Allopathy treats illness by introducing substances different from those that cause the disease. The central idea is to use a substance that is designed to combat and kill the disease. Western medicine is largely based on the philosophy of allopathy. We are all immensely grateful for antibiotics.

Homeopathy treats illness by introducing small amounts of the very same toxin, which in larger amounts is the cause of the disease. Homeopathy aims to use the same toxins as those causing the affliction in order to strengthen the body’s tolerance and resistance, eventually enabling recovery. Many Western medical practitioners remain skeptical of homeopathic philosophy, yet the action of a vaccine as compared to an antibiotic operates in a very similar way to homeopathic principles.

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I’m fascinated by the story in Numbers 21:4-9 about the infestation of the Israelite camp by venomous serpents. It seems that in response to their endless grumbling, God’s patience yet again comes to an end. God punishes the Israelites by sending an infestation of poisonous snakes among them with the result that many of them die. What really fascinates me is the implication of this story for a holistic understanding of spiritual-emotional-physical healing.

It’s an image of fighting fire with fire rather than deluging it with water. As is often the case, it doesn’t take God long to relent from his hasty acting out of anger. God instructs Moses to cast in bronze an image of the snake and raise it up at the heart of the camp. Anyone with snakebite has only to look up at the image, in order to be healed.

The real snake kills. The image of the snake of bronze heals. Fighting fire with fire rather than with water.

Numbers 21:4-9 is a graphic example of spiritual homeopathy. The same toxin has both the power to kill or to heal. The bronze image works like a psycho-spiritual totem. Healing is mysterious in the sense that while it may be impossible to trace the links in the steps of cause and effect – something the scientific mind likes to do, the effect produced is nevertheless real. Totem is the spiritual term that describes the bronze serpent.

A totem is a natural object believed to have spiritual significance. The totem of the bronze serpent raised in the heart of the Israelite camp exploits the matrix within which the poison that kills is now associated with the image that heals.

As a brief aside, it’s interesting to note that the caduceus, the double or sometimes single-headed snake symbol also known as the Rod of Asclepius is the symbol of Western medicine, the origins of which we trace back to classical mythology. But it also seems plausible that the imagery of the bronze serpent in Numbers draws from a larger tradition common across the fertile crescent of the ancient Middle East, eventually emerging into Greek mythology.

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Some weeks ago in my post On the Loss of Transcendence, I drew upon the fundamental connection between joy and suffering. From within the matrix of self-transcendence both joy and sorrow flow. This is the paradox of human spiritual and emotional life; positive and negative feeling, weakness and strength, are but the double sides of the same coin.

This Lent we have been journeying in our daily program with the Gospel of John. On Tuesday evenings we have been exploring our experience of the daily program. St Martin’s folk, like most middle-class Westerners schooled in rationalism, find directly reflecting on spiritual experience to be challenging. Temperamentally we prefer to know about, rather than know directly. Therefore in the interests of balance, in the Sunday adult forums, Linda+ and I have been presenting on the historical and communal context that gave rise to the unique theological themes of John’s Gospel.

The Gospel for Lent IV is drawn from John chapter 3, where the writer we know as John draws explicitly from Numbers 21. In so doing he forges an astonishing theological connection between the totem of the bronze serpent raised up in the midst of the Israelite camp and Jesus, raised high upon the cross.

Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world …. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Jesus is raised on the cross, not as an allopathic (combative) condemnation of sin, but as a homeopathic source of healing. As we gaze on an image of suffering, John’s core theological theme of God is love connects joy with sorrow, love with fear. Like joy and sorrow, love and fear are both manifestations of the same emotional matrix. Within the shadow cast by the totem of the cross, the impulse of fear that erupts in hatred is transformed into new energy for love.

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Socrates said that the unexamined life is a life not worth living. The season of Lent is akin to a laboratory for honing our capacity for spiritual reflection on the deeper currents that flow beneath the surface of our lives.

Beneath the surface of our day-to-day living, lie the toxins of shame, guilt, and the pain of relationship loss and failure –

that which the Irish poet John O’Donohue in his poem A Morning Offering calls the dead shell of yesterdays. But here also we find the grace of restoration and liberation or to draw from O’Donohue again to do at last what we came here for and waste our heart on fear no more.

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Mostly, we try to manage this process of self-reflection by ourselves. But we can’t always manage it alone. We are relational beings, and so there is a limit to how far we can get by simply talking to ourselves or even talking to God within the privacy of our own minds. When we can’t make progress on our own, what is needed is to be able to share our struggles with a trusted person within a larger context of God’s grace.

On page 447 of the Book of Common Prayer, many Episcopalians are surprised to discover the section called the Reconciliation of a Penitent. Reconciliation is one of the objective sacraments of the Church. It sets out a process designed to aid us when we feel emotionally or spiritually stuck, as when we sense that something is blocking the reworking of the toxin of pain and confusion. Unlike modern counseling which brings a psychological framework to bear on self-examination, Reconciliation brings a forgiveness framework to bear on our internal struggles.

The challenge of forgiveness is not whether God forgives us, but can we forgive ourselves!

Self-forgiveness flows from the grace of knowing we are already forgiven. We encounter that grace when we come to stand in the shadow of the cross.

Infected by the venom of life’s snakebites, feelings of self-condemnation, feelings of shame and sorrow, we come to stand in the shadow of the cross. Here we discover that our sorrow brings us to a deeper appreciation of joy.

The principles of spiritual homeopathy show us that sorrow and joy form parts of a single matrix.

Standing in the shadow of the cross we come to also face those inarticulate longings of the deepest regions of our heart.

In the shadow of the cross we come:

haunted by the ghost-structures of old damage – to be blessed by the longing that brings us here and quickens our soul with wonder – and the courage to listen to the voice of desire – the wisdom to enter generously into our own unease and to discover there the new direction our longing wants to take. (My paraphrasing from O’Donohue’s poem For Longing)

The Episcopal Church best sums up access to the sacrament of Reconciliation as all may, none must, but some should. Some people find in the Reconciliation of the Penitent a valuable and regular part of their spiritual formation. For others, it is a homeopathic healing action, taken at a particular time in pursuance of a restoration of an emotional and spiritual balance and health. Either way, this Lent why not consult with a priest near you?

A sermon from the Rev. Linda Mackie Griggs on John 2:13-22

                                                               

Lent came quickly this year, didn’t it? Hard on the heels of Christmas. But for some people that I spoke with before Ash Wednesday, it couldn’t come quickly enough. They may not have been mentally or logistically ready, but they were spiritually ready; for a season of reflection, prayer, and repentance. When the world comes to be too much with us it can be a genuine relief to step back, breathe, and relieve our hearts’ burdens by laying them down, opening them up, and naming them. That’s the beginning of repentance. It can be hard work to look deeply and critically at where we have missed the mark, but having done so we have a chance for a new start. And it’s easier to make a new start when we’re not carrying so much baggage.

So to that end, three weeks ago we began the annual journey of relearning who we are as Christians and whose we are as children of God. On Ash Wednesday, after receiving the ashes as a mark of our creatureliness and our mortality, we said the Litany of Penitence (which I commend to you for reading and prayer—p. 267 of the Book of Common Prayer.)

The Litany of Penitence is a confession, yes, but it’s more detailed than our General Confession. It gets specific about our sins, and I do mean Our. It is really important to read the Litany in the dual context of our selves as individuals and ourselves institutionally and culturally. This is when we turn our gaze not only to what have we done—or not done– but also to those sins in which we are complicit. It can be a searing examination:

We have been deaf to your call to serve, as Christ served us… Have mercy on us, Lord.

We confess— Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people, Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts, and our dishonesty in daily life and work. Accept our repentance, Lord, for the wrongs we have done: for our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty, 

Have mercy. We confess. Accept our repentance. We are called to own up to our failings and to accept God’s invitation to do better. The Litany of Penitence makes viscerally real the harm that we have done to God’s people and to God’s creation. But the purpose is not to make us wallow in guilt. It is to make us pay attention. And change. That is what true repentance is—it is a returning, a realigning, a reconnecting.

Okay so far. But here’s where we can be drawn up short: 

Restore us, good Lord, and let your anger depart from us;
Favorably hear us, for your mercy is great.

“Let your anger depart from us.” 

I confess that I have struggled here. I have stood in this pulpit, and in that chapel, in KidZone upstairs and sat at the coffee shop in Wayland Square proclaiming a loving, merciful, creative and compassionate God, yet, here it is; a God whose anger seems to need to be appeased in order for me to obtain mercy. How do we absorb this? How do we reconcile these competing images?

“In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” 

How do you un-see an angry Jesus? You can’t. Or perhaps it’s better to say, you shouldn’t.

Many of us—most of us, probably– prefer an image of Jesus’ face filled with love, wisdom, and compassion. The vision of Jesus’ visage instead suffused with anger, even outrage, wielding a whip of cords—this is hard to face, particularly for those who might have experienced anger directed negatively; in a way that is abusive, controlling, and manipulative. For these people, an angry Jesus is especially difficult to un-see, or to see in anything but negative, un-hopeful, light.

It is important, though, to remember that, just as love has many definitions—romantic love, agape love, parental love– so does anger. And if we are to engage this morning’s Gospel constructively we need trust that the anger of Jesus here is not controlling or abusive, born of his insecurity or fear. This is the protective anger of a parent who sees a child darting into traffic, yelling, “Stop!!!” This is righteous anger; an anger born of a need and desire to bring into alignment something that has gone off track—the kind of anger that can catalyze change. The kind of anger that can make people stop and listen.

So no, you can’t un-see an angry Jesus. But you can stop. And listen to him. You can try to see what he sees. According to New Testament scholar Raymond Brown, one of the motifs John uses in this passage is a framework of replacement:

“’Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ … he was speaking of the temple of his body.” 

In positing Jesus as a replacement for the Temple, the author of John’s Gospel was alluding to the alienation of his community from the synagogue, and their need to reinterpret Jewish institutions from a Christian perspective. Here Jesus was redefining what was holy for God’s people. He was saying that the Temple authorities had forgotten who they were by effectively allowing commercial interests to be the driving force behind the worship of God. People could not have access to worship if they did not have the right currency with which to purchase animals to sacrifice—doves for the poorest and livestock for the wealthiest. No money, no sacrifice. No sacrifice, no worship. And this was a crucial issue. The Temple authorities had become gatekeepers, focused more on what could keep people out rather than what should invite them in. They had forgotten the essence of their identity—People of God who, before all else, were called into exclusive relationship with their Creator and Liberator: “I am the Lord your God…you shall not make for yourselves any idol…” The idol had become money. The idol had become access and control. And Jesus was calling them out.

Jesus was calling them to remember who they were. And in remembering their identity they were invited to see where holiness truly lay. Not in the stones of the Temple but in Jesus himself. The temple of his Body.

Think for a minute about Incarnation. The Incarnation—the embodiment– of the Christ in the human form of Jesus is an expression of God’s creative love for us; showing us how precious we are, and not just us, but all of Creation, which has been called the first Incarnation. Creation is holy. Creation is sacred—loved into being at the very beginning. And when Jesus stood in the Temple and declared that he was the Temple—tear this temple down and I will raise it up in three days—he was saying a couple of things. First, he was saying that God resides in the Temple of his body—a prime example of the High Christology that marks this Gospel. And he was also saying that not just his Body was holy, but all that God has created and called beloved is holy as well. Jesus may be the ‘big I’ Incarnation, but ‘little i’ incarnation is all of us, and it is no less holy, sacred and beloved.

So Jesus was grieved—righteously angry that the people had forgotten what was holy, and he challenged them to remember who they were and whose they were.

To repent

To repent is to turn. As we look into the face of an angry Jesus we are called, not to face him and fear him but to turn and to stand with him. With him and in him. To see what he sees. To see where we have gone off track, or where, like a cherished child, we’ve run into traffic, headed for disaster. He calls us to stop! To turn and see through his eyes the many, many beloved creatures of God that we do not see—that we do not truly see– for how precious they are.

The Litany again invites us:

Accept our repentance, Lord, for the wrongs we have done:…for our blindness to human need and suffering… For all false judgments, for uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbors, and for our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us, For our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us…

Accept our repentance, O Lord. Help us to see what you see, through your eyes—the eyes of love. Accomplish in us the work of healing, wholeness, and reconciliation, that we may show forth your hope, your compassion, and your glory in the world. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recently, some of us attended a seminar on how to prepare for a mass shooter event. Our St Martin’s takeaway from this session is the realization that we must develop a clear protocol of steps, documented on cards publically displayed, that instruct our vergers and others in leadership on the steps to follow in the event of such an emergency.

On Thursday, I met clergy colleagues from the Central Deanery at our monthly lunch and I learned that in some parishes the takeaway from this seminar was a reinforced belief that parishioners must now come to church armed. All the priests around the table were of a common mind concerning carrying guns in church. We all believed and continue to believe that unless you are a member of the police, i.e. those charged with an official duty of care to protect the public, the bearing of arms in church begs significant theological questions. We also recognized that the protection of gun free spaces continues the age-old understanding of the church as a sanctuary space – a place of safety free from the creeping paramilitarization of our civic life.

The current gun debate and the more controversial discussion about guns in schools and churches seems only to further generate copious heat but little light. The failure to make sensible traction in this debate is a failure to confront the enemy within that confounds all sides in an attempted conversation, namely fear. Fear, as in a state of pervasive fear-fullness has extended an icy grip upon our hearts. Fearful hearts feed a culture of communal paranoia in which everyone becomes afraid. But the question never asked is – Of what are we afraid? What lies at the source of our fear?

Guns in church

Issues of major civic controversy have contested histories.

 “The earliest mandatory gun carrying law is a 1619 Virginia statute that required everyone to attend church on the Sabbath, “and all suche as beare armes shall bring their pieces, swords, pouder and shotte.” Those failing to bring their guns were subject to a three shilling fine.lxi This law was restated in 1632 as: “All men that are fittinge to beare arms, shall bring their pieces to the church….”lxii While the original motivation in colonies both North and South for bringing guns to church was fear of Indian attack, by the eighteenth century, the Southern colonies‟ concerns appear to have shifted to fear of slave rebellion. Virginia‟s 1619 and 1632 statutes were somewhat vague as whether all white men were required to come armed to church or not, because of the qualification “fittinge to beare arms.” The requirement was more clearly restated in a November 1738 statute that required all militiamen to come to church armed, if requested by the county‟s militia commander. Other language in the statute suggests that protection of the white inhabitants from possible slave uprising was now the principal concern.lxiii 

Rhode Island‟s 1639 law ordered that, “none shall come to any public Meeting without his weapon.” There was a fine of five shillings for failing to be armed at public meetings.liv Maryland did likewise in 1642: “Noe man able to bear arms to goe to church or Chappell… without fixed gunn and 1 Charge at least of powder and Shott.”lv The Rhode Island town of Portsmouth passed a similar requirement in 1643,lvi as did New Haven Colony in 1644.lvii 

In 1637 Massachusetts, Anne Hutchinson‟s Antinomian heresy threatened the social order. Hutchinson‟s beliefs had spread rapidly through Puritan society, and “some persons being so hot headed for maintaining of these sinfull opinions, that they feared breach of peace, even among the Members of the superiour Court… those in place of government caused certain persons to be disarmed in the severall Townes, as in the Towne of Boston, to the number of 58, in the Towne of Salem 6, in the Towne of Newbery 3, in the Towne of Roxbury 5, in the Towne of Ipswitch 2, and Charles Towne 2.”civ”. From  Colonial Firearm Regulation  by Clayton E. Cramer

It seems that there were exceptions to arms bearing in the 13 Colonies. External enemies: Indian’s, and slaves were prohibited where possible from carrying arms. But so too were those deemed internal enemies also prohibited: heretics, and Catholics. In fact, for the privilege of being barred from the Colonial militias, Catholics were given the privilege of being taxed twice over. Following the Boston Tea Party, the British government proceeded to confiscate guns held by the local militias in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and to impose law and order by use if the standing army. This move only further fanned the flames of revolutionary zeal.

Following the successful outcome of the Revolution, continual anxiety concerning the possibility of potential British reinvasion, together with a continued communal anxiety about Indian attack and slave revolt led Congress to enact the Second Amendment giving constitutional protection to the right of the citizenry to bear arms in self-defense and defense of the community and the state.

Changing context

The right to bear arms is understandable within the colonial and post-revolutionary historical context. However, the argument that the context that pertained in colonial and post-revolutionary American can be in any realistic manner a blueprint for America in the 21^st- century remains a highly contested and contentious one.

Fast forward 300 years and we find that anxiety concerning a communally feared ‘other’ against whom an armed civilian populace was seen as a necessity -no longer reflects our context. Modern-day Americans have no need to protect themselves against Indian attack, slave revolt, the undermining of civic order by heretics, not to mention Catholics or the threat of invasion by a foreign power. Communal and national anxieties of this variety have been replaced by something much more frightening -a fear of one another.

Today the Second Amendment is defended as a necessity in order that we might defend ourselves against our neighbor. In some quarters the right the bear arms is viewed as a necessary protection against even our own government. There is a common saying that the best defense against a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun. Yet, in our society, beyond a clear threat from armed, unstable individuals and criminal elements, who is it we define as a bad man?

Mutual mistrust now leads us to view our very neighbors, especially those we can identify as somehow different from ourselves, as the objects of fear. A paranoid mindset has taken hold of our imaginations so that our neighbors become viewed as potentially dangerous and unpredictable.

Because we can’t know what anyone might do, coupled with the realization that anyone might be carrying a gun, everyone becomes an object of our fear.

Gospel guidance

In Friday’s text from Meeting Jesus in the Gospel of John, our Lent 2018 program, we read: 

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, [the doors being locked for fear of the Jews] Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you’. After he said this he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.

In his reflection on this text Brother Geoffrey posed the question: Where are the locked places in your life?

The first disciples were afraid. They had locked themselves away for fear of the world on the other side of the door. For John and his community of Christian Jews, their fear and anger focused on their Jewish neighbors as the community of the synagogue that had recently expelled them. Writing some 60 years later, in the period following the fall of the Temple and the expulsion of the Christian Jews from the synagogues, John uses the experience of the first disciples as a metaphor for his own community’s struggle with fear of neighbor. What is John’s answer to that fear? It is Love. To be more exact it is being loved. But as I explored last week in To Resist Being Loved being loved requires something of us!

In the section of Mark’s Gospel read for the second Sunday in Lent Jesus speaks plainly about the need to rebuke the pervasive state of fear-fulness that grips our hearts and imaginations. To paraphrase his words he seems to be saying:

if anyone who wants to follow me they must first confront their fear, bear their own and one another’s pain and do as I am doing.

In the words get behind me Satan, Jesus rebukes Peter’s unconscious state of fear-fullness, provoked by the foretelling of his arrest and death. His reference to Satan clearly suggests that Jesus sees this state of fear-fullness as misalignment with God, and a state that exposes us to a realignment with the values of this world – values that pose self-defense and aggression, flight or fight, as the only available options.

Now here’s the ultimate question:

is the preservation of one’s own life a principle that takes priority over every other principle and value in life?

If we look to the gospel message for an answer, it’s clear that Jesus does not think so.

Instead, Jesus poses the question:

For what will it profit someone to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?

We forfeit our lives when we live from a place of unexamined fear-fulness. We forfeit our lives when we fail to see God’s love of ourselves reflected in the face of our neighbor. I forfeit my life when I believe that my self-defense has a higher value than the possibility that I may be called upon to give my life to save another. In the face of a confrontation with someone with a gun intent on killing me, my being unarmed may result in my death. Although in that moment courage my may desert me, until then, I intend to live as best I can – knowing that living is a risky business.

The invitation heard in all the great religions is to transcend the limitations of our animal instincts. As John witnesses and we can all attest, the antidote to fear-fullness is love. But the commandment to love and be loved requires something of us, a particular kind of surrender of ourselves to God.

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and the sake of the gospel, will save it.

No one has said that accompanying Jesus on the road to Jerusalem will be easy.

 

Verse 9 of Mark’s first chapter opens with these words:

In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “ You are my beloved Son, with you, I am well pleased.”

It ‘s so good to get back to Mark’s gospel in the Lectionary’s three-year cycle of gospel readings. Mark’s narrative is spare and uncluttered with extraneous detail. As we can see in the passage above, Mark does not describe events from the safety of the past tense. He writes in the continuous present. Using the ing verb ending, Mark ushers us into the action as it happens, e.g. and just as he was coming up out of the water he saw the Spirit descending like a dove on him.

Mark’s language is also personal and direct. God speaks directly to Jesus: “You are my son, the Beloved, with you, I am well pleased”. It’s interesting to compare Mark with Matthew’s version of this same story where God says: “This is my son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased”.

So who does Matthew think God is addressing? Certainly not Jesus! Perhaps the reason for the difference is that Matthew has already identified who Jesus is in his birth narrative. In Matthew and Luke Jesus is born as God’s son. Jesus already knows who he is and so God’s speaking at his baptism seems to be for someone other than Jesus’ benefit. But in Mark, there is no doubt that God is speaking directly to Jesus.

The question that intrigues me is this: is Mark suggesting that God is telling Jesus something he does not already know? Does Jesus know he is the Son of God before God identifies him as such at this moment of baptism?

Because Mark gives us no backstory on Jesus birth or origin, his appearing before John to be baptized is his first arrival on the scene. What really excites me is that in Mark, God does not talk about Jesus in the third person as reported in Matthew and Luke, but names Jesus, to his face, as the Beloved with a capital B. This is not a beloved, but THE BELOVED. And it appears from Mark’s construction of the story that the process by which Jesus comes to be the Beloved is not by birth, but adoption. We are also children of God, not by birth, but through adoption. And our adoption, like that of Jesus’, is through baptism, a baptism at which God names us also as beloved – although with a small b.

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This leads me to ask what is our experience of being be-loved by God?

We are coming to the end of the first week of our participation in the Lent Program from SSJE and The Virginia Seminary – Meeting Jesus in the Gospel of John. The theme of this week has been the love of God. Each day we have been invited to respond to a short Scriptural passage and journal our responses and associations as the text as it works it’s way into us. I have found that what really works well for me is not to journal at a single sitting, but to carry the journal around with me throughout the day. In those moments of trying to remember to pause by creating a space between the ending of one activity and the beginning of the next, I read the text again and jot down some more associations and responses.

The real challenge for me has been to take seriously John’s message that God loves me. I am beloved, not because of anything in myself that is particularly lovable. I am God’s beloved, because God has first and foremost, loved me.

I have been curious to note my emotional response to being addressed as beloved. Theologically and intellectually I understand myself to be the recipient of God’s love. Yet, emotionally, I shy away from this for I feel and know myself to be both unworthy and ungrateful.

George Herbert’ poem Love Bade Me Welcome exactly describes my shying away. When God tells me I am beloved my natural reaction perfectly echoes Herbert’s words:

….I, the unkind the ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee. 

It’s as if I want to tell God: thank you, but no thank you! To be beloved of God is too intrusive and potentially demanding, too intimate a suggestion. It’s too much for me to accept because the reality of God’s love for me takes me way out of my comfort zone.

The human existential reality is that it’s hard to be loved. It is so much easier to the lover. The lover has all the control. Between us, and God, there is a continual negotiation going on around this issue of loving and being loved. As the lover, God pursues us and has no intention of respecting our intimacy comfort zones.

The Rev. Mr. Herbert says it best when he puts God’s negotiation and pursuit of us in this way:

….I, the unkind the ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand and smiling did reply, ‘Who made the eyes but I?’

Truth Lord, but I have marred them, let my shame go where it doth deserve. 

Because Herbert lived and wrote in a time when Anglican theology was strongly influenced by a Calvinist emphasis on Jesus’ sacrifice, he naturally continues: 

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? 

Ah, My dear, then I will serve.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat,

So I did sit and eat. 

Finally, comes the human capitulation in the face of God’s relentless pursuit. 

If I was more spiritual I might say that my experience of God’s love for me is humbling. In reality, I shy away from it because I find it humiliating. I know that heaven is not about earning and deserving, but believing and receiving, yet, so much of my identity is predicated on being worthy as one deserving of God’s love only to the extent of having somehow, earned it – a ridiculous notion I know, but it’s buried deep in me and seems impervious to theological reason.

The truth is I am loved. We are all beloved because God’s love is gifted to us. Our response should be to open and receive this gift; letting our humiliation – our shame go where it doth deserve.

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Notice how Mark simply tells us that the Spirit drove Jesus out, in effect expelling him into the 40-day wilderness experience, being tempted by Satan? Again, note Mark’s preference for strong and active verbs; compare: immediately drove out – with Matthew’s more passive: was led out. 

Also, note how Mark provides no details as to the nature of the confrontation between Jesus and Satan. The detailed series of temptations come from Matthew and Luke, not from Mark.

I like Mark’s version better, not only for the stark beauty of its sparseness but because it allows us to populate Jesus’ time in the wilderness with our own imaginings.

Might Mark’s lack of prescriptive detail provide space to populate Jesus’ experience in the wilderness from within our own imaginations so that the 40-days become a more intimate struggle with our own demons?

As we move into Lent, let us look more deeply into our own experience of temptation and struggle. In particular, let us look head-on at the greatest temptation of all – to shy away from receiving our true identity as beloved of God

Mark ends this section with Jesus returning from his time of preparation in the wilderness to find John has been arrested. The time he says has come, the Kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe the good news! For us also, there’s no time to lose!

Listen here to Ralph Vaughan Williams setting of Herbert’s poem.

 

 

 

Margaret Wheatley writes about joy as an experience of connection, communion, presence, and grace within the ordinariness of our daily experience. She notes how it’s possible to have joy in moments of great suffering. Noting that it is in pursuit of happiness that we estrange ourselves from joy, she speaks of joy being the same as sadness for both states embrace us with an energy that is beyond physical – laughing or crying – it doesn’t matter.

Perhaps this seems so paradoxical as to not be true until we realize that joy and sadness are both states of self-transcendence. When we lose connection to the transcendent we are left to the tyranny of self – a state of profound disenchantment.

Faced with a birth, a wedding, an anniversary – we are captivated by joy. In the face of a death, a disaster, a tragedy of personal or epic proportions, sorrow and sadness capture us as we suffer with, console, and love one another.

The joy we so long for may not be found on mountaintops but it must be found somewhere. It’s not distance that separates us from a life-enhancing encounter with the living God, but a preoccupation with self that makes self-transcendence impossible.

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The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is to my mind one of the towering figures in contemporary philosophy. Joshua Rothman in an op-ed in the New York Times last year wrote that Taylor:

has explored the secret histories of our individual, religious, and political ideals, and mapped the inner tensions that cause those ideals to blossom or to break apart.

Taylor’s massive opus A Secular Age explores the historical, religious, and political developments leading to our arrival in the current secular age. He contrasts the year 1500 when it was impossible not to believe in God with the impossibility of such belief for many today. He charts the route of travel as the culture of the West moved from the impossibility of unbelief to the impossibility of belief.

In the long 400-year emergence of our current secular Western mindset, Taylor notes the gradual transition from the age of enchantment to the age of disenchantment, Disenchantment denotes our loss of a connection to the transcendent.

When our connection to the transcendent is lost, all we are left with is ourselves – now occupying center stage. This is a place of great loneliness and disenchantment.

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Drawing on Taylor’s distinction between enchantment and disenchantment helps us to view the Biblical narratives as the product of an enchantment mindset. To the enchantment imagination, God is often frighteningly present in the physical structures of the material world. Divine power not only inhabits objects and places, it fills and disturbs the relational spaces that separate one person from another. God is made uncomfortably known in the sweep of great events through the unfolding epic that is the story of history.

The enchanted mindset understands God’s presence in spatial terms of up and down, in and out. Thus God inhabits sacred mountaintops, sacred spaces. The encounter between the divine and human takes place only after a laborious journey up to the mountaintop where God dwells in a self-revelation in blinding light.

Yet at the same time, the mountaintop is a place concealed in thick cloud. What comes to be known there cannot be spoken about. On the mountaintop Peter, James, and John experience an epiphany of Jesus clothed in his divinity as the Christ. This is a fleeting experience, no sooner glimpsed than it is gone – forever eluding their desire to capture and contain it. Then the disciples must negotiate the even more perilous path down the mountain carrying the experience. They must carry the remembrance of what they have seen and yet, at the same time, practice a kind of forgetting.

Events on the mount of the Transfiguration are only at a midpoint in a long process towards the dénouement or the final act in Jesus’ ministry. It seems that in the spiritual life peak experience is only a means to, and not an end in itself.

As they were coming down the mountain Jesus ordered them, “tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead”.

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Today we do not look for God in material space-time. The acceptance by past generations, whose enchantment shaped expectations of encountering God in material objects and places is now firmly rejected by most of us as superstition. Nevertheless, the question is not does a separate spiritual dimension still exist for the modern imagination, but where and how does it exist for the modern disenchantment mind?

Spatial references to up and down don’t work in the same way for us. For us, God no longer inhabits the mountaintop. Heaven is no longer imagined as up there, or hell being down there. Yet, the metaphors of in and out still work for us. For a modern imagination, the spiritual realm is best conceived of as a parallel dimension that interpenetrates with space-time.

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said he’d been to the mountaintop, no one assumed he had actually climbed a mountain.

The mountaintop now becomes the metaphor for the possibility of a different order of experience, one that challenges our acceptance of the absence of the spiritual in lives given over to a preoccupation with our small self. We may no longer find God in the through the material world in quite the same way as our Biblical and generational ancestors did, yet, despite this God remains emotionally and experientially available to us.

The paradox is that while we reject enchantment as superstition, no generations crave with a greater intensity a desire of self-transcendence than we do. Magical realism, heroic superhuman sagas abound in Hollywood’s works. Opioids, marketed as a solution for physical pain establish a hold on society as a solution to the increasing levels of our spiritual pain.

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Margaret Wheatley speaks of joy as an example of a transcendent experience because joy is able to encompass both delight and sadness. Joy is not happiness, which is a very one-sided experience. Happiness is easily destroyed because it is the product of self-preoccupation. Joy radiates outwards, opening new pathways for interconnection and relief from self-preoccupation.

So here is the clue. For us today, transcendence is found in the web of interconnectedness with one another. We transcend the limited confines of self not into the emptiness of bliss, but into the joy of being fully present for one another. Wheatley quotes from the great 19^th-century Bengali poet and spiritual teacher, Rabindranath Tagore:

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

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The Transfiguration story is a halfway point in Mark’s account of the life and times of Jesus. It marks the transition point from preaching and teaching in the Galilean countryside to his final and eventful journey to Jerusalem.

The Visit of the Magi and the Transfiguration bookend the Christmas-Epiphany season. From here on, we move into a different section of the spiritual journey. The landscape becomes rocky and desert-like as we journey down the mountain into the season of Lent.

Is there no better time than in Lent than for us to renew our engagement with the debilitating experience of our preoccupied and disenchantment self?

A sermon from the Rev Linda Mackie Griggs for Epiphany 5

“He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.”

It has been said that a preacher should preach about two things: About the Gospel, and about 10-15 minutes. That old quip came to mind because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about time. Maybe it’s the turning of the new year. Maybe it’s the imminence of Lent so quickly on the heels of Christmas, leaving us with no breathing space. Maybe it’s the fact that Malcolm and I updated our wills this past week. Regardless, time has been a thing lately.

It’s not a major revelation that time’s passage is puzzling. It purports to be steady and measured; marked in precise intervals by atomic clocks—and on our cell phones. But anyone who has lain awake at 3:39 in the morning and contemplated the endless sleepless and usually worry-filled hours ahead, and then compared that to the fleeting seconds of cozy sleep that pass so quickly after you hit the snooze button— anyone who has had that experience knows that time is fickle. It even varies from person to person; I read recently that the past year has gone by either painfully slowly or relatively quickly depending upon how we respond to current events.

As Einstein demonstrated, and as we all know, time has subjective qualities that render it at once measured, steady and relentless, yet also ebbing, flowing, and mysterious.

I wonder if that’s because time is so tightly entangled with mortality. How much time do we have left? How much time for our friends and loved ones? And not just on a personal level—a few weeks ago the entire state of Hawaii thought it had twenty minutes left on earth. Monday’s Providence Journal had a front page article

about preparedness for nuclear attack. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists clock,

that measures how close the world is coming to nuclear war, moved thirty seconds closer to midnight. Things haven’t been this tense in decades. And it’s bound to affect our outlook on the future. How do we look toward tomorrow if we don’t know if there will be tomorrow?

Well, that’s depressing.

I know, but it’s a serious conversation that I was having just a few days ago.

There’s a country song that’s called “Live Like You Were Dying” that posits what we would do if we knew we had just a little time left, and the idea would be to cram all the fun and excitement and love into a short span, and not waste a minute on ‘the small stuff’. But to live like you’re dying also risks a mentality of the heck with responsibility, do what you want because it just doesn’t matter anymore.

So what’s the alternative?

Perhaps rather than living as though there’s no tomorrow, it would be better to live—and plan—in hope and faith that there will be tomorrow because really, even if everything were calm and perfect in the world we still don’t know how much time we have on earth. We have as much as we have; that’s the case now, just as it has always been. The question is not how much time we have left, but what will we do with what we have?

And that is what gently weaves its way through our scripture lessons today, including Isaiah. “Have you not known? Have you not heard?” This gorgeous passage from Second Isaiah is a reassurance and reminder to the people not to despair;

that their time will come, and that the unsearchable God of Creation who has numbered and named the stars has every creature in God’s hand, and they are called to wait faithfully for deliverance that will come.

Eventually. In time.

For Israel it was seventy years.

And during that time they would establish themselves and become a community in exile—living in faith and hope for a tomorrow that they might not see, but the generation after them would. Isaiah was calling them to wait, not in despair of time running out for themselves, but in anticipation of—and preparation for—the future for the next generations.

In Paul’s letter to the people of Corinth you see him encouraging the Corinthians to come out of their identity silos and walk a bit in the shoes of others, which indicates that the concept of empathy was apparently a challenge for the young developing church. But what does this have to do with time?

When Paul wrote this letter, late in the first century, he felt the pressure of time in a different way from the people of Israel in Isaiah’s time; rather than feeling that time was stretching endlessly ahead, Paul felt that time was coming to a close—that the Second Coming was imminent, and that the community—a diverse, cosmopolitan and fractious bunch, needed to get it together quickly. The example that he was setting was of a person who so deeply felt God’s call that he was willing to make a free gift of his ministry, not asking for reward.

“To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews…to the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak…” The way to preach the Gospel, in other words,

is to live the Gospel; to respond with empathy, truly listening to one another from a place of vulnerability and humility. Don’t waste precious time quarreling.

Paul’s mission was to form a beloved community in preparation for the Reign of God—a time that was at once quickly approaching and yet already here. Time was short; who knew if there would be a tomorrow? The call to the people of God was to live in whatever time they had with a Kingdom mindset, not in fear but in fulfillment of, and anticipation of, abundant life.

So to Paul time was at once precious and meaningless—something to be savored and used well, and not dwelt upon as a commodity for its own sake;

In a way this helps to express the concept of God’s time—Kairos. God is in all of time

and therefore not ruled by it. To be mindful of God’s time is to be open to its fluidity and mystery; to understand the Incarnation of Christ as God entering into time

in the person of Jesus, who embodies the intersection of time and eternity.

In the Gospel today we see time moving quickly, and distinctively. More than in the other Gospels Mark expresses urgency. Like Paul, he was writing very early after the Resurrection and felt the pressure of time—the awareness that Christ’s return was imminent. And his narrative shows this urgency. Things move quickly—the word, ‘immediately’ is used over 40 times in this Gospel. And today we see Jesus moving from pillar to post, dogged by Simon Peter as though he was some kind of a handler with a clipboard and an itinerary—“…after the synagogue, Jesus, you have a healing appointment at my house, followed by teaching, healing and deeds of power in the evening, and we have an early start tomorrow for spreading the Good News, so you’ll want to rest up…” When Jesus escapes long enough to pray—he has to wait until everyone is asleep to manage it—the disciples hunt him down. It’s exhausting.

So Mark has squeezed a lot into a relatively short amount of time, but what does this tell us? What is the invitation of this story in our pondering of time’s mystery?

It lies in resurrection.

In returning to time—getting it back. Jesus came to Peter’s mother-in-law, sick with a fever, took her by the hand and lifted her—in other translations, raised her up. “Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.” For years I saw this passage as an excuse for getting snarky about patriarchy, or mothers-in-law, but no; this is actually a pivotal expression of Christian identity by Mark, who had an almost Pauline understanding of what a kingdom life should look like for someone living in the now-and-not-yet.

The Greek term for “lifted up” or “raised” is the same one Mark uses for Jesus’ resurrection. And he uses it in six healing stories in his Gospel—six instances of people being restored to their families, to wholeness, and in a way to time itself—

lifted up from the suspension of time that can mark pain or illness and returned to the flow of daily life. From Mark’s perspective the healing grace of Jesus is a form of resurrection.

And the response of the healed is what?

To serve.

“…and she began to serve them.”

The word he uses is a form of the Greek for deacon—one who serves. So this story is not one of patriarchy as usual. Rather, it’s telling us that in response to Christ’s healing grace and renewal we are called to serve. That is how God calls us to spend our time—no matter how much or how little we have.

What would you do if time were offered back to you?

Sandy Buffy knows the answer to that question. In 1997 she was diagnosed with a life-threatening pancreatic tumor. Faced with the decision of whether to undergo extremely risky surgery to remove it, she was given a two percent—Two. Percent.—

chance of surviving the surgery. As a mother to three small children, twin boys and a girl, she wanted to see them grow up, so she chose the surgery. Her husband and family were advised to say their goodbyes, which they did. Can you imagine how wrenching that must have been?

And she survived.

Two Percent.

And since then she has lived a life of daily gratitude. Sandy is an artistic person, and after her recovery her creativity went into overdrive. Beginning working from her home in Charlotte, she now has a studio and gallery in downtown Cleveland, creating and teaching and having a wonderful time. And she has given 100% of her profits to charity.

One Hundred Percent.

“And she began to serve them.”

Sandy embraced her resurrection by throwing herself into a life of gratitude, beautifully symbolized by the fact that she works with materials that have been used before—bottle caps, dryer lint, random bits of chain, roofing copper, what have you. She serves by giving things new life, and then gives again of the rewards from her creations.

More than anyone I know Sandy has taught me about the precious meaningless of time—how to live joyfully and compassionately in each moment while holding very lightly the fact that the number of moments allotted to us is a mystery, and there is no point in fretting about our inability to control it.

Chances are we won’t experience such a dramatic moment as Sandy’s in our own lives, so how can we participate in the precious meaningless of time?

Jesus experienced it when he withdrew in the dark hours of the morning to pray. Like Jesus himself, prayer is the intersection of time and eternity; a way of allowing ourselves, within the framework of our lives, to rest in the timelessness—the eternal present/past/future –of God. Or consider the Eucharist: When we partake in Christ’s mysterious and real presence, we participate in a sacrament in which the events of the past and the promise of the future meet in the present moment. That is God’s time.

(And that is why some priests take off their watches before every service.)

In prayer and sacrament we are offered sacred time; precious time rendered mysterious and meaningless in the presence of God. We are offered healing grace and are lifted up in renewed wholeness every time, and every time called to get up, to go out, serve the Lord, and be the Good News.

 

 

 

 

 

2017 Rector’s Report

 

Taken together the reports from the various ministry groups in this Annual Report provide in detail a record of achievements in 2017. I have no wish to duplicate this information here. For the purposes of this annual state of the parish reflection, I want to review 2017 through the lenses of spiritual practice, engagement, and overall health, a slightly different take on our three strategic priorities.

Christian communities often get bogged down in issues of belief and miss the point that what we believe is often much less impactful that how we live and act. The prayer of General Thanksgiving recited every day at the end of Morning and Evening Prayer puts it succinctly:

And, we pray, give us such as awareness of your mercies, that with truly thankful hearts we may show forth your praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up ourselves to your service, and walking before you in holiness and righteousness all our days. 

We express our discipleship not through the words we speak but in the manner of our living. Hence spiritual practice is a first lens through which to review these past 12 months.

Spiritual Practice

Worship is the first element of spiritual practice. At the Bishop’s visitation in January 2017 he consecrated the new nave altar and communion rails. The care and attention given to the design and manufacture together with the financial generosity of members in the congregation symbolize our commitment to the importance of worship as a community of practice.

In 2017, the average Sunday (ASA) attendance danced around the 120-140 mark. ASA is gradually falling as a stable measurement as older patterns of weekly attendance change. In addition to our traditional schedule of services, we added a new worship opportunity in the form of a monthly, Tuesday evening Eucharist during which the sacrament of anointing and laying on of hands with prayers for healing is the special focus. So far numbers are slowly climbing at this service as word of mouth promotes this as an opportunity to connect spiritual practice with the emotional and spiritual yearnings in 21^st-century life.

In 2017, the offering of prayers for healing in the chapel during communion has drawn increased numbers of folk for whom this is an important support in bearing the burdens of the heart. Attendance at the weekly Meditation Hour on Thursdays continues to hold steady with the introduction of a more body focused meditation practice. On the Thursday before Christmas, we held our second Blue Christmas service, with a focus on the experience of sorrow in a season of joy. This year we drew 70 folk, roughly double the numbers on the same event in 2016.

It’s clear to me that a traditional Anglican emphasis on worship continues to not only define our community identity but is leading us to encounter a deeper spiritual connection with God as a community as we peer into the mists of an uncertain 2018.

The second element of spiritual practice in 2017 has been in the area of embedding the Bible through the ambitious program of the Bible Challenge – reading the Bible over the course of a year. An unthinking and unreflective approach of – it must be true because the Bible tells us so, as well as a cynical rejection of the Bible as a source for anything applicable for life in today’s world, are both attitudes that are equally challenged when we are exposed to the unfolding epic of God’s relationship with the Judao-Christian community over the span of some 4000 years of social and theological development. Scripture is a poor and tyrannical rulebook. However, it is a powerful source of wisdom for how human beings and communities can find strength and purpose as they contend with the sorrows and joys of living with God at the center of their lives.

I don’t have an accurate sense of how many people are actually participating in the Bible Challenge program but in 2017, yet, we have had more conversation about the Bible than before, and Bible Study has flourished in surprising settings.

For instance, Vestry meetings no longer start with a ritualistic pause and a prayer as Vestry members have each taken responsibility to begin meetings with a personal reflection on a Biblical passage, inviting wider discussion. A good third of our Vestry meetings is now given over to spiritual practice in the form of Bible reflection at the beginning and Compline or night prayer at the end. The Vestry, long the bastion of the practically minded has in 2017 continued its evolution into a leadership team of spiritually inspired vision crafters.

Yet in 2017 the Bible Challenge has deepened our scriptural fluency and tolerance for complexity. Whether you are participating actively or passively in the Bible Challenge, it continues into 2018 as a central element of spiritual practice with knock-on effects that are as yet, hard to measure. 

Member Engagement

If we were a retail organization we would report a sharp increase in foot traffic in 2017. As a lens, engagement offers us a very positive story to tell in 2017. We had a staggering 120 visitors in 2017. The definition of a visitor is a new face we’ve not seen before. Of the 120 visitors, 40 have become members.

The website has played an increasing role in showcasing the parish to enquirers. While usage by members remains disappointing considering the amount of time spent on maintaining the website, it is a key factor for enquirers in finding their way to our doors. At the end of the year, e began to revamp the website in the direction of greater simplicity and pictorial appeal. The new design will be launched within a month or so into 2018.

The fact that I can tell you how many visitors we have had in 2017 indicates an enhancement in our ability to capture this information thanks to the tireless efforts of those involved in the welcome ministry. I commend their report to you. It’s also clear to me that, in 2017, increased energy for engagement has resulted in us taking greater strides towards being an every member ministry community where everyone takes responsibility for engagement with newcomers. Over and over again, newcomers report that this is the most friendly and welcoming church they have come into. One young man who attended on a baptism Sunday said: I felt like I had stumbled into a family gathering. He stayed and was formally received into membership of the Episcopal Church by the bishop last Sunday.

In addition to increased visitors on Sunday morning, we are seeing participation from non-members for weekday offerings, for example 10 women attended the Women’s Spirituality Group who are not part of Sunday congregational attendance. This is a sign of how we have opened another doorway for people to participate in the life of St Martin’s.

An important challenge in 2018 will be able to offer men an experience of solidarity that functions to open a door to men in our wider community, beyond the boundaries of the Sunday congregation.

Any increase in numbers is an amazing achievement of swimming upstream against the flow of traditional New England indifference to the serious practice of Christian faith and the demographic challenge of a still sluggish Rhode Island economy.

A picture of Health

Financial support is not the only indicator of levels of engagement and health in our community, but it is a crucially informative metric. As with average Sunday attendance, there continues a decline in the number of pledging members. This is a global phenomenon, again reflecting changing generational demographic priorities. I commend the Treasurer’s Report where you can gain a sense of the underlying trends, which are resulting in a smaller number of pledging units contributing a higher level of income – to produce in 2017 the first surplus in some years.

At the beginning of 2017, the draw from the endowment was budgeted at 5.5%. We will end the year with a draw of slightly less than 5%. I note that this is a real achievement, for when I arrived in 2014, the endowment draw was 7 +%. The autumn annual renewal campaign netted 22 new pledges going into 2018.

Health as a lens revealing a steady progress. In my first two years at St Martin’s my focus was on reenergizing the parish system. 2017, my third year, shows a parish system fully re-energized.

This is thanks to all of you believing that St Martin’s is a community that is not only worth your continued support, but a community worth your enhanced investment of time, talent, and treasure.

Of the three elements of personal investment -time, talent, and treasure, time remains at the highest premium as the pressures of modern life take their toll on us. In 2018, the danger will be that despite an increase in membership numbers and a healthy balance sheet we remain in danger of overheating as we all run at capacity to keep the size and complexity of our program going.

A phrase we will hear again in the coming year is – less is more, i.e. we must invest more energy in fewer programs In 2018, our priority remains one of becoming more and more a magnetic community of attraction, giving testament to Archbishop William Temple’s comment that:

The Church is the only institution that exists primarily for the benefit of those who are not its members.

2017, has been a phenomenal year for St Martin’s during which we have shown forth God’s praise, not only with our lips but in our lives.

In conclusion, I want to return to the notion I mentioned earlier that an overemphasis on believing is less impactful than focusing on how we live our lives.

It’s a false distinction in some senses because belief and practice are intertwined so that we can’t live and act well if our primary belief in the centrality of God in our lives is absent.

Let us continue into 2018 along the path we have chartered, a path of spiritual deepening characterized by the manner in which we {give} up ourselves to God’s service, walking in holiness and righteousness -all our days.

 

 

What do you know about the book of Jonah? Put up your hands (metaphorically if you are reading this) if you know the name of the city to which God asks Jonah to go? Do likewise if you know the name of the city to which he escapes in order to take a ship going in the opposite direction from the one God asks him to take? Raise your hands if you know what happens to Jonah after he is thrown overboard from the ship in the midst of the storm? I imagine if you can’t answer the first two questions you will get the third right. Because what we all know about the story of Jonah is that he is swallowed by a whale and spends three days cooling his heels in its fishy belly before being vomited up onto the seashore.

In the Bible Challenge, we will arrive at day 246 on Monday having recently read through the entirety of the Book of Isaiah and are now 13 chapters into Jeremiah. Judged by worldly standards of success none of the Major Prophets –Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah, Amos, Hosea, etc -seem to have been successful. They cry out about backsliding ways and the people refuse to repent. They draw attention to impending crises and the disasters predicted happen anyway. Now, in contrast, the prophet Jonah, a minor prophet if there ever was one, is a rip-roaring success. After some shilly-shallying about, he preaches for only a day to the citizenry of great Nineveh, calling them to turn from their evil ways. Low and behold, they do! At first sight, we might conclude that no one is more surprised than Jonah. But when we look deeper, we notice that Jonah is really pissed off because he knew beforehand what the outcome would be.

He tells God plainly that it was because he knew God would change his mind that he tried to avoid the task in the first place:

That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, O Lord, take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live. 

And God asks Jonah – Do you do well to be angry? meaning, Jonah, how does it serve you to be so angry?

This seems a very contradictory way for a prophet to behave and goes to the heart of the conundrum of this book of only four short chapters. When face with conundrum we all experience a strong impulse to cut through the uncertainty and confusion and make it simple anyway, regardless of the consequences.

So the simple interpretation is that the book of Jonah is about racial and religious intolerance and the desire to exclude those who are not members of our tribe from being the recipients of God’s grace. Despite his rip-roaring success with the folk in Nineveh by getting them to repent and thus enabling God to change his mind about wiping them from the face of the earth, Jonah, a good Hebrew, does not like God being merciful to a bunch of heathens. He likes even less being made to be God’s instrument in what appears to him to be a sorry affair.

How’s Jonah’s complaint ringing for you?

Jonah is a short book written sometime between the 5^th and 4^th- centuries BC during the period of the returning exiles from Babylon to Jerusalem. However, its setting is in an earlier 8^th-century time, probably around the 750’s when Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire was at its peak. Recall that it was in 721 that the Assyrians swept down from the North and destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel completely. The book’s plot of sending a Hebrew prophet to win the Assyrians over to God’s favor has some loaded undercurrents.

In reading any scriptural text the first question to ask is what is the purpose of the writer (s)? The book of Jonah, the son of Amitai, meaning son of truth, seems to be an appeal to the returning exilic community, busily rebuilding Jerusalem, warning them against the dangers of retreating into a racial and cultural exclusivism that places limits on God’s mercy and compassion.

Jonah is a warning to our human propensity to limit God’s abounding mercy so as to bolster our own fear and anxiety.

Did you know that Jews read the book of Jonah in the afternoon on the Day of Atonement? Picture this, the drama of the morning liturgy with its solemn chant of the Kol Nidre, the prayer of atonement is now past and the expanse of the afternoon opens before the fasting penitents whose hunger and thirst only increase as the day draws on. Reading Jonah reminds them of the fruitlessness of any attempt to evade the relentless task of examining the unpalatable truths of one’s life – at least in the last 12 months.

Jonah, despite his knowing better, is a model for the fruitlessness of attempting to evade God. Jonah rejects God’s purpose, i.e. God’s desire to pardon and save. Jonah sits in judgment on God by seeking to distance himself from God’s generosity.

How perverse it is that the thing we desire most for ourselves is also the very thing we work so hard to deny to others.

In a recently published book entitled, Jonah: The Reluctant Prophet, Erica Brown, of George Washington University:

Jonah is, in many ways, every man and woman who struggles with inadequacy, who confronts the darkness within and without…. Jonah is every person who has wrestled with insecurity, celebrates second chances and then realizes the path out is never linear. Jonah is the only Biblical Book that ends with a question, because his life became a question: is life worth it? Can we find meaning? Can we find Peace? 

My answer for now is that we cannot find meaning or peace without an honest examination of how we, individually and communally have participated in attitudes and actions that have sought to limit the extent of God’s mercy, compassion, and generosity to my/our tribe, my/our community, only to those like me/those like us.

The Lectionary in placing a reading from Jonah alongside Mark’s depiction of Jesus calling his first disciples presents us with an uncomfortable challenge. God is not only more generous and loving towards others who are different from ourselves than we might care for God to be, but God expects us to be her agents, his voice, her hands, his feet in mirroring God’s concern.

God calls us to be prophets, or in the more intimate language of the gospels, Jesus calls us to be his disciples. So what is our response? What kind of prophet, what sort of disciple are we prepared to be?

Jesus echoes God’s call for Jonah to go to Nineveh when he proclaims:

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; [but first, you must] repent and believe in the good news.

The Kingdom is good news in the midst of a world that continues to conform itself to the bad news of business as usual. By contrast, the Kingdom’s expectations of greater inclusion, deeper compassion, and more abundant mercy are realized when repentance as an honest confrontation with the truth of the past enables for a genuine state of reconciliation.

Are we like Jonah, or are we like Andrew and his brother Simon, James and his brother John? To be like Jonah is to sit in judgment on God through second-guessing and seeking to run away from the Kingdom’s expectations? Andrew, Simon, James, and John have little idea of what they are getting themselves into, all they know is it seems worth taking a risk by saying yes.

The time is now, the Kingdom of God is near. Which way will you follow?