 53.12). The dynamic of the love of God is the dynamic of movement, of sending, the vocation of the Son kneeling in prayer in Gethsemane and the vocation of the community in the time of Wilberforce and in the time of Oscar Romero. What shall we do? Where will we stand? The idea of the Trinity is thus tied up with the vocation of the Christian to mediate and to embody the reconciling, justice-creating presence of God in the world.

The Trinitarian community recognizes God’s utter transcendence insofar as it is a community that lives unsettled, in hope. “You made us for yourself,” Augustine prayed, “and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” This prayer isn’t about the stress of life finding peace at last in death. Theologian Joe Sittler once said “Heaven is a metaphor for life with God”, and that life is a fellowship we strive toward here and now in the path of discipleship, isn’t it? As my wife likes to say, “Don’t give until it hurts; give until it feels good.” We know when we have arrived even if we know we can’t stay there long. The triangular diagram o f the Trinity illustrates this fundamental energy of tension and propulsion between transcendence and immanence, like the traffic of angels on Jacob’s ladder.

The Trinity is critical for Christian orthodoxy because it is critical for Christian orthopraxis, discipleship. We are commissioned in the name of the Trinity in baptism to this way of life, a way of life that makes the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit real in the world. Notice, for instance, that prior to the blessing Paul gives he is pressing home the way Christians ought to be living. “Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in the faith”, he says (2 Corinthians 13.5).

A final note on the lesson from Matthew for this Sunday: I don’t think the Trinitarian formula for baptism is original with Matthew. For one thing, t seems too early for the community to be baptising in the name of the Trinity as shorthand for orthodox Christian community. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, baptism itself just isn’t an important motif in Matthew, as it had been in Mark, for instance. If you take this bit out as something that had been added later, what you get is much more naturally a conclusion for a gospel that has been about instruction. Make disciples, passing on all I have taught you. Nevertheless, the immanence of God is present in human life in the assurance that, as we witness to continuing generation, God as Emmanuel is with us.

Pentecost A

2008-05-07T01:36:00.000-07:00

In John 20 Jesus breathes the gift of abundant life into his disciples as God imparted life into Adam—in Greek this is a pun, since “breath” and “spirit” are the same word. Jesus is giving them the gift of his own life, which they will live as they are sent even as the Father has sent Jesus.

But all this happens on the eve of Easter itself, as if, for John, Easter resurrection and Pentecost commissioning were the same thing. Luke puts the gift of the spirit on the Jewish Holiday of Pentecost (Shavu’ot, the Feast of Weeks, 50 days after Passover). Why? Perhaps it was to legitimate within the Jewish community what the Book of Acts shows to be essentially a Gentile phenomenon. In any case, the gift of the Spirit in Luke/Acts, with glossolalia and so on, is very different from the gift of the "Paraclete" in John, the continuing presence of Christ in the life of faithful discipleship--very different from the kind of charismatic experience we get in Luke.

Acts is largely a hagiographic account of the growth of the church through the Gentile community, a story in which the experience of charismatic phenomena plays a major role. Looking back through Luke’s gospel with a concordance in hand, readers can see that Luke inserts “spirit” wherever he can, to give the sense that the Jesus movement was spirit-driven from the start.

It has always seemed to me that the dominance of charismatic experience in Acts hints that such experience was already a feature of the Gentile community before Christianity arrived. My grandfather’s cousin Arthur Hays taught church history at McCormick Theological Seminary. I heard he used to open every semester’s lectures with the observation that “Christianity never entered an empty world.” There has always been a pre-existing culture in which the faith would exfoliate in new and unexpected ways. The history of Christianity’s rich diversity is keyed to such cultural transformation. If anyone has ever written anything about charismatic experience present in the pre-Christian-Gentile community I haven’t seen it. It was there in the temple oracles and surely present in some of the new religious movements sweeping through the Near East in those days.

Paul, who himself became a champion of Gentile Christianity, seems to have had personal experience of charismatic phenomena early in his career, certainly on the road to Damascus. Nevertheless, the Corinthian letters show him struggling to channel the early church’s enthusiasm in a constructive direction. The dominance of spiritual phenomena in the life of the community threatened to turn a young Christianity into a cult of personal ecstatic experience. Paul mad it clear that the spirit brings us together in community, as the body of Christ.

I have always thought Luke places the birth of charismatic experience at the Jewish Pentecost festival because he wants to align the Gentile experience with Jewish sources. One of these sources would be the Pentecost holiday itself, which celebrated the gift of Torah to Moses on Mt Sinai with much the same “Pentecostal” enthusiasm we get in later Christianity. We haven’t yet understood “Torah” if we merely translate it as “Law”. Torah came as the gift of a way of life that was new and liberating and overwhelmingly an experience of grace. Just look at the enthusiastic abandon of contemporary Lubavitcher communities celebrating Savu’ot. The importance of making the connection between “spirit” and “law” that generates and shapes community is seen in the way the Pentecost story evolves here in the second chapter of Acts. The people draw together as a new community, sharing life in common, living as the body of Christ, as it were, and as a community of Torah. There’s more of this in Acts 4. However the Gentiles appropriated Christianity in their own cultural expectations of ecstatic experience, Jewish roots determined that the result would be community-building, so that Paul could speak of “the fellowship of the Holy Spirit”.

The second important source in Jewish tradition for charismatic experience is in the prophetic tradition, and in particular in prophetic tradition connected to the “last days”. Luke couples his Pentecost story with the prophet Joel, whose young men shall have visions and whose old men will dream. What these dreams and visions constituted was the constant prophetic dream of the day of the Lord, an idealistic and utopian projection of a world of justice coming soon. Such overwhelming visions have throughout history often been accompanied by charismatic phenomena. Indeed, the recent grip the Christian right has held on White House policy has gone hand-in-hand with apocalyptic visions of the last days, accompanied by White House prayer services that look like Pentecostal camp meetings. Joel, the prophet who encourages us to beat our plough shares back into spears and our pruning hooks into swords, would feel very much at home here. Luke doesn’t pick up the militant side of Joel, but the last-days-ism certainly plays strongly in early Christianity, and continues to today in churches for which charismatic experience remains important.

In my tradition, in the tradition of the Reformed churches, the spirit has a stronger emphasis on binding together than in experiencing ecstasy. All authority is corporate, for instance, and seeking out the common will of God together among the elders or at a church meeting can be (or should be) a profound spiritual experience. Our experience of the spirit is embedding on our connectedness and concern for others in our community and in the world, not only as the pattern of our governance but also in the motivation of our prayers and our concern for social justice. Scripture reading in the Reformed tradition, moreover, is a profoundly spiritual experience. Calvin’s introduction to his commentary on the Psalms is a classic instance of understanding how the Spirit is at work as we read, opening our hearts to the experience until it is as if we are being read by the Scriptures and our lives are being transformed by the experience. Lest this becomes a mere emotional exercise, the Reformed tradition emphasizes rigorous, almost academic discipline to the study of the Bible in order to give proper weight to the text over our own feelings and imaginings. Because the result can look a bit dry, we in the Reformed tradition often forget that we have our own spirituality. But we do, and it is central to almost every practice.

Ascension Sunday A

2008-05-04T00:25:00.000-07:00

Stephanie Flanders was explaining on Newsnight the parlous state of the economy, and its possible recovery, with a series of letter-shaped graphs. A sharp recovery would look like a “V” and something smoother would look like a “U”, while a “W” would represent a second collapse and a second recovery.

At the ascension we get the second half of the “V”. The incarnation is the first half. For some reason people find the ascension part of the story harder to swallow today, but the truth is both members of the biblical “V” are myths, both telling us something significant about the Jesus event, and both difficult for the honest 21^st century Christian to swallow.

There are certain things you just aren’t allowed to say in the church, and this is one of them. John Hick and some of his friends at the University of Birmingham wrote a book called The Myth of God Incarnate, and then took up a position teaching at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. The pin heads in the local Presbytery gave him immense flack—I can’t remember the whole story, except for how sad I felt for my home denomination. Hick’s opponents were no doubt the same reactionaries who became so heated over the Angela Davies affair and Presbyterian participation in the Sophia conference and continue to raise a storm over homosexuality issues. Hick later wrote a stronger challenge to the small-mindedness of the church, The Metaphor of God Incarnate, in which he outlines the grief the know-nothing had given him.

In order to speak about the ascension we need to look at the nature of myth. What we might call Primary Myth is a creation of the community involving deep-seated archetypes and traditions. Stories accumulate and re-iterate themes that seem to spring out nowhere, or everywhere.

Thomas Thompson, for instance, in The Messiah Myth: The Near Easter Roots of Jesus and David, writes,

Before asking whether episodes and scenes that structure the story of Jesus’ life are based on events, we need to look at the function of stories in antiquity. The story of Jesus’ birth and baptism, of his teaching and miracle working, of his suffering and crucifixion—as well as his resurrection—fulfill a clearly defined, coherent function. Together, they embody a well defined tradition of discussion that formed the Judaism to which the gospels belonged.

A second level of myth-making we could call Creative Myth, authored myth, in which a specific and identifiable writer is responsible for the story—Isaiah, Malachi, Mark, Luke, D. H. Lawrence or John Updike. Here we might have, for instance, prophecies of cosmic judgement and the final inauguration of God’s kingdom in self-consciously mythic language, extravagant hyperbole, vivid imagery. The function of the rhetoric is to project intentionality and hope. Rarely were the visions “successful” in terms of historical validation, but this does not imply they were failed prophecies. The way the story is told creates motivation and vision. The relevance of historical truth is beside the point.

A third level of myth is secondary to both of these levels of myth-making, and I would therefore cal it Secondary Myth, and that is the point of reception when the story ceases to be supple and alive and becomes institutionalised and literal. Primary, naive myth, of course, also has this of belief about it, but emains supple and inventive. On this level myth is no longer generative or supple, but rigid. It becomes literalised, set and dogmatic. This is what happens when myth becomes theology and the property of groups like The Presbyterian Lay Committee in my home country or, here in the UK, the Reform movement among the Anglicans that thrives on bating Rowan Williams.

A fourth level of myth is what scholars call Broken Myth, myth that can no longer be believed because the frame in which we see the world has moved on from, say, a Ptolemaic understanding to an Einsteinian understanding. You can still cross the Atlantic guided by Ptolemaic stars, but you can’t get to the moon that way. This is the level at which we throw out the ascension story as no longer workable. We no longer live in a world where verticality has value or hierarchy or absolute truth retain any hold on us. We live in the Richard Dawkin’s world where myths are no longer “true”.

But of course asking a myth to have historical or scientific validity is to miss the point. It’s not that ealier cultures once considered the myths that animated them to be “true” in the sense that we hold things to be true, since truth as we understand it simply didn’t exist in those days, any more than it has any determinant function in the work of poets and novelists and screenwriters today. So there needs to be a fifth level of myth, what Paul Ricoeur calls “the second naïveté”. And that is the capacity to pass through the work of historical-critical understanding to re-appropriate the original energy with which Isaiah wrote, or a contemporary poet writes today.

It is curious that Luke is the only gospel to give us an ascension story, and it is unfortunate that “Ascension day” in the church calendar, more beloved in high church circles than my own tradition, takes the story so mechanically from there. Surely in Luke/Acts the narrative of the ascension is a conscious midrash on what is more nuanced in the other gospels, as when in John we read of Jesus being “lifted up”, or in his story of the call of Peter. We also get the story in that hymn Paul quotes in Philippians 2, evidence, I think, that an earlier strata of Christian tradition was thinking more poetically than later generations. It proved too easy for orthodoxy to fall in with the Lukan story, and lose this subtlety of thought in the interest of a dogmatic conformity that could be more easily managed by the increasingly rigid institutional structures of the church.

Easter 6 A

2008-04-26T05:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-16T06:55:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-09T01:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-01T02:04:00.000-07:00

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.

Easter 2 A

2008-03-18T02:16:00.000-07:00

In the story from John for the second Sunday of Easter Jesus shows his wounds to his fearful disciples. It has always amazed me that educated adults with theological degrees want to take this story with flat-footed literalism instead of common sense. The Gospel of John is masterfully imaginative. I am suggesting here that John heightens the tension between images of living and dying in the manner of a Petrarchan conceit. Petrarch, a poet of the Italian Renaissance, would employ jarring metaphors that brought two seemingly incompatible images together, oxymorons, actually, like peace and war or fire and ice, to create startling and vivid imaginative turns. John Donne, more familiar to English readers, did the same in comparing marriage to a flea or separated lovers to the extended arms of a compass.

The tradition was intensely visual. The poetic conceit was closely related to “emblem” literature, for instance, verse that would be accompanied by an actual visual image, a wood engraving, say. Christopher Harvey published a book of emblems called The School of the Heart in which one emblem, “The Heart powred out”, expands on a verse from Lamentations (2.19): “Pour out thy heart like water before the face of the Lord.” The engraving shows a young man pouring from a large hot water bottle-like heart into a stream while an angel looks on, an intense literalisation of the image in Lamentations, which is accompanied by an epigram and a longer poem.

John sets life and death together like a Petrarchan conceit. In the face of death, loss, defeat and fear John gives us life in the jarring hyper-reality of an encounter that becomes an invitation to actually touch the wounds that Jesus displays. This is a resurrected body that eats grilled fish. You can’t take these stories any more literally than the verse in Lamentations about the heart being poured out like water, though some do, and, indeed, the intensity of Harvey’s literalisation adds to the perspicuity of the image. But it does so as an intentional device to pull our attention away from dead literalism and flattened, predictable language to reinforce the energy of the original imagery. This is what John is doing. He is saying that whatever the “risen-ness” of Jesus means in the life of the disciples, it has to do with the woundedness of crucifixion, and any appropriation of the living body of Christ in the life of discipleship is going to have to experience like woundedness in some form. The new life we are given in Christ, our resurrection, is going to include suffering and perhaps literal wounds and possibly even crucifixion. The jarring oxymoron in this conceit is the sense that death is life, the ability to pour ourselves out in our discipleship, to suffer, is what the new life in Christ is all about. It is a new way of seeing things that has to do with the way we accept the life of Christ as the shape of our own life (John 1.12). When Thomas does touch the wounds and kneels and says, “My Lord and my God”, it is not to make a confessional statement about the identity of Jesus in some theological, doctrinal sense, but to speak words of submission spoken in the context of conversion and transformation. This is my Lord and my God.

The jarring tension between the substantial and the insubstantial is of course set up from the beginning when Jesus walks through the door into the locked room to bring peace where there is no peace. The disciples are huddled in a fellowship of paralysis in a story that becomes John’s version of Luke’s Pentecost story. In a move that looks a bit like Harvey’s literalised image of the heart poured out, John has Jesus “breath” on the disciples, literalising a pun in Greek on the Holy Spirit (pneuma means both breath and spirit). The gift of the spirit enables the disciples to forgive sins, an extraordinary claim that gives them the power to live out the grace of God in ordinary life. Disclosing the presence of God, then, becomes the exercise of our ordinary humanity and common compassion. We don’t need all this religious folderol in order to forgive sins. We just do it, and we have to realize that when we don’t do it, it doesn’t get done. Christ ‘R’ Us. God is actualised in faithful human relationships.

The Gospel of John is alive with extravagant, vibrant metaphors that have confused the fundamentalists of this world to no end. Even Raymond Brown gets hung up on the need to take such images as literal events occasionally. Our reading concludes with the observation that Thomas has believed because he has seen. Given the way the idea of “seeing” has been developed, we may be assured that “seeing” her is that new way of seeing that is gained by a transformed life. Certainly John is not caving in to small-minded empiricists like Richard Dawkins and their mirror images in American televangelists like Pat Robertson here. Nor does the play on seeing and not seeing in verse 29 have anything to do with blessing the credulous. Either this verse vibrates with the essential paradoxes of this reading or it has nothing to do with the gospel it seems to sum up. The truth comes somewhere between seeing and not-seeing, and has more to do with how we live as embodied beings bearing the life of Christ in the world through what we do than it does with what we believe, in the conventional meaning of that word. In John, belief is always connected with action or it is nothing. No understanding of resurrection has any validity outside of the witness of our discipleship.

Easter A

2008-03-14T14:29:00.000-07:00

The Easter story from the Gospel of John (John 20.1-18) tells of the visit to the tomb in the early hours of the morning. It is still dark, and by the time you have reached this point in your reading of John you know he is not just telling you something about the time of day. Darkness in John is always meaningful, even when it only seems to be descriptive. Insofar as it is the darkness in the prologue that never overcomes the light, as well as the darkness covering the visit of the benighted literalist, Nicodemus or the darkness into which Judas goes when he leaves the Last Supper to do his dirty work, this is the darkness against which we see the light of the dawning resurrection.

In the church I served in Birmingham (UK) we always held the Easter vigil in the pre-dawn darkness of the otherwise empty sanctuary, the small circle of worshippers lit by their own hand-held candles as they read those long Old Testament lessons of the vigil, intertwined with psalms and prayers and Taizé chants. As the service slowly progressed the stark blackness of the night was gradually overcome by the still colourless grey light of early dawn. The sanctuary furnishings around the fellowship slowly became visible, and finally a stronger light pieced through to the chancel where white linen cloth lay draped over the communion table like discarded clothing.

The story in John has this same slow, gradual movement toward Mary’s joyful exclamation, “I have seen the Lord!”

Notice how the story is layered. First Mary and her companions (only indicated by the use of the word “we” in verse 2) come to the tomb and see that the stone that had sealed it has been rolled away.

Then Peter and the beloved disciple move toward the tomb. The beloved disciple runs ahead of Peter and looks into the tomb. Then Peter arrives at the tomb, looks, and goes in. Then the beloved disciple goes into the tomb. Then they both go home.

Mary, still disconsolate, is standing outside the tomb. Now she, like the two disciples, goes into the tomb, where, unlike the two disciples, she meets two angels. It’s idle to ask why the two disciples hadn’t noticed the angels. The pattern has been established. Each move in the story adds something new.

Why do you weep? the angels ask, and Mary tells them what she had told the disciples. They have taken her Lord. Then she sees (but does not recognize) Jesus, who asks, as the angels had, why she weeps, adding another question, “Whom do you seek?” Mary gives him the same answer she has given before, then Jesus speaks her name: “Mary!”

The manner in which John builds the scene incrementally is a standard stylistic feature of his gospel. Each movement in the story adds a little bit more, teasing us, as it were, until the powerful emotional climax of the recognition, and then comes the denouement in which Jesus explains his coming ascension and Mary runs to exclaim to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!”

Drama is the thing here. I will never forget that Easter at St James United Presbyterian Church in Chicago when Ann Faulkner got us to perform the 10^th century liturgical drama, the Visitatio Sepulchri. St James was a church that itself was experiencing the early stages of a remarkable rebirth. Ann had come to us emerging from a battle with cancer, her chemotherapied head covered in a scarf to hide her baldness. She’d taken on the job of organist among us as a bold move back into the world of the living. She’d borrowed white albs from a local Episcopal church to dress all the players, the small group of young adults who had only recently joined this church. All the parts, of course, were singing parts. When the young man playing Jesus chanted Mary’s name and she looked up from her desolation in recognition, we all felt a lump of emotion in our throats. Doretta actually wept that morning. Whether it was because of the emotional power of the scene itself, or for Ann, or for our own re-birth as a church—it was all the same.

In John, the resurrection story collects rebirth moments that have come throughout the gospel and weaves them together in this moment of encounter. Jesus calls his disciples “brothers” here, recalling the prologue (1.12). To all who receive him . . . he gives the power to be children of God, born not of blood or the will of the flesh but of God. This is not just John’s virgin birth story (the story of our virgin birth). It is our resurrection story. When we take the Word as the pattern of our lives, we are reborn into a new life. Our rebirth is linked with the story of Jesus’ ascension, through which we are brothers because we are all children of the same Father: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (20.17). The ascension of Jesus is the birth of a new community—or a new family.

In John, resurrection has to do with intimacy. In the prayer following his farewell discourse Jesus says, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (17.3). Those who love Jesus do the things Jesus does, and as they do these things, they abide in him, and he abides in them, and so does the one who sent him (15.1-11). Sin in John is thus less like breaking rules and more like withering on the vine.

The light that is such a central motif in John is the light of our deepest humanity, life itself, fullness of life, life abundantly (John 10.10). The resurrection “moment” in our story is the moment Mary hears her name spoken. Think of the Good Shepherd (10.3-4), who knows his sheep and his sheep know him. He calls them by their names. Resurrection in John summons out what and who we most deeply are—this is what abundant life is—just as Lazarus is summoned out of the darkness of the tomb into new life (“Lazarus, come out!”). Those who have made the journey of integrity out of the closet into the full light of day can testify to such a resurrection experience.

As the resurrection stories in John (not just the resurrection story, but all the other ones) are embedded in experiences of encounter, the resurrection of Jesus seems to be connected to the experience of transformation in the life of the believer. Mary’s rejoicing that she has “seen” the Lord is built upon when Peter, later, sees the Lord in an encounter that becomes his experience of vocation (in John the calling of the fishermen is placed at the end of the story, not, as in the Synoptics, at the beginning). “Seeing” Jesus in John is a matter of transformed vision and transformed life, a new way of seeing and being that comes through the kind of discipleship that does what Jesus does. In the beginning of the gospels the followers of Jesus are responding to an invitation to “come and see”. The Greeks who would “see” Jesus must learn to die as the grain of wheat must die before it bears much fruit (12.24). They must learn to live as Jesus lives.

It seems, therefore, to me, that resurrection in the Gospel of John has very little to do with what happens to us after we die, as if the preservation of the self was what the good news were all about. John is all about how we live now in a transformed humanity that has taken on the image and likeness of God. Resurrection in John is an incarnational sort of thing, putting flesh on God, a rebirth into the world, a commissioning, as Oliver Davies says in Transformation Theology (55), to serve and act here and now in relation to that specific time and place where a particular faithful people constitute the living body of Christ. Christ ‘R’ Us.

In her acclaimed book, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1335, Caroline Walker Byrnum traces the the ways in which the early Church and medieval Christianity turned the idea of resurrection from an image of transformation to one of nervous continuity. I think it is is critically important to recover the earlier sense of the experience of transformation, giving our people the genuine hope that comes with other-directed discipleship, rather than the false hope of holding on to what they have.

Good Friday A

2008-03-14T14:28:00.000-07:00

John 18.1-19.42

I think the central motif of John’s Good Friday story is what Tillich would call the “courage to be”, seen in the ability of Jesus to say “I am” at the time of trial and condemnation.

“Whom do you seek?” Jesus asks the soldiers and police who come to arrest him (the question is fundamental to the journey of discipleship). They tell him, and he says, “I am he.” This interchange is repeated for emphasis (18.4-8). The trial itself revolves around his identity, and in John Jesus remains in control of the trial throughout. Jesus is confident and even assertive in his sense of identity. In the background, Peter denies who he is.

The strength of Jesus’ identity is of course something more than mere self-actualisation. The theme of individuation that runs throughout this gospel as the challenge to discipleship is at the same time a challenge to discover our deepest identity as God-bearers to the world. John’s Jesus may unashamedly identify himself as the revelation of the Father, but he expects the disciple’s life to do the same.

I find it useful, in this context, to look at the background of the “I am” sayings of John’s gospel in Exodus 3, where Yahweh identifies himself as “I am”. Clearly, as Jesus says, “I am the bread of life”, “I am the good shepherd,” or “I am the resurrection,” we are meant to recall this story about the divine name. In Exodus 3 God’s revelation of his name as “I am” is clearly contrasted to Moses’ lack of self-confidence: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” (3.11). God will not deliver the Israelites independently of Moses. Moses must act with the assurance that God will be with him, as a divine presence. So in all continuing discipleship God is present. This is a fundamental theme in Johannine theology. It is not only explains Jesus. It explains Lazarus and the rest of us. The prologue’s proclamation that “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (1.14) will be seen to apply to all believers. God dwells in the faithful, abides in them as the shekinah, God’s tabernacling presence in the people of Israel. The trial and condemnation of Jesus in the gospel of John is, in the last analysis, our story. We, too, are invited to say “I am”.

Maundy Thursday A

2008-03-14T14:24:00.000-07:00

John 13.1-17, 31b-35, 1 Corinthians 11.23-32

Maundy Thursday, like Palm Sunday, begs dramatic re-enactment by the congregation. One can hardly imagine meeting for worship on this night without celebrating the Lord’s Supper. Here at City United Reformed Church we do so around a large table set with white linen, sharing a pot-luck supper by candle-light. The Sacrament is fully integrated into the meal and yet the gospel set for this service is the gospel of John (13. 1-35), which, glaringly, has no meal.

In the companion reading from 1 Corinthians 11.23-32 we get what we call “the words of institution”, a recollection of the words of Jesus spoken in the context of the continuing celebration of this meal fellowship in his name. “Do this remembering me,” he says. The absence of the meal in John is not just because John shifts the celebration of Passover from this night to the day of crucifixion, when the sacrificed paschal lamb coincides with the death of Jesus. We don’t have a meal in John because he wants to shift attention away from ritual action to the content of that ritual action— the invitation to live as Jesus has, as God-bearers to the world.

The reading for Maundy Thursday is nevertheless full of “do-this-remembering-me” commands. The foot-washing that was so shocking to the disciples is meant to illustrate a way of life that the disciples should continue (13.14). This is what you might call basic John. Those who do what Jesus does do what God does, so whoever receives those Jesus sends receive Jesus, and receive the one who sent him (13.20). This is the new commandment, that they should love one another as Jesus has loved them (13.34). Such discipleship embodying the presence of God in the world is what John means by the Pauline formula for the institution of the Lord’s Supper. It is not just a command to continue to celebrate a given ritual action; it is, more fundamentally, a command to live out what is beneath that ritual action— to live as Christ, to put flesh on God’s Word, to live as God’s dwelling place..

In John this story is framed by references to betrayal. When Martin Luther King, Jr., celebrated the Lord’s Supper the first Sunday evening of every month at Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery, Alabama, he assumed the role of Jesus, seated in the company of deacons dressed in dark suits and wearing white gloves. He would read the words “And he said unto them, ‘One of you shall betray me,’ at which point the organ would cease its quiet, mood-setting background and the congregation would be plunged into a moment of awed silence before the pastor continued his recitation. (Lischer, The Preacher King, 80.)

Set in the darkness of night, the Dexter celebration emphasised the poignancy of a fellowship gathered in an atmosphere of betrayal and danger that becomes a metaphor not only of what the life of Jesus had been but of what the life of King himself would be. And yet the overriding theme here is one of grace, as it would be in King’s philosophy of non-violence. Bread is broken and shared with all, regardless. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. Ritual becomes discipleship, or it is empty of meaning.

Paul calls the cup the new covenant in my blood. By the time Mark wrote the meal that comes in between the bread and the cup seems to have disappeared, so Jesus is made to say “This is my blood” to make a neater parallel with “This is by body”, a move that shifts the emphasis from the sharing of a cup to the cup’s contents. The shift allows Mark to add ‘. . . which is poured out for many’, a phrase which connects this action with Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, who “poured out himself to death “and was numbered among the transgressions” (Isaiah 53. 12).

Mark, incidentally, leaves out the command to do this “remembering me”, presumably sharing John’s concern for that repetition of ritual action that can easily become empty. Instead, Mark locates this phrase in the story of the woman who “pours” the costly ointment onto the head of Jesus, in effect pouring out herself, and Jesus comments, “wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her” (14.9).

The action of “pouring out” cannot be located in the person of Jesus alone, as in that mechanical, transactional, legalistic theory of blood atonement. This gesture is the fundamental act of all Christian discipleship. In Philippians 2 the Christian is called to “have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus”, who “emptied himself” (Philippians 2. 5,7). In John, at the death of Jesus, his side is pierced and blood and water flow out – not just symbols of the Church’s sacraments but references to the way the death of Jesus – his life poured out – continues to be acted out in a Church that has learned to love as he loved. Maundy Thursday, like Palm Sunday, begs dramatic re-enactment by the congregation, re-enactment that must not end in ritual but become a way of life performed in memory of him.

Palm Sunday A

2008-03-06T05:36:00.000-08:00

The gospel lesson for this Sunday is Matthew 21.1-11. In The Last Week Marcus Borg and Dom Crossan say the Palm Sunday story is a piece of street theatre meant to contrast with a Roman military procession into Jerusalem. They say Pilate would have come into Jerusalem for Passover to keep a lid on things, and he would have come in with a typical display of Roman power. Jesus, in a street theatre reference to Zechariah 9, reminds the crowds of a king who comes into Jerusalem in humility, on a donkey, to banish war and bring peace. While in Mark the reference remains implicit, carried by the structure of the narrative, here in Matthew the reference is explicit. Matthew quotes Zechariah 9.9: “Tell the daughters of Zion, look, you king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

I find the thought that Jesus is challenging what Borg and Crossan call the “domination system” compelling and preachabe. But the Zechariah story properly belongs to the Jewish festival of Sukkoth, in the autumn, not Passover. So I have always wondered if the Palm Sunday story might actually describe something that had happened half a year earlier. Was the timeline collapsed in order to heighten the dramatic tension of what, liturgically, we call “Holy Week”? Surely half a year would have given a more reasonable amount of time for the Galilean Jesus to develop a reputation in Jerusalem and get in trouble with the authorities.

Or what if the Palm Sunday story is simply Mark’s midrsh on Zechariah? What if the Palm Sunday story is Mark’s way of interpreting Zechariah’s prophetic, messianic hope by re-telling it in a narrative starring Jesus, in the same way that Mark’s crucifixion story is a midrash on Psalm 22, or in the same way that Mark’s baptism story is an interpretation of the Exodus story?

The Jewish practice of interpretating a verse by re-telling it in a different form was fundamental to its rhetorical culture. Nothing could be left alone. Everything had to be told twice. I love what Gerald Bruns says about the rabbinic passion for interpretation by re-telling:

The rabbis themselves…were never embarrassed by hermeneutics: “the rabbis said: Solomon had three thousand parables to illustrate each and every verse [of Scripture]; and a thousand and five interpretations for each and every parable”—which computes to a total of three million fifteen thousand interpretations for every scriptural verse. From a modern standpoint, which pictures a solitary reader isolated with the scriptural text and trying to divine an interpretation…this interpretive extravagance is outrageous; but the rabbis are not to be pictured this way. Their relationship to the text was always social and dialogical, and even when confined to the house of study (beit midrash) it was never merely formalist or analytical. They saw themselves in dialogue with each other and with generations of wise men extending back to Koheleth and Solomon (and even beyond to Moses and to God himself, who is frequently pictured as studying his own texts) and forward to the endless openings of the Scriptures upon new questions that are put to them. Gerald Bruns, ‘Midrash and Allegory: The Beginnings of Scriptural Interpretation,’ in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Fontana, 1987), 630.

You see this need to repeat and clarify in the most familiar texts, in Psalm 24, for instance, where everything needs to be said twice in order to clarify:

The earth is the LORD'S, and the fulness thereof;
the world, and they that dwell therein.
For he hath founded it upon the seas,
and established it upon the floods.
Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD?
or who shall stand in his holy place?
He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart;
who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.
He shall receive the blessing from the LORD,
and righteousness from the God of his salvation.

We get this in Zechariah. The king comes “mounted on a colt, the foal of a donkey”. And this leads to one of the most bizarre details of Matthew’s Palm Sunday story. Matthew, making explicit what was merely implicit in Mark, quotes Zecharaiah 9 and seems to take it literally:

"Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. … This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying, “Tell the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey." The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. Matthew 21:2-7

Does Matthew imagine Jesus to be riding into Jerusalem straddling two beasts at once? Or is he deliberately throwing into the story an element impossible to take literally, in order to teach how to read it, not literally, but as a narrative whose function is to serve as an interpretation of Zechariah?

Can an obsession with what actually happened to the historical Jesus lead us to overlook how first century writers actually wrote and thought? The wealth of sociological and historical research over the last twenty or thirty years has added immeasurably to our understanding of the Christ event. But we can;t allow that to obscure what is happening from a literary point of view. It seems to me Matthew saw Mark’s story as the midrash it was (an interpretation in narrative of the Zechariah that helps us understand the Christ event) and wanted his readers to get the point. The point is proclamation, not history.

Interpretation is the key in another sense. Our response to the text is an interpretation. As the reformers said, Scripture doesn’t become the Word of God until it is preached, and even then not until it is lived out in the lives of the faithful (the end point of the interpretive process in praxis).

First of all, simply as a story, Palm Sunday begs “interpretation” in dramatic action. This Sunday is customarily played out in our churches with dramatic processions enacted by the congregation. At University Church in Chicago the whole congregation would make a public procession around the block on Palm Sunday. I remember one hazardous Palm Sunday when the sidewalks were covered with a thin hard sheet of ice. Back inside for worship, the dance choir pranced energetically down the central aisle shaking noisy palm branches which they then laid on the steps at the front of the sanctuary as they bowed in reverence at the conclusion of this entrance rite.

Here in the UK, in Birmingham, at Weoley Hill Church, the Scouts and the Guides and the Brownies and the Cubs would process in while the rest of us were singing loud hosannas. One of the Venture Scouts, with long auburn hair—the recognizable kitsch image of our Lord—would dress in a white alb and be carried on the shoulders of his fellows while all the rest of the young people in the parade waves palms. Here at City Church the young people come in waving branches while the choir sings a version of “76 Trombones” (“Jesus rode into town in a big parade”, see worship resources on the church website) then act out the story as it unfolds from Palm Sunday through the crucifixion and death of Jesus. (Unlike Mark, Matthew has the Palm Sunday procession flow into the rest of the story, highlighting the theme of confrontation in driving out the money changers from the temple.)

In Matthew’s version of the story, on Jesus entering Jerusalem, “the whole city was in turmoil, asking, "Who is this?" (21.10). In Birmingham, I would use a roving microphone to interview people in the crowd, asking what this hoopla was all about. Jack Thompson, one of the theologians teaching at West Hill College, was particularly hilarious in giving an absolutely opaque Christological discourse as a way of parodying the theological take on Jesus. My favourite interview of them all was with Chris Mayhew, who wore a donkey mask and spoke in a rough Kentish farm labourer’s accent to give the donkey’s eye view of the excitement. We were convinced that this is what the donkey would sound like, could he speak.

We did these interviews in order to convey the sense in Matthew’s version of the story that no one really knows what is going on. It’s like the parable of the final judgement, Matthew 25.31-46, in which no one knows who Jesus is when they see him. The crowd thinks it is all about triumph. What the Palm Sunday procession really stand in contrast to is the via dolorosa, the way of the cross. It does this in two ways. On the one hand, as a triumphal, messianic entry into Jerusalem it stands in contrast to the way of the cross as the way of defeat and shame. But on the other, it actually prefigures the cross to which it stands in contrast. It reveals, in the tension of Zechariah’s conflicting messianic images—the king who rides a donkey—the paradox of the cross as the real moment of triumph that re-interprets all messianic expectation. Insofar as Jesus, crucified in the company of the condemned (the three crosses make an image of a new community of solidarity and inclusion, or "at-one-ment"), is demonstrating unflinching fidelity here, fidelity to God and to neighbour, even at the moment of his suffering and death, the cross affirms the Palm Sunday celebration rather than contradicts it. This, of course, is the fundamental Christian paradox. As the reformers said, the kingdom of God is hidden under its contrary, the cross. Neither the people nor the disciples nor the authorities understand what is going on at Palm Sunday. The process of interpretation needs the cross, and what we might call the discipleship of the cross, to be complete. As the fidelity of the cross is lived out in the fidelity of the people, the stories of tradition have a chance to become the Word of God, not just proclaimed but understood and lived. The Palm Sunday story begs dramatic play, and more. The story calls us to "interpret" it by the way we live, in our own confrontation with the powers and principalities of our world. Without living through the whole story the fundamental mystery of Christianity is lost. Sadly, more often than not our congregations are like the crowds in the original story. They just don;t get it. All they want is Easter, so they never eally get what their faith has to offer.

In Matthew the procession reaches a triumphal climax in the dramatic conflict experienced at the temple. The procession begins at the Mount of Olives, which in Zechariah 14.4 is identified as the location for the final struggle of the day of the Lord. This eschatological dimension of the story is not to be missed. The coming of Jesus into Jerusalem is like the coming of the Son of Man. The stories of judgement and conflict that are part of the vision for the Day of the Lord are told here in the life of Jesus and in present-time, in the life of the believer. It is like the confrontation people feel on the path of conversion. There is confusion and disorientation. There is praise, but often for the wrong reason, and we won’t know the right reason until we see the story all the way to the end, and say Amen to it with our own lives.

“Hosanna” is a Hebrew word that means “deliver us!” or “save us!”. It’s the kind of word one shouts out loud or deep inside the soul when one becomes conscious that the way things are isn’t the way things ought to be. Deliver us from the domination system, Borg and Crossan would say. We want a messiah who will rescue us. It’s one of the stages on the pilgrimage to conversion. On Easter we shout something different: “Alleluia!”, another Hebrew word. This one means “praise the Lord!”. It’s the kind of thing we shout when we see that our salvation is tied to our discipleship, and the way we learn to empty ourselves, as Christ did, for others. Christ 'R' Us. On Easter, the baptized, those who have died and been reborn with Christ, shout “Alleluia!”

5 Lent A

2008-03-01T01:38:00.000-08:00

The gospel lesson for the 5^th Sunday of Lent (John 11.1-45) illustrates every minister’s nightmare of being late for a funeral. I had a funeral myself yesterday as I write this, and all the night before I had tossed and turned with dreams about being late for it. Though the morning was filled with the usual pastoral crises and difficult logistics, through a grim determination practised in many years of ministry I managed to be ready on time. And then my driver failed to show on time, so I was late for the funeral anyway. The nephew of the deceased, reading from John 11 in the service, remarked how fitting it was that the reading should be about Jesus being late for a funeral.

Martha is disconsolate. Have you ever had to deal with grief like this that is at least in part a result of your own incompetence? Jesus mutters some palliative sop about the resurrection to deflect attention away from himself—that seems pretty much what the doctrine was invented to provide—and Martha replies by trotting out the standard theological take on the resurrection she had learned in Sunday school. Blah, blah, blah. It doesn’t help, she says. She doesn’t feel comforted. Her grief is raw.

Thus far the encounter between Jesus and Martha replicates a lot of the pastoral encounters with which we are too painfully familiar. Our incompetence leaves a cloud of unrequited grief in its wake. It happens to the best of us.

But fresh light shines into the scene when Jesus says, “I am the resurrection”. Two things are interesting here, both of them central to the Gospel of John. One is the boldness with which John has Jesus repeat the “I am” phrase he uses elsewhere (I am the bread, I am the light, etc.), betraying the depth to which God, whose name is “I am” (Exodus 3.14) is fully present in Jesus.

The second is what is often called John’s “realised eschatology”—resurrection is not just something for the end of history, as Martha had been taught, or even something that has to wait for after we die. It is a new way of life that Jesus lived, a way of life that embodies God. The Word became flesh in what Jesus did. We can at least say this confessionally, as proclamation, as John does. As Willi Marxsen says in The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus was resurrected long before he died. The same is true for the ordinary believer who puts flesh on the Word of God through discipleship. Faithful discipleship makes what is hoped for a present reality. This is “realised eschatology” as the discipleship of the people of God. Those who take the wisdom of God (the logos, in Greek) as the shape of their own lives (John 1.12), as Jesus did, become, like him, sons (or daughters) of God, born not of a human father but with God as our father. Or, as Jesus put it to Nicodemus, we are born again. These images coalesce into one vision that interprets the meaning of resurrection in the Gospel of John. Resurrection is a way of life, life that abides in the presence of Christ as Christ abides in us in our discipleship, and so we abide in the presence of God. This is bodily resurrection; it is a matter of the whole person and what the whole person does in history. The gospel that defines eternal life as knowing God and knowing Jesus Christ (John 17.3) affirms that eternal life is realised in life as it is presently lived, the re-born life, the life of the resurrection. Life is not a waiting room. Life is not an ante-chamber to the real action. This is where th language of our funeral services needs to change. Life doesn’t start for us as our friends retreat to the bun fight after the service at the crematorium. William Stringfellow (Instead of Death) said nothing new happens when the undertaker calls that had not already happened on the day of his conversion.

The idea of “resurrection now” as an experienced reality for the born-again disciple interprets the Lazarus story. The Lazarus story never hit me so powerfully as when the gay comedian Peterson Toscano performed at our church here in Cardiff. His show had been built around his own closeted struggle as a conservative evangelical trying to be straight—he’d spent several years in a church-sponsored community dedicated to converting gay men to heterosexuality. During the course of the show, in a parody of preaching on this text from John that began with hilarity but gradually took on increasing gravity, Peterson, with spine-chilling drama, called to Lazarus in the voice of Jesus, “Come out!”. The command was spoken with electric energy, and, for some in the audience, as I learned in conversations in later months, life changing. This was, as H. A. Harrison called it, “true resurrection”. No wonder it is the resurrection of Lazarus that gets Jesus into trouble with the authorities in the Gospel of John. The mandarins of social stability want mechanical conformity and feel threatened by individuation and liberation. This is the conflict in our own world that the Gospel of John wants us to think about. The courage to say “I am” should have primary place in our discipleship and not be isolated in the person of Jesus. Tillich called it the courage to be. This is the kind of life-transformation that is the heart of Christianity. Paul said, if this never happens, then our faith is futile and our preaching is in vain. If it is only for the closeted life of social/political conformity that we live, then we are of all people most to be pitied (John 15.14, 19).

This sense of the Lazarus story opens up when we learn its origins in an early version of the Gospel of Mark. To help understand its place there I’d like to sketch a brief analysis of that gospel’s construction. Mark starts out with the baptism of Jesus, which is linked through various verbal connections to the crucifixion (the splitting open of the heavens and the splitting of the curtain; the declaration of the voice from heaven and the centurion that Jesus is the son of God), giving us something like Paul’s association of baptism with the experience of dying and rising with Christ. In a sense, Mark can be said to be about baptism from start to finish. At mid-point James and John ask Jesus if they can sit at his right and left when he comes into his glory (Mark 10.38-40a). Are they willing to be baptised with the baptism that Jesus himself will undergo? At the end of the day those who are found at the right and left of Jesus in his glory are the two thieves crucified alongside him.

The aspirations of James and John represent the aspirations of the reader, the catechumen for whom this text was written as a way of exploring the nature of the Christian life. The gospel is a manual for those who would be baptised. It tells their story. The figure of a young man is woven through the story who represents such readers. He is the rich young man whom Jesus loved who cannot give up his wealth to follow in the path of discipleship. He is the young man stripped naked the night Jesus is put on trial. Remember that the baptised would have been stripped naked before coming into the water at the time Mark’s gospel was written, and in baptism we are under trial just as Jesus was. The young man at the tomb dressed in white is the baptised, the only witness to the resurrection because he has died and been reborn with Christ.

Helmut Koester in Ancient Christian Gospels shows this story of Lazarus was originally part of this string of references to the “young man” theme in Mark. Clement of Alexandria had a copy of Mark which contained a story that became lost in the version we know. The story comes following Mark 10.34:

There was a certain woman whose brother had died….Jesus stretched out his hand and raised him, grasping his hand. And the young man, looking at Jesus, loved him….they went into the house of the young man, for he was rich.

The Lazarus story in John brings with it this fabric of meaning woven through the Gospel of Mark, a meaning that centres on the experience of conversion, transformation, baptism and resurrection. The Church, with its small-minded, nervous focus on nailing down what actually happened to Jesus on Easter, as in N. T. Wright’s big book, The Resurrection of the Son of God (the title betrays his attempt to distance himself from Marxsen’s book, The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth), too often blocks the path of truly discerning this central Christian mystery as something that happens to us. For the orthodox, it’s all something that happened miraculously to Jesus, no thanks to Richard Dawkins. It has very little to do with the life of the disciple, unless the life of the disciple is limited to wonder at the working of big miracles and never grasps the invitation to live as Jesus lived and do what Jesus did, reborn to live, as he did, as God-bearers to the world. It’s a pity that at Easter the pressure of a stiff orthodoxy stands so strong that many preachers feel condemned in their efforts to proclaim this liberating gospel of resurrection that lives at the heart of Christian faith.

4 Lent

2008-02-28T00:28:00.000-08:00

This is the Sunday variously known as mid-Lent, Refreshment Sunday or, here in the UK, "Mothering Sunday". Sometimes we call it "Good Shepherd" Sunday. When my friend Larry Turpin was at Rogers Park Presbyterian Church in Chicago, he said it was the Sunday he got to preach about the big stained glass window depicting good old Jesus as the Good Shepherd. Here in the UK we have to weave the theme of motherhood into all this.

There is something comforting and protective about shepherds. No wonder it is the shepherd image they use for Refreshment Sunday. In the normal rigours of Lent we feel exposed, alone and on trial. The image of the shepherd enables us to revert to the security of our childhood when we were simply cared for, no matter what. We're given a break. And the association with mothering is a natural. I remember growing up in the 1950s when this sort of attitude toward the function of religion as a protective blanket to which we could return week by week as a refreshing retreat from the nasty realities of the Cold War and adult life in general was normal, that everyone had the Twenty-Third Psalm off by heart. I mean everyone. And it was everyone's favourite, just as Roy Rogers was supposed to be our favourite cowboy. The Twenty Third Psalm enshrines this sort of religion-as-mothering-comfort blanket.

The image of the Good Shepherd is not unique to the Bible. It was THE standard image for political leaders throughout the Middle East in biblical times. It's the archetypal paternalistic image, the Chicago alderman who is there to serve and protect you--never mind the corruption. It presumes the powerlessness of the populace. It's the standard image for kingship for cultures like those that took Ba'al (by a variety of names) as the model for kingship in states that duplicated on earth the pattern of heaven. What is important to remember on Refreshment Sunday is the degree to which the Yahwist Revolution challenged such a political/religious model. The Good Shepherd image in the Bible, consequently, is not as common as it is elsewhere in the religious discourse of the Middle East in this time. More often than not, as in Ezekiel, the shepherds undergo prophetic criticism for their failures in serving and protecting. Much of the prophetic literature serves to undercut the propaganda value of the shepherd image. The Twenty Third Psalm is therefore a-typical of biblical literature, though biblical literature is always a mixed bag. The Ba'al stuff has a way of creeping back in. It was, for obvious reasons, very much a part of the royal theology from which much of our psalmody emerges. Having said that, it is a nice psalm. But watch it.

The lessons for the 4th Sunday of Lent include 1 Samuel 16.1-13, Ephesians 5.8-14 and John 9.1-42 as well as Psalm 23. 1 Samuel 16.1-13 is the story about Samuel anointing the boy shepherd as the unlikely new king. The shepherding business ties this lesson in with the 23rd psalm, and the bit that says the Lord doesn't judge by what the eyes see (verse 7) links it to the gospel lesson, the healing of the man born blind. It is important to remember the political culture of the Good Shepherd image as briefly sketched above when reading this story. David was a kind of King Arthur figure in Hebrew literature, and this standard political image has shaped the legend of his origins. The legend of David's humble birth and so on is perhaps the standard story for the birth of a hero--a story that sparked the political legend of Abraham Lincoln being so legitimately a leader simply because he had been born in a log cabin. It was said that Richard Nixon had been born in a log cabin that he build with his own hands at the age of 12. It's the same kind of "birth of a hero" mythology that gets Jesus born in a stable when there was no room at the inn--a curious but typical juxtaposition with having him born in Bethlehem--David's home town--just the right mix of typical humility and glory. (Theologically, Jesus had to be born in Bethlehem, but was most likely born in Nazareth.) In any case, it is difficult to see this story of the calling of David standing outside the general fabric of middle eastern propaganda. If we go for the business about appearances being deceiving and the Lord judging by the heart rather than what the eyes see, then it is important also to get behind what the emotions see in presentations of legends like this. The implications of taking this story naively can be disastrous, as the story brings with it this whole baggage of a politics of domination and infantalisation. As a resting point in the Lenten way of the cross it may provide us with a welcome stopping place to be coddled and mothered. An awful lot of Christianity never gets beyond this sort of thing, though. It's like having our spiritual life dominated by an image like Michaelangelo's Pieta--a mothering presence that comforts us in our dying becomes the primary and perhaps primal icon of our faith, smothering initiative and vitality and never allowwing us to grow up. Dipping back into childhood security is therapeutic on occasion, perhaps. God knows, we need comforting. But not as a permanent state of affairs.

The gospel lesson, the story of the man born blind, is typically John. The framework of the story, the literal healing of blindness, falls off like a booster rocket or the discard skin of a snake or the elaborate details of a shaggy dog story that exist only to launch the pun at the end of the joke. In this case the joke is on the Pharisees and the story is about the difference between insight and sight. When in the beginning of the gospel John has the disciples of John the Baptist ask Jesus where he is staying ("abiding", as in "abide with me", later), he invites them to "come and see", a spiritually charged invitation that leads these disciples on a pilgrimage of discovery, learning ("seeing") by doing, in the Johannine sense that faith is both actualised and understood in what one does, and not otherwise, and what one does is what Jesus does. As someone else put it, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.

The story is not just another Johannine tirade against fundamentalism. It is a story about how official structures and institutionalised orthodoxies get in the way of praxis as a path to understanding. The story becomes a kind of trap for the reader looking to Jesus in his Messianic role as fixer (Good Shepherd) who does it for us, for on this level the story is simply a miracle story, another demonstration of Jesus' power. An interpretive matrix that grows out of a value system with domination of the other (the Ba'al story) at its heart, is bound to read this story as simply one more example of a miracle-working saviour.

But the ending of the story throws all this out, cancelling what has come before. The Pharisees, like the literal-minded readers of this story, are the ones who are blind. The so-called miracle story and its power ideology becomes a parable of the kind of spiritual blindness in which institutional structures and stiff loyalties to traditional power and authority stand against healing in compassionate lives shaped by the needs of others. Worshipping Jesus does not mean waiting on him (as the standard Messiah) to do it for us. Worshipping Jesus means doing what he does. That means growing up, becoming adult, responsible Christians. The best mothers enable this to happen. The best churches enable this to happen. Sadly, Mother Church too often smothers the kind of Christian maturity that seems to me the constant and compelling message of our sacred texts.

Blog Title

2008-02-19T04:52:00.000-08:00

Keith Kimber floated into my office this morning suggesting I ought to sign up for one of these free blogs--a total waste of time as far as I am concerned. I started a personal website a few years ago (www.pie-in-the-sky.org.uk) which I have never found the time to finish or keep up to date. How in the world am I going to find time for THIS?

Let me explain, at any rate, the title. Bob Ash and I thought up this Christ "Я" Us thing about ten years ago in Birmingham as an expression of our shared commitment to radical, contemporary theology. The "Я", of course, is supposed to be backwards, as the phrase is a take-off on Toys "Я" Us. In the commercial logo I assume the "us" means the store. In "Christ Я Us" it means the body of faithful people, the covenant community, the fellowship of the holy spirit, that embodies the presence of Christ in the contemporary world. Christ is not otherwise manifest in our world outside the praxis of a community that lives the way he taught and demonstrated and so mediates his presence to the world.