In my last blog entry Sustaining Service, I noted that Episcopalians no longer expect to see God materially active in their day-to-day lives, or in the world around them. What’s more, I encounter men and women who have devoted lives of faithful service to Church and community and who have never expected God to even notice them. Is this the unfortunate consequence of low expectation or might it also be the self-effacing spiritual humility which is characteristic of our Anglican Culture in general?

That as may be, I also detect a recent movement, recent in the sense of a development of the last 100 years, whereby Episcopalians along with their Liberal Protestant neighbors have become confused between being in discipleship with Christ and being good persons doing only what good people do. A pervasive social humanitarianism has increasingly blinded us to the fact that the goal of Christian discipleship is not becoming good, but being in love.

I am aware that placing God as the object of our being in love seems strange to many Episcopalian ears. Such language has a very non-modern, vaguely revivalist tone. It is this revivalist-evangelical tone, so pervasive in the religious culture of United States, that Episcopalians see themselves in opposition to.  Although our Anglican Tradition of public worship has deep roots in mystical theology and uses the language of metaphysical experience, alas, at the personal level of our individual day-to-day lives we have come to view mystical or metaphysical experience as a relic of past centuries.

For many of us God has set the laws of the universe in motion and now stands off-stage. Our task is to be good servants and stewards of church and community. This attitude is akin to servants in a great house getting on with their work and never expecting to encounter, or be encountered by, the master of the house.

I recall Carl Jung having made a comment somewhere in his voluminous works about how 20th century people no-longer possess a medieval mindset. He was referring to something that Charles Taylor, in his magnum opus, A Secular Age refers to as the process of disinchantment. In the enchanted world of the medieval mindset, God is magically present and experienced as a tangible, material reality. In the enchanted world human beings experience the reality of God primarily through the external material world in contrast to internal emotional reality.

Taylor charts the historical process whereby the world of enchantment becomes supplanted.  The disenchanted world is a world in which God becomes displaced from external material reality. The first stage of this process relegates God to the sphere of internal emotional experience. The end of this process produces the secular age in which it is now possible for human beings to understand themselves and their world without any reference to the existence, let alone the presence, of God, active in the world and in their personal lives.

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Anglicanism has always displayed a surprising  openness to contemporary culture. Pick any age and Anglicans were in the lead among those Christians who embraced the spirit of each age. This is one of our great strengths, but also poses a danger for us; that in an age when God has largely disappeared from wider social and material discourse, we find it increasingly hard to contemplate a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Our deep liturgical life, designed to open us to the mysterious and yet identifiable experience of God permeating our experience, now functions as something that filters-out direct experience of God. For us the practice of religion has become very safe. The celebration of the community in love with God becomes the mere celebration of the community for, and of, itself.

My very superficial excursion into the historical process that has contributed to Episcopalians no-longer expecting to see God, is a preamble to saying, I wish I could be a person like Bartimaeus in the Gospel passage set for this Sunday, which is a continuation of Mark chapter 10.

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I just hate myself when, in an over-priced restaurant serving mediocre food, the waiter comes over and asks: ‘Is everything all right?’. I usually find myself responding in my best brought-up voice: ‘Everything is lovely, thank you’, and then muttering through the rest of the meal, ‘well I shan’t have to come here again!’

I wish, oh how I wish, I could be like Bartimaeus who seems to have no difficulty making a fuss in order to get what he wants. He is completely unperturbed by the admonishment of the people around him telling him to shush and not make such a scene.

Bartimaeus, is not only completely impervious to what others think of him, but he knows exactly what he wants. He also has no doubt about who it is that has the power to help him. Bartimaeus not only knows who Jesus is, he expects to be noticed and responded to, by Jesus. What is it that motivates Bartimaeus? If it’s self-confidence then he earns only my envy. If it’s his desperation, then he earns my admiration. Could I allow myself to show that degree of vulnerability and to take such a risk?

Although confidence and desperation are clearly part of his motivation, Mark intends us to see Bartimaeus’ action as faith-driven. The crowd tells him the commotion is caused by Jesus of Nazareth passing by. Bartimaeus does not call out Jesus of Nazareth in calling out to Jesus. He calls out instead for Jesus, Son of David (code for Messiah) to pay attention to him. Bartimaeus is compelled by the courage to believe, placing all his hope in the expectation that God will notice and hear him.

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In Jung’s sense, Bartimaeus has a medieval mindset. He lives in a world described by Taylor as one of enchantment. He is surrounded by a tangible and material presence of God’s Divine power. Divine power is located in objects, categorized as pure and impure. Divine power resides in places, this one holy, this one profane. It manifests through situations and people. If the divine is materially present then so too is Satan and evil. Evil too, surrounds Bartimaeus and he knows it, intimately! Being blind he may well have felt himself cursed. Certainly others would have attributed his blindness to the results of sin. Bartimaeus is a human being feared and shunned by others in his world as a source of spiritual defilement, a human manifestation of evil.

However, I have to conclude that Bartimaeus is not like me or you. His motivations and expectations have been shaped by a culture of enchantment, whereas, ours are shaped by living in a post-enchanted world, a world of  disenchanted, in which God is felt by us to be materially absent. There are some Christians who struggle to maintain the medieval mindset. However, Episcopalians are not found among these kinds of Christians. We no-longer look for God or really expect to be encountered by God. Instead, we live in a world of personal agency and personal responsibility. In fact, we are spiritually constrained to become increasingly self-referenceing within a world of disenchantment. We have become the authors of our own salvation.

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What then, is the value for us of this Gospel story? I believe Mark’s story still carries a value for us because it is through this story that God continues to speak to us. Culture separates us from the individual called Bartimaeus. However, Bartimaeus is still a human being. We share with him motivations that are still a condition of the human heart. Where we differ is in our sense of what expectations.

Bartimaeus has faith and the courage to hope. In that hope he risks not getting. He risks disappointment! Yet, Bartimaeus risks, with all his being, because he is at a point in his life where he can’t afford not to take the risk. Bartimaeus is a man who not only expects a response from Jesus, he also knows what he wants. It might have been easy for Jesus to assume he knows what Bartimaeus seeks, as in, another blind person to be healed. Yet, Jesus does not assume he knows and so asks Bartimaeus to asks him, what is it you want me to do for you?

As we share the contours of the human heart with Bartimaeus perhaps there are some questions that help us with this story.

• What have you seen or heard that brings you to back to Church week by week?
• Do you long to see hope walking by?
• What do you need Christ to free you from in order to become?
• What will it mean for you when God removes what has been holding you back in your life?

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Jesus connects with Bartimaeus in a manner that results in the removal of his blindness. This is because of a change that has already begun to take place inside him. Using the more appropriate terminology of our culture I might say that Bartimaeus’ faith, hope and courage to risk failure allows him and Jesus to come into alignment. We seek and find God through the way our hopes, and disappointments bring about an alignment between us, and God.

Borrowing from computer technology, the cordless keyboard and mouse have to come within range of the bluetooth signal. They have to be in alignment with the desktop. We come into alignment with God through giving expression to the yearnings of our hearts.

Mark’s Gospel story ends in a key phrase.  For weeks now, in successive sermon blogs, I have been mining this phrase to create an image for our coming into alignment with God. Mark tells us that Bartimaeus having regained his sight followed Jesus on the road.

I have been exploring in recent posts the central metaphor for discipleship – that of being on the road with Jesus. Jesus invites us to join him on the road. The road leads to Jerusalem. The Evangelist Mark records a series of events involving Jesus as he travels towards Jerusalem. Through the chronology of events Mark shows Jesus gradually revealing to those who are with him what being in discipleship means.  As in today’s section Mark 10:35-45 we once again see how the disciples continually remain imprisoned within the limitations of only what they are able to imagine. Their imaginations, like ours, have been shaped and remain encapsulated within very conventional ways of looking at the world. As I mentioned last week, the impact of Jesus’ teaching about the meaning of being a disciple has the potential to shake us to the core and break open our encapsulated world views like the proverbial martini – vigorously shaken and not just stirred. The road to Jerusalem is a metaphor functioning at two levels of perception. Jerusalem is both a place-name on a map and a symbol of the destination of our own road of discipleship. This is the destination for our own internal dying to the old in us and rising to the promise of the new.

Last week we passed the road sign TIME TO EXAMINE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH MONEY. Approaching this signpost we become uneasy, fearful of an implicit demand. We are unsure we will have the courage to meet this demand. Here we enter a less familiar stretch of the road. Here in order to pass-on we have to face-up to the most difficult realization of what being in discipleship means. It means accepting that being on the road requires us to relinquish our illusion that the money we earn is  ours to control. For it’s difficult to face the implication that if we long to open our hearts publicly, we cannot continue to keep the open or closed state of our wallets as a private matter between us and God. 

Having passed through this section of the road we may be somewhat relieved today to find that the next section of the road is better paved and the route more familiar to us. It is with relief that we approach the next sign post that reads: WELCOME GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANTS.

Yesterday, at the Diocesan Convention, Trinity Cathedral was recognized as a center for Jubilee Ministry. Trinity Cathedral has become designated by the Episcopal Church as a center for Jubilee Ministry. The concept of Jubilee Ministry is taken from Isaiah’s proclamation of the year of Jubilee – the seventh year when all social injustices will be righted. This is God’s call to his people to build societies based on divine principles of social justice. In this morning’s Gospel Jesus echoes an important element of Jubilee when he tells us that we are not to abuse one another through the exercise of power. Among us, he or she who wants to be first must become the servant on all.

While Episcopalians may have a low threshold for pain in the area of giving till it hurts, in the area of service they show a remarkable pain tolerance. Here at Trinity Cathedral we know about service. As was duly recognized yesterday at Convention,   we give of ourselves unstintingly in the service of others. The proof of this can be seen in the summary of ministry achievements for 2012, which you will all receive as part of your Annual Renewal Packs this morning.

So does this mean that we have met the challenge of Jesus’ teaching on servanthood and passed with flying colors? I think not! For while the product of our service is second to none, one question remains. What is the motivation for and the spiritual fruit of our service?

Much of our motivation for service seems to me to be continually outwardly focused. We long to make a difference in the world and we give of our energies to make the world a better place. Does this mean that we are good people only doing what good people should do? I suspect many of us operate from this motivation. Again while the product of our labors is beneficial, so much of our service could be seen as just another expression for our self-assertion – which is always an expression of our power. Service becomes our equivalent of following the commandements. The rich man in last Sunday’s Gospel followed the commandments as an expression of his self-assertion, his self-sufficiency, his being well and truly in control of his relationship with God. All of this masqueraded as spiritual faithfulness, and deep down he knew it, because he felt the promise of eternal life continued to evade him.

In our world, commitment to social justice, the imperative of the Year of Jubilee, is not a characteristic confined to Christians alone. Many non-believers hold Jubilee values with passion as an expression of Humanitarianism. I am not troubled by Humanitarianism. I welcome and applaud it. The rise of Humanitarianism, a product of the Enlightenment, has made our world an infinitely better place. The question I am asking is, is there a difference between being a disciple of Christ and being a good person, doing what good people do? For me there is a difference. The difference is not discernible in the product of our service but it is discernible in the motivation for, and the spiritual fruits of, our service.

The difference between a Christian and a Humanitarian approach to service lies in the direction of the motivation. For the Christian, it’s not enough to have the outward focused motivation of wanting to make the world a better place. For the Christian service is our response to God’s invitation to come into the intimacy of relationship. We are motivated to make the world better because we are in the process of growing more deeply in love with God. Growing in love with God through being in discipleship with Christ, is our motivation for service and produces the spiritual fruit that is the hallmark of our discipleship.

Anglican openness to a dialogue with culture has its dangers. We have become much influenced by the humanitarianism of the age.  As Episcopalians we no longer expect to see God active in the world. The world is no longer enchanted, a term coined by Charles Taylor. By this he means a world full of a magical sense of God in all things. Our world has become as Taylor terms it, disenchanted. God seems far off. God is the prime mover who has set up the clockwork of the universe to now run itself. Our job has become that of good servants of the machine oiling and cleaning and repairing so to maintain its efficiency.

Lives of service will always be missing something when the service is not motivated by a deep love of Christ and an expectation of being in relationship with Christ. In such a relationship we expect to encounter God intimately in our day-to-day living. In such a relationship we expect to not only notice God, but be noticed, by God! This personal component of intimacy with Christ, in which we feel a love for Christ and expect to be loved in return, is the engine of our service. It is also the spiritual fruit, the promise of eternal life, for which perpetually seek and for which our hearts are continually in restless search.

I discern that there are two kinds of need in our congregation. I see traditional church people, committed to lives of service and outreach. They are the backbone of this congregation. Their need is to enter into the intimacy of relationship with Christ and let this become the driver for their  service in the world. I encourage them to expect to see God and to see themselves no longer as merely faithful servants, good persons doing what good people do. They are called into the being-ness of discipleship that takes them beyond being merely useful to God. They are nothing less than courageous disciples of Christ, beloved of God and accompanying Christ on the road.

I see others here who have little experience of being good servants in any traditional sense. They are newer arrivals to this Cathedral, drawn here by a force that defies rational explanation. They are here because they know they can be no-where else. They sense here in the depth of the liturgy, God’s conversation with them, mediated through Lectionary and Sermon. They know they are being personally addressed. They know the pull of the longing to open your heart to God. For them, the need is to move beyond a solitary search and to enter on the road in the company of others. For them it is through community dedicated to service that they will find themselves to be already on the road with Christ.

Being in Discipleship      I note the feelings and thoughts within as I begin to blog on Mark 10: 17-31 where the story of the rich man seeks from Jesus the answer to eternal life. I experience discomfort at having to address Jesus’ encounter with the rich man and his famous words about rich people, heaven, and the eye of the needle.   Jesus continues on the road which is a key phrase for Mark. Being on the road is not just about the destination of Jerusalem and its tumultuous events. Being on the road for us is about an internal journey. A journey towards a transformation within each one of us, leading to the state of being in discipleship. Being in discipleship, rather than the normal expression of being a disciple, better describes for me the experience of trying to open myself to this transformed state. This is an experience of the continuous present, i.e. being in – rather than a state of arrival being a -.

Mark wants us to scoff a little at the obtuse way Jesus’ disciples continually miss the point. We have been merrily scoffing away since the early part of September when the lectionary started to focus our attention on Mark’s picture of Jesus starting-out on the road. Yet, being on the road with Jesus – the process of being in discipleship, is also for me a struggle to take-in and make room for a particular world view, which shocks me to our core.

Our World View      My world view is the way my individual life experience conditions me to experience myself in the flow of life around me. Being on the road with Jesus turns my world view upside down. There isn’t a part of me that remains untouched by this upheaval. Like the proverbial Martini, we are all shaken and not merely stirred. This starts with Jesus’ instruction to anyone of us who wants to be his disciple to deny self, take up our cross, and start-out on the road. For further thoughts on this, I refer readers back to my blog Follow Me for the 16th September.    

Illusions      What do I need to do – to inherit eternal life? This is the rich man’s question. Isn’t also our deepest question? The rich man tells Jesus that he has done all things necessary for salvation and yet there is something that continues to evade him. So, please good teacher Jesus, he says, tell me what I need to do? Jesus gives him what he seeks:  go sell everything that is stopping you starting out on the road with me. My discomfort with this text tells me that it is not only the rich man whose heart falls at these words. Unlike the rich man I don’t even have houses, money in the bank, stocks and shares to dispossess myself of. My discomfort lies in Jesus’ call to me to give up another secretly guarded illusion.   

Money is the single-most powerful illusion of happiness. Or if happiness is too much to expect, then at least money provides the illusion of security. Jesus is telling us that this illusion endangers our inheritance of eternal life. Yet, what is eternal life?  I have long ago jettisoned the notion of eternal life as pie in the sky when you die. I am interpreting eternal life to mean the here-and-now experience of being on the road, i.e. to being in discipleship with Jesus. At Mark 10:17-31 we arrive at a signpost on the road that says in bold letters: LOOK AT YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH MONEY. 

The Myths of Scarcity and Abundance       Currently, there is a lot being written about our relationship with money and setting this issue within the larger context of how our collective and individual world views are shaped by the fear of scarcity which fuels our obsession with the need for more and more- the illusion that what we have is never enough! For those of you who live in Arizona, if you have a chance to attend one of Canon Timothy Dombek’s STEW-U’s (stewardship university) I recommend you do so. With conviction he explores the myth of scarcity and our obsession with over abundance, and how this distorts the lives of our Christian Communities. I also refer readers to Lynne Twist’s book Unleashing the Soul of Money. For those of us who can’t bear the thought of reading one more book, Twist’s book comes in audio format and makes for compelling listening. You can also refer back to my reflections on illusion and the illusions of scarcity and more is better in my blog Passing Through The Veil of Illusion.

The Comfort of Self-Assertion       I want to take us back to look at the construction of the rich man’s question. The construction presupposes that there is something we need to do.  In my experience we tend to ask the question – so what do I need to do, or how do I do that? – when we seek to quieten the anxiety we feel at having arrived at a significant insight so disturbing in its life changing implications that we need to run from it as fast as we can. We run from the possibility of being changed by our arrival at an insight. We take refuge in the futility of our own inability to see how we can act. This is part of our universal human experience – we long to change with such a desperate intensity, while at the same time, fearing with an equal intensity the prospect of changing. If I let go this source of grievance, if I puncture this illusion of safety and security – what would happen and/or who then would I become?

Following the Commandments is code for how we confuse self-assertion with living as if we are on the road to being in discipleship. The rich man in Mark’s Gospel follows the Commandments because he easily has the material and spiritual resources to do so. Following the commandments is, in other words, the action of self-assertion and self-sufficiency, masquerading as spiritual faithfulness.

How do I know this? I know this because the rich man is me and he is you. I know this from the rich man’s reaction to Jesus asking him to sell his possessions and give the money not just away, but to the poor i.e. those who are in need, and enter onto the road. This I can easily identify with, but because it is about him, I can also take the moral high ground and judge him at the same time. He could not do it because this would require him moving beyond controlling his relationship with God. Through selling his possessions he is being called back into relationship. Not a private relationship with God in which he is always in control of his own feel good factors and personal security. He is being confronted by the need to enter into a public relationship with a God who is present to him through his relationships with others, commonly called community. What is the rich man’s response?  He goes away with a heavy heart  .Here is the litmus test that we all face within the context of our own relationship with money and possessions. It matters not,  how much or how little of these we feel we have.

Going for the Jugular       I heard some funny quips this last week about Episcopalians and money. Did you know that Episcopalians give until it hurts? It’s just that we have such a low pain threshold. Episcopalians when faced with the invitation to pledge will stop at nothing! Think about it. Alas there is an uncomfortable truth in these parodies. Episcopalians are unstinting in their service of one another and the wider world. Ask them to do something, to get involved with a mission and they are right there. Ask them, are you on the road to being in discipleship with Jesus and you usually draw a puzzled look and may evoke a response, oh I am not one of those – those being Evangelicals. Ask Episcopalians, would you like your name published as a supporter of the Opera, or the Ballet, or NPR?.  They will gladly go public with their generosity. Ask them to go onto a list of those who are pledging, and heaven forbid, tithing members of Trinity Cathedral and the look of horror has to be seen to be believed. No! The good Episcopalian says. That’s private between me and God – and the cute among us might even quote scripture, parade not your faith in public and go into your closet and let not the right hand know what the left had is doing. Well, we usually avoid the going into your closet, bit, – but you get the drift.

Last week I coined the snappy phrase: open your wallets as wide as you long to open your hearts. This week’s Gospel confronts us with our willingness to publicly open our hearts and yet, to keep the open or closed state of our wallets, our secret. As a priest, I avoid becoming categorically prescriptive on issues. However, on the issue of money I have to state, our money is not our money, and our relationship with it is not a private concern. God calls us to account publicly for our relationship to money. Because – God’s dream for us is, that the use of our money becomes a source of blessing and spiritual transformation for us.

Money, Being Transformed, Becoming Sources for Transformation       The rich man’s question for assurance that he would inherit eternal life represents all our narcissistic anxieties. Jesus’s response offers a possibility of transformation – turning the question into: are you willing to use your resources to make a difference in the world?  The rich man is afraid of such a transformation and goes away sad. He would rather rely on his own self-sufficiency.

Don’t we all want to make a difference in a world where we mostly feel so ineffectual? Our use of our money becomes a blessing and a fulfillment towards our spiritual longings when we allow it to become an instrument for making a difference. It makes a difference through the way it brings us into a transformed and transforming relationship with others – and together, we build strong community.

The Dilemma        Today is the Sunday Trinity Cathedral has designated as the beginning of our two month Annual Renewal Program. I have a phantasy that if Trinity Cathedral was a mega church I would be well prepared for the commencement of the program by having pre-selected a text or a series of texts well in advance. I would then have built an impressive series of sermons around my text or texts, all of which in a subtle variety of cleaver ways, utterly convinces you- my hearers-  of the need to open your wallets as wide as your desire is to open your hearts.

Alas, this option is not open to me. In a liturgical tradition the preacher is both constrained and enabled by the fixed nature of the Lectionary. Constrained, because as we begin our Annual Renewal Program, I am not able to pick and choose scriptural texts around which to build an utterly convincing argument for the necessity of tithing. Enabled, because the Lectionary forces me to stay within the conversation that God chooses to have with us as a community concerning his dream for our becoming. The Lectionary disciplines us, not only me, but all of us, to listen to what God is telling us as a community – a community that seeks to remain within a covenanted relationship with God’s self. In our tradition preaching is not so much a conversation that I have with all of you. It’s the articulation -often in seemingly inarticulate groans and sighs – of the conversation the Holy Spirit is fostering with us.

All of this is a preamble to the more difficult task of squaring-up to the gospel for our commencement Sunday – Jesus’s teaching on divorce. Aghhhhhhhhhhhh!

Taking the text Head-On      In some churches you would hear the preacher present this text as the scriptural basis supporting the indissolubility of marriage. In other churches you might hear the preacher attempt to explain this text away. Both approaches successfully avoid struggling with the text. The opportunity this text presents is one of the most powerful examples of what we as Episcopalians really believe God is calling us to do. We are a tradition that believes that each generation has to sit in the tension between the tradition, as we receive it, and the lives we actually live. At Trinity Cathedral we express this through our tag-line:

Trinity Cathedral where traditional worship meets with contemporary ideas. 

If you want to know who we are and why you might feel drawn to belong here, this tag-line says it all.

This is the fourth week of a consecutive reading from the central chapters of Mark’s Gospel. Each week our struggle with the text has led us to an understanding which connects the scripture with the reality of the lives we live without hopefully, damaging the integrity of either. You might like to refresh your memory of this journey by rereading my sermon blogs beginning on September 16th or listening to the sermon podcasts posted on the Trinity Homepage or Facebook page.

Jesus’s words about divorce are not, as in the case of last week’s Gospel reading, an example of his use of hyperbole. The context is one of those pesky ones where the Pharisees, presented in the Gospels and the bad guys, seek to entrap Jesus in the manner reminiscent of a presidential debate. It’s refreshing to see that Jesus does not pivot.

The key line for me is where Jesus, referring to the Mosaic Law tells the Pharisees that divorce was allowed:

Because of your hardness of hearts …

He then tells them that this was not what God intended from the beginning of Creation. So does this mean, as the Church once universally contended, and in some sections of Christianity still does, that divorce is a sin against God’s intention at the Creation that men and women to live together in indissoluble marriages? I think not!

For a more in-depth exploration of the reasons why I think Jesus is not universally ruling out divorce, I refer you to an exegesis of the context and meaning of today’s text by Matt Skinner in his 2009 commentary on the Mark 10:2-16 at http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=10%2f4%2f2009&tab=4

Themes Within the Text      What I see here is not so much Jesus talking about divorce but about the integrity of marriage, and within that integrity, the rights of the woman. For it was, and remains, God’s intention that human beings accept their responsibilities for one another when they choose to enter into covenanted relationships. What makes marriage a covenanted relationship is that God at Creation intended that human beings should not live alone. It is also an earthly image for the covenanted relationship between Christ and the community of those who follow him.

Last Wednesday, I was part of a discussion of the upcoming Gospel passage at the Bishop’s weekly staff meeting. I listened hoping to glean some helpful pointers for addressing this text. Instead I became deeply moved as in this mixed group of colleagues, some clergy, some lay,  several persons spoke of the painful memories of their experience of divorce. If I could sum up my sense of their pain, it was the pain of the loss of innocence. The pain of the disillusionment at finding themselves unable to continue to live in an unhappy marriage. What seemed to have hurt them most was not the emotional trauma of the break-up of their relationships but the breaking of their sacred vow to live with their marriage partner for the rest of their lives. It seemed to me that no-one in that room who had been through a divorce, had remained unscathed by the loss of their once innocent belief that when you make sacred promises everything should work out, and people should live happily thereafter.

The loss of our innocence leaves a deep and often ugly scar in us. And yet, I also noted that each of these persons had gone-on to make a new and fulfilling marriage with another person. For me there could not be a more graphic example of how we are called to live in the tension between the tradition we receive and the lives we actually live. As Anglican Christians this place of tension is where we expect to encounter God. It is in this tension that God comes looking for us.

I am at the point where I feel I could go on writing about Mark 10:2-16 all day. I interpret this feeling to be a sign that I need to wrap-up this blog entry.  The central statement in this whole passage for me is  when Jesus refers to divorce as a law written to mitigate the hardness of human (read male) hearts.

Two Distinct Conversations     Jesus has one conversation with the Pharisees and then moves to a different conversation when he goes indoors with his disciples. With the Pharisees Jesus seems to be concerned about the plight of women in the case of a writ of divorce. Under the Mosaic Law the writ of divorce was to be given to the woman as a protection against the huge discrimination she would experience in a patriarchal society where women were merely the chattel firstly of their father and then their husband. The Pharisees, all men of course, make no mention of this aspect of the Law.

When Jesus is alone with the disciples he specifically includes the possibility of a woman divorcing her husband in cases of adultery. Matt Skinner notes that this was such a shocking suggestion that Matthew, in his Gospel omits mention of this possibility altogether. It’s an interesting aside that in the Church of England the priest hands the marriage certificate to the bride reminding her that the certificate is her legal property and not her husband’s. This custom is a historic leftover from a time when proof of marriage was a woman’s only legal protection in a society where it was men who held the upper hand.

Jesus seems to be saying not that there can never be a divorce but that in divorce men and woman are equal.  In his conversation with the Pharisees his message is that divorce is impossible when it is being used by men as a loophole to justify adultery. When this is the case, divorce or no, the new marriage contract does not protect the guilty person from continuing in an adulterous state.  Jesus does not see the sin of adultery as a sin against the property rights of other men, but a sin against the marriage partner- against the wife – a sin against covenanted relationship. This is the link to his second and different conversation with the disciples. Here, Jesus alludes to the centrality of the marriage partnership. He seems to understand that both men and women can institute divorce and that both will be morally accountable to each other for their behavior. I don’t read his words to be saying that relationships never fail. I hear him speaking against the reduction of the marriage relationship to a matter of male property rights over women and divorce as the easy legal loophole to justify male or female adultery.

Jesus’ Concerns    I note how having shown his concern for woman Jesus then rebukes the disciples for their exclusion of the children from his presence – suffer the little children to come unto me for to such belongs the Kingdom of Heaven. In today’s passage we hear Jesus continuing is teaching about vulnerability.Woman and children are the images Jesus uses for the way that God, incarnate in himself, volunteers to become vulnerable to the hardness of the human heart. To be vulnerable and excluded from the protections of power is the chief qualification for inclusion into the Kingdom of God.

Jesus’ seeming prohibition on divorce is not a denial of the propensity for human relationships to fail. It is a reminder that covenanted relationships carry responsibilities that can’t be sloughed off without a recognition of the pain of relationship failure. This is a pain that is healed only through repentance. Only in repentance do we gain the ability to move forward and learn from our failures how to make better informed future choices.

Linking the Improbable   Perhaps this Gospel reading is not such a bad one to have on the Sunday we commence our annual renewal, looking forward to 2013. Rather than being read as a prohibition on divorce the text is about the integrity of marriage and the costs to the human heart when marriages fail. It’s about marriage as a model of covenanted relationship intended by God at Creation. That God intends marriage as a fruit of Creation necessitates in our own generation, extending the concept of covenanted marriage to include our gay brothers and sisters. It is also a reminder that through our baptism, we, as the saving, and cross bearing community of Christians at Trinity Cathedral, on the corner of Central and Roosevelt, have entered into an intentional and covenanted relationship with God. As members of the Body of Christ we incur responsibilities and obligations to our faith community.

Not to put too fine a point on it. One of the responsibilities of our covenant of baptism is to open our wallets as wide as we desire to open our hearts. Wallets and hearts exist in a virtuous cycle.  If we are serious about being in covenanted relationship with God, the opening of one is intended by God to lead to the opening of the other.  However, more about pledging and tithing in weeks to come. So stay tuned!

This last week I made my first visit to a Mormon Church, where I attended a funeral service. Among a wealth of impressions and unanswered questions that played in my mind, the experience left me with two key  impressions. I felt humbled by the deep interpersonal quality that pervaded the gathering. I felt I was in the presence of a religious culture which witnessed to God’s presence through the personal connections between people. Everyone around me appeared to feel as if they belonged together. The worshipers seemed to me to be bound together not only by a tangible experience of gratitude to God for his love, but also, by an everyday experience of showing one another the power of that love. I will return to the second off my two key impressions in a moment.

As it happened, later that same day a new member of our congregation came to speak with me. In the course of the conversation he told me about his Mormon upbringing and  his early adult years spent in the Church Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints.  In the course of our conversation he said something that really surprised me. He told me he was finding in the Episcopal Church a deeply felt resonance to the Mormon culture that he could no longer be a part of. He noted that both religious cultures shared an experience of the importance of place. He grew up in a town in Utah where the only church in town was Mormon.

Episcopalians in the U.S. never enjoy the exclusive experience of being the only church in town even thought sometimes we like to behave as if are. Ours is a tradition that was formed in a context the English village and town where for hundreds of years the only Church was the Anglican Church.

The surprise of the last week, for me, has been to realize that Mormon and Anglican Traditions have things in common. Both emphasize the importance of  place and the importance of identifying with the local. The locality is the setting for the world of  everyday life. This is the setting within which God speaks to us. Here, both Mormon and Anglican Traditions emphasize the centrality of being in right relationship with one another.

My second key impression from the funeral service was reaffirmed in my conversation later in the day. As I sat sensing the deep interpersonal bond that tied the worshipers together I was also profoundly disquieted by the knowledge that the interpersonal bonds were only extended to those who shared the Church’s beliefs. Because Mormon belief is that homosexuality is a sin against God, both the person I went to the funeral to support and the person who spoke with me later that day had experienced rejection from the Church when they reached that point in their lives when their integrity as persons required an open acknowledgement of being Gay. For both of them this became the point where the loving community they had grown up within, and to which they had devoted much of their lives, closed its doors to them and left them on the outside.

Mormonism and Anglicanism both stress the centrality in the Christian life of being in right relationship with one another. However, this is where the similarity ends.  Mormonism is among the many examples of religious cultures that are truth based. In a truth based culture it seems that right relationship can only extend to those who share right belief.

As Episcopalians our Anglican Tradition emerges out of an experience where people with very different theologies and political ideologies were compelled by the law to sit alongside one-another in the same pew Sunday by Sunday. Historically we refer to this as the Elizabethan Settlement. Over time, the Elizabethan Settlement broke down, and it eventually became possible for English men and women to express their differences in the choice of the Protestant chapel and eventually the restored Roman Catholic Church. However the mainstream of English culture continued to be dominated by its identification with its National Church, expressed at the local level of the Parish Church.

Over several centuries the necessity of tolerating religious and political differences under the same church roof led to what we today recognize as the distinctly Anglican compromise.  This need for compromise and tolerance has prevented us becoming a truth based religious culture. Instead we became a worship based culture.

What makes Episcopalians stand out in the current American religious landscape is our distinctive emphasis on worship as the context in which we find our commonality. Over generations the rich and poor, Tory and Whig, those with High Church sympathies sitting next to their Low Church neighbors were all moulded into a common culture of worship through the linguistic and imaged richness of the Book of Common Prayer.  Like Mormons, we too stress right relationship. However, for us right relationship is not predicated by shared truth. Our foundation of right relationship rests on the experience of praying together. We are people committed to praying with any person who wishes to pray with us.

Gathered together in worship we hear God speaking to us through the proclamation of Scripture. This morning’s Gospel is rich in potential preaching themes. As we move Sunday by Sunday through the central chapters of Mark’s Gospel we see a pattern repeating itself. Jesus teaches the disciples about what it means to be his disciples and they, the disciples, then graphically demonstrate in behavior that they have miserably failed to understand. If Jesus’ disciples could get it so wrong and still come through in the end, then there is hope for you and me.

The disciples are pissed-off not only that someone else is healing in Jesus’ name, but healing successfully where they previously had failed. They try to do what groups always try to do – protect their territory by attempting to silence any opposition. Yet, Jesus tells them:

Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us.

These words are familiar to us because we usually hear them being misquoted. Instead of Jesus’ actual words whoever is not against us is for us, we invert the phrase to whoever is not for us is against us. This reversal communicates the opposite meaning. Anyone who is not for us is against us expresses a narrow need for exclusive control. It maintains that those who are not on the inside are automatically on the outside. So Jesus tells the disciples, don’t exclude him because he is not one of your band, but include him on the strength of his actions and purpose being the same as yours. Exclusion is replaced by inclusion.

The disciples were operating from the principle that those who are not for us are against us. They intuitively define being for us as being the same as we are. They want to form a self-selecting, truth based group.   Self-selecting groups have to keep clarifying who is in and who is out. Whereas, Jesus is inviting anyone into relationship with him on the basis of the way he or she behaves.

The disciples are only seeking to defend themselves against the fearful message of Jesus. If everyone is included, then how will we control the message and keep the truth clear.  Perhaps its desperation that forces Jesus into graphic hyperbole?  The sin for which drowning by mill stone, severing of limbs and plucking-out of eyes is the atonement is the sin of thinking and acting in ways that put stumbling blocks in anyone’s path to God.

Mark portrays a sequence of events in Chapter 9 in which the central linking theme is following Jesus. We follow Jesus when we welcome and receive others into relationship with us. Sin is our human need to draw sharp distinction between those we consider with us and our consequent desire to exclude those we are not the same as us. It’s a short step from here to defining   them as those who are against us. For me this is the sin of falling out of right relationship with another because I am not able to tolerate difference and diversity in community.

I remember my father delighting in repeating two old world sayings which summed up his need for an easy solution in relation to his argumentative children:

Do as I say, not as I do!  and  Children are meant to be seen and not heard!

I don’t think for one moment he really believed these saying to be true. In fact he would always laugh as he recited them. Yet, I suspect like a lot of parents he felt torn. Not believing these sayings to be true he nevertheless resorted to them in the hope that they would provide him with a simple solution in dealing with the challenges his children presented.

What are your memories of the world you grew-up in? I grew up in a world of solid suburban values supported by the social provisions of healthcare and universal education accessible to all and free at the point of use.  Looking back in hindsight the N.Z. I grew up in seems from this distance a place where life was sweet, uncomplicated, and safe. I grew up in a golden age of national prosperity funded on the back of a forty-year economic boom which began to unravel only after  Britain’s entry into what was then called the European Economic Community in 1973.

As a child, the world I grew up in gave me freedom. I was free to go out on my bike, which was my only form of transport for both getting to and from school and for exploring the world around me. My friends and I rode the country roads and explored the disused water filled and overgrown gravel pits and pine forests that surrounded the area where we lived. No-doubt many Americans of my age remember growing up in a similar kind of  (suburban) world.

The world I now find myself living in seems such a different place from the world of my memories. The prospect of allowing my granddaughter a freedom to roam about on her bicycle exploring the world around her is beyond thinking about.

As I look around me I see a confused picture of a society where we are both obsessively anxious and at the same time, callous in the extreme in our attitudes towards children. Millions of children are the obsessive focus of anxiety driven parental over indulgence. We are beginning to note the fruits of anxiety-driven, intrusive parenting in a prolonged period of adolescent dependence now extending for many into early adult years. At the same time the results of the recent American Survey reveal that in 2012 16.4 million children now live in poverty.

Child poverty is not simply being monetarily poor. After all many of us can legitimately claim that: we may have been poor but we were loved and happy. Therefore, child poverty is a relative term inclusive of multiple deprivations effecting a wide rage of life experiences. At the risk of stereotyping myself as a frequent listener to NPR, I heard this last week a commentator speaking about research findings that show clearly how poor life prospects can be linked to the effect of early poor nutrition on brain development.

It has been said that the truest picture of any society or other social grouping can be seen in its attitudes and treatment of children.

The images created by this morning’s gospel reading evoke a deep sympathy in me for Jesus! He hears us arguing about which among us is the more important. I imagine him in desperation taking hold of the child nearest to him and confounding those around him, he proclaims whoever, welcomes this child welcomes me and not only me but the one who sent me.  Mark (:30-37

Mark gives us a glimpse in two places of Jesus’ attitude towards children. In two weeks we will encounter the second and arguable the more famous – Mark 10:13-15 suffer the little children to come unto me. In the context of 1st century Palestine Jesus’s comments about children run strongly against cultural assumptions. In doing so Jesus once again is standing in the prophetic tradition which presents women and children as the ultimate symbols of vulnerability and dependency – and thereby powerful images of an essential quality of God.

In the long march of time some things remain constant. At the level of social attitudes and actions children evoke powerful ambivalence in us. Our 21st century Western ambivalence towards children is exemplified in a number of ways. Social ambivalence towards children is an expression of the fact that children are our future, yet, in the present moment they are often experienced as an inconvenience, a burden on our patience and our pockets.

We sharply distinguish between our experience as parents and our attitudes as general members of society. As parents we draw a too sharp distinction between my-our children – and children in general. Towards my-our children we are often over-anxious, over protective, and over indulgent. As taxpaying members of society we tend to think about children in general.

As a society we express attitudes of callous neglect towards children in general. We think little of cutting social welfare provisions in child and family healthcare, and in education because we claim they are too expensive. When we act at this level we are not thinking about my-our children. We are thinking about all those children in general, whose parents should be able to take better individual care of their children and not expect me or us, to do if for them!

The Episcopal Church is greying. For generations we have neglected the formation of our children. Sunday School as a form of child minding that is an insult to the natural intelligence and curiosity of our children does not qualify as an adequate response to the formation needs of our children.

One of the strengths of our Cathedral is the long commitment to Children’s Ministry. Often this area has been the focus of tension and has been the context for strong contention.  While this is often difficult to manage I see this as an indication of the passionate importance that our parents and teachers place on the formation of our children. Children and youth formation is important enough to passionately disagree over what is best.

The Diocese of Arizona has one of the strongest commitments at diocesan level to children’s education and youth ministry. Nevertheless, despite this, a survey of parish budgets would still reveal how little actual investment is made by many of our parishes in children and youth ministries. As a result nationally among the mainline churches the Episcopal Church has the poorest retention rate among adolescents and young adults. Now this is saying something in a culture where according to the Pew Religion Survey 2010, all churches, whether mainline, nondenominational or evangelical, are irrelevant to 30% and rising of mellennials, i.e. people born since 1981.

The same ambivalences towards children found at large in society regrettably also find expression within Church communities. Most churches when asked about their number one priority will say, growth. Thinking generally as members of a congregation we connect our desire for growth with encouraging families with children and young people. When asked more individually to reflect on the shift in our personal attitudes required to encourage growth, our increasingly greying Boomers rail against the interruptions to the dignity and contemplation of their worship occasioned by the presence of families with children and young people.

For Jesus, the child is not a focus of sentimental dreaming. Nor is the presence of children a cause of irritation. Jesus takes and holds up the child as an image of his own experience of vulnerability. The image coming to me from this morning’s gospel is an image of Jesus’s vulnerability and loneliness as he begins his long journey on the road to Jerusalem.

Jesus is not inviting us to become sentimental about the child as a figure of lost innocence. Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem is his lonely road and he invites us to become his companions on this road.  He is not holding up the child as a model of discipleship. He is not saying that disciples are those who become innocent like a child.  Jesus is showing us that when we welcome, love and support the child in our midst we welcome God into our lives and thereby become disciples.

Jesus is telling us if we want to be his disciples we will have to place ourselves at the service of others. The clearest image of serving others requires us, with all our hearts, to desire to welcome children into our midst.

What more powerful image is there of  service to others than an image of ourselves placing the interests of others before our own? The contours of this image are those of the welcoming of the child as an expression of the welcome of God into the heart of our communities.  This is what it means to become Jesus’ disciples and lovers of God.

Exploring and reading around this Sunday’s Gospel from Mark 8 I came across this comment from Matthew Skinner, Assistant Professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary in St Paul:

Jesus moves from touring the borderlands between Jewish and Gentile country. Here he has been confronting the generalized suffering of humanity through mighty acts of power and healing. This is the mid point of Mark’s story. From here Jesus turns his face towards the road to Jerusalem. He offers the disciples a prequel of what lies ahead. In a nutshell, the way ahead is one of conflict and death. The conflict begins immediately in the heated confrontation between Jesus and Peter.

Peter rightly intuits Jesus’ identity as Messiah. But his view of what this means is conditioned and imprisoned within his Jewish cultural and religious worldview. Within this worldview the Messiah is the liberator king who will restore Israel to its rightful place in the world and therefore, Jesus’ words of suffering and death not only make little sense but seem somewhat scandalous.

Jesus has to disabuse Peter in the strongest of terms – get behind me Satan!  There now follows the invitation to discipleship in verse 34 : Anyone who wants to be a follower of mine must deny self, take up their cross and follow me!

Some of you may be familiar with The Message Bible. It describes itself as a contemporary rendering of the Bible – crafted to present its tone, rhythm, events, and ideas in everyday language. I commend to you its interesting translation of Mark 8:34-35

Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat; I am. Don’t run from suffering: embrace it. Follow me and I will show you how.                                                                                                                                                                                               Self help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self.

Like a knife, the Message translation, slices away layer by layer our self-protections from the real meaning of Jesus’ call to denial of self. What self-denial means is to recognize that we are not the ones in the driver’s seat. Following Jesus is not about us exercising our free will from a Smörgåsbord  of heroic choices. In the immortal words of the Carrie Underwood song we are being called to let:

Jesus take the wheel
Take it from my hands
Cause I can’t do this all on my own
I’m letting go
So give me one more chance
To save me from this road I’m on
Jesus take the wheel.

We are so anesthetized by the traditional Biblical language exhorting self-denial and cross carrying that most of us do one of two things. Either, we let it in one ear and out the other paying lip service to it in the process. Or, we moralize and/or spiritualize its meaning.

We moralize self-denial when we imagine ourselves as heroes personifying the virtues of fortitude, courage, or humility, or projecting those virtues into our spiritual heroes and concluding that these heroic virtues are not for the ordinary likes of us. We spiritualize self-denial when we picture ourselves valiantly achieving control over our desires through delayed gratification, or some form of spiritual hair-shirt discipline. We spiritualize self-denial when we imagine it means embracing a life of suffering, a lying down in front of others inviting them to do their worst to us.

To moralize and or spiritualize self-denial is to individualize it as something we do through our own self-assertion. We imagine that we can triumph over the our suffering. I refer anyone who might be interested for an excellent analysis of what Jesus does and does not mean by suffering to  Matthew Skinner’s paper: Denying Self, Bearing a Cross, and Following Jesus: Unpacking the Imperatives of Mark 8:34 http://wordandworld.luthersem.edu/content/pdfs/23-3_Icons_of_Culture/23-3_Skinner.pdf

In approaching Jesus’ call to us to deny ourselves, to take up our crosses and to follow him I draw from my formation as a psychotherapist. Now I want to issue a warning here: undisciplined use of psychological analysis of biblical texts may damage your spiritual health. I am extremely cautious about submitting Biblical passages and language to psychological interpretation. Psychological language, in my view, is generally overvalued in our popular discourse because it can feed our craving for explanatory solutions. Having stated this reservation, I want to bring a psychological lens to bear upon the picture Mark paints of what Jesus means by denial of self.

Mark uses the word aparneomai – to disavow– only twice in his Gospel. The first time is in today’s passage. The second time is when Peter denies Jesus three times in the court of the High Priest.

In his assertion of Jesus as Messiah and later in his disavowal of Jesus in his Passion, Peter embodies the psychological concept of ego. Ego – ‘the I’ -was originally coined by Sigmund Freud to refer to a part of the personality whose function it is to mediate between the demands of our inner and outer worlds.

The ego’s function is to navigate between the conflict between our inner desire and constraints of the real world. Freud understood our internal world to be governed by what he called the pleasure principle and this comes into sharp conflict with our experience of an external world governed by what he termed the reality prinicple. The ego’s skilled function in negotiating between the internal world of our desire for pleasure and external worlds of social constraint, ensures our survival and self preservation in the world.

Through our ego we conform to the values of the world. Worldly values promote self-assertion in the face of competition in a world of scarcity. They reward self-protection, self-promotion, and dangle before us the ultimate promise of self-fulfillment.

Roberto Assagioli, an early follower and later critic of Freud, founder of the school of Psychosynthesis, more aptly termed the ego function as the survival personality – that part of us that ensures our survival in a world of competing demands.

Jesus is calling us to disavow our over identification with our ego-survival personality. He is asking us to hand-over the direction-setting of our path in life, to God.  My often used phrase – God’s dreaming of us into that which is yet to become known captures in essence what this looks like. Through letting Jesus take the wheel a different road opens up before us. We are now on the road of transformation. As the fear driven grip upon us of our over-identification with our individualistic ego loosens, this transformation results in us becoming, not only more closely connected to God, but also, to one another!

This psychological approach now helps us to see why Jesus goes on to talk about winning and loosing our life. Once again, the translation in The Message cuts through our over familiarity with the standard text.

What good would it do to get everything you want and to lose you, the real you?

What is the real you?  Psychologically, it goes by many different names depending on whose system (Freud, Jung, Assagioli) you are working within. A general term might be the real you is the true as opposed to the false self.

The concept of the true self comes as close and psychology can come to the spiritual language of soul. It’s difficult to say they exactly equate. Direct equation across completely different discourses is not possible.  Nevertheless let me put it like this.  We have a soul and a personality, and they are not the same although they are interconnected.

Jesus is saying that we can win at the ego game, the projection of ourselves according to the values prized by the world, and lose our soul, our sense of who we truly are being dreamed by God into becoming.

The violence unleashed in the Arab World to what some claim is only an exercise in freedom of speech shows us an example of what an excess of individualistic, ego-driven, self assertion leads us to. Contrastingly, a direct result of giving up self-assertion enables us to make room in our lives for one-another – in Matthew Skinner’s words quoted above, we come to belong to (one) another. This is the principle upon which all community is based.

So then, what does it mean to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Jesus?

Episcopalians are Christians of the Anglican Tradition. The Anglican Tradition is a transmission of historic (catholic) Christianity. What this means is that for us baptism is not so much something that alters our relationship with God, i.e. before baptism we are unsaved and after we become saved. Baptism is entry into belonging within the community we call Church. We are saved through becoming members of the saving community of the Church. As members of a saving community the spiritual journey is a journey we make in the company of others.

As Anglican Christians Episcopalians believe that God does not speak to us as individuals acting alone. As the Early Church Father Tertullian said: one Christian is no Christian. We believe that God encounters us through our membership of the Body of Christ in the world. God becomes knowable to us when we come together in worship at the Eucharist. God speaks to us as a community when we as individuals use our smart phones or tablets, on a daily basis, to plug-in to electronic versions of morning and evening prayer, which  is the common, as in, shared action of prayer by the sacred community we call the Church.

Coming back to Mark 8. When Jesus invites us to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow him, he is not inviting us to embark on a solitary road of personal suffering.  He is inviting us into identifying ourselves with, and committing ourselves to belonging within, his Body in the world. This is the community we call Church. What this means is to become part of a cross-bearing- community which seeks to live in contrast to worldly values.  For Jesus and for Mark and his community this meant risking persecution by standing together in opposition to the worship of worldly power of Rome. For us it is to stand together in opposition to the our worlds valuing of isolated, ego driven individualism.

Now it might be a bit of a stretch to see the Episcopal Church as standing against the worship of worldly power. We whose historic privilege as a church caused others to refer to us as God’s frozen chosen. We are they who follow in the English tradition of tasteful elitism. Yet, the Holy Spirit has been powerfully moving is this church of ours.

We who at one time seemed the most unlikely seedbed for energetic social change now find ourselves in the vanguard of the engagement with the big cultural questions changing the way we view issues of gender, human sexuality, the dynamics of privilege and the challenges of injustice and poverty.

We may not all agree among ourselves about the solutions. Yet, we are a church that is no longer afraid to engage with the issues of our age. This throws us into the turmoil between the tradition we receive and the lives we actually live.  As a consequence, the Episcopal Church Community pays a price for carrying the cross. We are the focus of much attack and ridicule. The accusation is made that we have abandoned the Bible. We are frequently assailed by the prophecies of our premature demise.

All of this affirms for me that we as a Church are attempting to accept the invitation Jesus makes in Mark 8.  We are far from perfect, yet we understand that to take up the cross, as Jesus exhorts us to do, leads us beyond our ego defenses to a new and transformed manner of experiencing the presence of a relational God, a God-in community in the world. This is an experience that carries a cost at the heart of which is a daily discovery that we belong with one another. 

Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat; I am. Don’t run from suffering: embrace it. Follow me and I will show you how.                                                                                                                                                                                               Self help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self.

It is November 1916. On a wet and cold day a young 21 year-old Ulster woman sets sail from Belfast Docks to rendezvous in Liverpool with the ship that will take her away from everything that is familiar. She is beginning a new life in one of the self-governing dominions of the British Empire. She is contracted to work as the housekeeper for a wealthy farming family in Taranaki, a rich farming area on the southern west coast of Te Ika-a-Māui (the fish of Maui) or as most of us know it, the North Island of New Zealand.

My grandmother never spoke of the reasons for leaving home and venturing forth in the middle of a World War. One might assume that she had hope for a different and better life for herself. My guess is that she recognized something calling her into that part of her life, which for her, had yet to become known. One might assume she had hope. She certainly had courage.

Perhaps it’s from my maternal grandmother that I inherited the courage to make the reverse journey. At the age of 22 I left my hometown.  Christchurch is that most English of all New Zealand cities, now utterly destroyed by two years of continual earthquakes. The city is the principle city on Te Wai Pounamu, (the canoe of Maui) or the less imaginatively named South Island of New Zealand. In 1978 I set out for that part of my life, which at that time, had yet to become known to me.

Did I have hope? What were my hopes? All I knew was that something was drawing me onwards. The result has been to spend 30 years, the greater part of my adult life, living and working in London. London and the U.K. became the context within which my hopes and dreams unfolded. Courage and hope have more recently lead me to Phoenix, which now, is the context for the continuation of hopes and dreams unfolding. I do not believe that I am unusual. Others’ reading these words will have similar experiences to report.

My grandmother was a formative influence in my life. She powerfully shaped my early view of the world. It is a world-view that highly values courage. Yet, my grandmother imparted to me something that I have found less helpful.  She was a walking compendium of old world aphorisms: a stitch in time saves nine, the devil makes work for idle hands, never a lender or a borrower be. But the saying of her’s that entered most deeply into my consciousness was: never expect and you won’t be disappointed.

Somehow what I internalized her view that the world was a place of scarcity. Therefore, it’s too dangerous to have hopes because hoping only leads to disappointment. I think, sadly, that my grandmother despite courageously setting out for a new life took with her, her earlier life experience of scarcity. What was the scarcity for her?

She came from an educated, school teaching class, members of the Church of Ireland. (Until my dog Charlie Girl decided to take up the discipline of the Daily Office I had inherited from my grandmother a tiny little Church of Ireland Book of Common Prayer and Hymns Ancient and Modern, both fitting together in a little traveling box. I still have them but now a little the worse for the exuberance of doggy devotion.) For my Grandmother Mary, poverty was not the scarcity. It was love. Despite her fierce love of me I remember her as a woman who could never really believe in the abundance of generous love.

Fears of scarcity and hopes for the abundance of generous love are major repetitive themes in my preaching. Like most preachers talking to my congregation is always a form of talking to myself.

While sitting with this gospel passage from Mark 7, my attention goes to the story of the Syrophoenician woman. Such a glorious name Syrophoencian – maybe we should start calling ourselves Arizophoenicians? My attention is drawn to her courage and her hope. It would have taken considerable courage to cross the racial and religious boundary line separating Gentile from Jew. We see in the tragedy unfolding in Syria how deep ancient communal divisions go.  In traversing this boundary of boundary lines – this Gentile woman is investing a quality of hope and expectation in Jesus. Her hope opens her eyes to seeing him for who he really is. She alone addresses Jesus as Lord – Kyrios, at a point when the disciples are still calling him Rabbi.

The story concerning the Syrophoenician woman is rich in multiple meanings. One significant theme in this encounter revolves around crossing boundaries, with a strong theme of inclusion and exclusion. Is it right to extend to Gentiles what until now has been reserved for God’s chosen children? There is a strong theme about courage to hope, risking the ultimate of disappointments – death of a loved one. However, my immediate focus is a related and yet, distinct theme –  one that connects this story to my memories of my grandmother -that of scarcity and abundance.

Using a form of words, which implies the opposite of what he intends Jesus appears to be denying the woman’s expectations. Thus he elicits from the woman a response that evidences the courage and tenacity of her hope. It is on the basis of her hope in him as Lord that her daughter is healed.

The capacity to have hope goes to the heart of our spiritual lives. For many of us hope is problematic. My grandmother’s folk injunction against expectation because it invariably leads to disappointment draws its power from our human experience of fear that there is no abundance. Fear that to be disappointed is something we might not survive. Fear that informs us that there is not enough available of what we need in this world and so we need to cut our suit to fit the cloth – another of my grandmother’s sayings.

Now, I know well enough the corrosive power of disappointment! In my daily spiritual practice, past disappointments surface like icebergs in a congested shipping lane. Icebergs of  grievance loom up out of the unconscious darkness at points where I have been unable to grieve a loss. I notice that I can remain very attached to my grievances. They can come to define who I think I am and they control what I allow myself to expect. I can seek to escape past losses. Yet, unless I also learn to grieve them, they remain as frozen points, blocks of ice inhibiting the onward flow of my spiritual and emotional life. The fears of scarcity chill the waters of the emotional and spiritual shipping lane through which my life proceeds.

In my personal experience and in my experience as priest and therapist, it is this fear to hope, and assumptions of scarcity rather than abundance of love which imperil our ability to participate in God’s dreaming us into becoming. The problem about hope is that the outcome is unpredictable. I am put in mind of the famous Rolling Stones song, You can’t always get what you want. The pertinent lyrics go:

You can’t always get what you want, You can’t always get what you want, You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, well, you might find you get what you need.

The lyrics make the same point it would take me several pages of complex psychological analysis to reach. What they succinctly highlight is that we often get confused between hoping and wanting. Hope is always about what we need, and the trick is to be able to spot that and let go of an attachment to what we think we want.

For reasons that still largely remain unknown to me, my grandmother wanted to leave the experience of scarcity in her past, behind her. She managed to escape her past. Yet, what was needed was for her to grieve her past. When we grieve the past we become open to a future that is no longer dominated by the residue of past feelings. We can often assume scarcity to protect ourselves from disappointment. Yet, when we do this we become closed off from God’s dreaming of us, which is always more than what we can dream for ourselves.

The Syrophoenician Woman grieves at the impending loss of her daughter. It is her grief that fuels her hope. The basis of her hope is that in Jesus she has found the abundance of love. Even in the face of Jesus appearing to question, or to ration her right to the love she hopes for, her answer displays a trust that he will give her what she needs.

God’s dream for us is a dream of the abundance of love. Like all dreams, it is always in the process of unfolding – of becoming.  I have spoken here predominantly about our becoming as a personal journey, which we are making as individuals. Yet, our becoming is also a communal journey, which we make as members of a community. For Anglican Christians, this aspect of community has a special importance because our Tradition understands that the principal way that God communicates his dreaming to us is through our membership of the Body of Christ- the community of the faithful.

Over the next three weeks I am inviting all members of the Trinity Community into an intentional conversation that will unfold during October and November, culminating on 25th of November, the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Central to that conversation will be an exploration of assumptions of scarcity and the dream of the abundance of love.

This intentional conversation forms the heart of our Annual Renewal Program. Like all true conversations it is not pre-scripted and will develop over time in directions none of us can as yet imagine. As a community we are in transition to the next stage of that which God continues to dream us into becoming. Through exploring our community hopes and dreams, our assumptions about scarcity and abundance we enter into participation with God’s act of dreaming. I also trust that our intentional conversation will seek to open each one of us to our individual hopes and dreams of encountering God’s love more deeply in our lives.

Be on the lookout for your invitation to join us, it will appear in an in-box, or for the electronically challenged, a mail-box near you.

It is the 15th October 1978. A fresh-faced 22 year-old man arrives in London. The Labour Government of Jim Callaghan is on its last legs. The right wing of the Labour Party is preparing to jump ship and join-up with the Liberal Party to form the Social Democrats. The far left, known by the name the Militant Tendency has begun a concerted campaign to destabilize the Government and to take the Labour Party in the direction of  the loony left. Militant already has control of several large municipalities, Liverpool being the most infamous example.

The country is weary of the last five years of weak and indecisive Labour Government leadership. The economy is in a downward spiral and the Chancellor of the Exchequer has recently had to go cap in hand to the IMF for a bail-out loan (echoes of a current Greece) just to keep the lights on. The Unions are militant and restive.

Flipping forward to May 4th, election night, 1979. The young man by accident finds himself following the crowds to Margaret Thatcher’s Chelsea residence. His heart is heavy with foreboding as the woman who would later become known as the Iron Lady fixed the crowds with her steely gaze. The next day outside number 10 Downing Street she would echo the words of St Francis of Assisi:

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.

Former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, currently awaiting trial at the Old Bailey for conspiracy and incitement to murder, having been found out in the time honored  British political tradition of the sexual scandal – in his case of having and affair with a rent boy – reacting to Mrs Thatcher’s victory he said: “I am horrified. She makes [her predecessor] Ted Heath look like a moderate.”

During the election campaign, Mrs Thatcher said the Conservatives would cut income tax, reduce public expenditure, make it easier for people to buy their own homes and curb the power of the unions.

Some of you may wonder why am I remembering all this?  The more keen-eyed among you will have already spotted my likely direction of travel.

My reason for remembering is that this is the Labor Day Weekend.

Labor Day Weekend has an equivalent in Britain of the August Bank Holiday. Both mark the transition from summer vacations back into the rhythms of work. Both honor the contribution forged in the struggle of the Labor Movement for the improvement of the lives of working men and women.

The Labor Movement arose out of the classical age of entrepreneurial capitalism.  In order to create social stability it was necessary to force capital to concede some of its fruits to the engine of its success – its workers. Wise governments in the first half of the 20th century, despite their often deceptive rhetoric, understood that the best way of keeping Bolshevism at bay was to ensure a more level playing field in the imbalances of power between those who created the conditions for jobs (employers)and those who created the wealth (the workforce).

I began with my memories of 1979 and the following 10 years because I want to make it clear that I know first hand the fear that fuels the current loathing in some quarters for Organized  Labor. There is a lot of the language of political scare mongering  painting a stereotype of labor unions that is pure fantasy. However, I also know what it’s like to live in a state where that fantasy has become a reality. Where the pendulum has swung too far to the Left. Where governments of both Right and Left are powerless to protect a society  held hostage by the corruption and tyranny of Union power.

But that is not the situation that faces us in the America of 2012. In fact the opposite situation pertains. SOme political  rhetoric seems only to recognize the rights of job creators as if they, by themselves, generate the wealth required for a healthy society. The language of the dignity of work and of legal protection for workers has fallen into a cone of silence. Entrepreneurs do not create wealth! They create opportunities for a collaborative enterprize with workers who through their labor create wealth.

In Mark Gospel reading for this morning, Jesus confronts the conventionally religious-political figures of his day. In criticizing the way the conventional religious party uses the Tradition of the Elders, Jesus is not attacking the heart of Jewish Law. He is accusing his interlocutors of misinterpreting the Tradition. He accuses them of reducing the Tradition to something small enough to suit their own purposes.

For the religious, religion has become merely a matter of external form. Jesus reminds them that religion is not a matter of ritual practice. Religion is a matter of the heart. The human heart is the source of all that is truly spiritual. The human heart is also the source of all that most profoundly corrupts. The corruption is not only an individual matter. The corruption of the human heart has wide ranging social ramifications.

Often its important to see Jesus’ voice emerging against a background of the Old Testament Prophets. The prophet Isaiah admonishes his hearers to:

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1:16-17).

You seem eager for God to come near you.  Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please and exploit all your workers.  Yet is not this the kind of fasting I, your Lord, have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice…to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe them?” (Isaiah 58: 2-7).

The language of the Biblical Tradition is neither the property of the Right nor of the Left. However, it can be captured and distorted to support worldly political agendas. Labor Day weekend is a celebration of the dignity of human labor. Our history shows us that that dignity requires protections. Our history also shows us that those protections can also become corrupted.

James goes to the heart of the matter. He is concerned that his hearers conform themselves to pure religion. Pure religion is not something that applies only in the bedroom but can be jettisoned in the boardroom, office, or factory.

James offers us three tests by which:

The Father looks to see the lineaments of his own life in the lives of those who claim to be his children (J.A. Motyer p75 The Message of James).

1. Bridling the tongue, i.e. avoiding speech that results in harming others.  James is not concerned with saying the right thing. He is concerned with the way the tongue is connected to the heart. The tongue is the royal road through which the resentments of the heart emerge unbridled to damage our relationships with others placing the common good in jeopardy.

2. Attending to the most vulnerable. This is more than a generalized expression of kindliness (Motyer). This is a prophetic stance that requires actions which may cost us dear. Championing the vulnerable among whom woman and children are emblematic is an actual demonstration of care for others that reveals us as bearing the characteristics that allow God to locate and trace the lineaments, the presence of the divine life of the Trinity- God-in-community, within us.

3. James’s third test is to keep oneself unstained by the world.  This is not a contemporary religious culture-warrior’s cry against contamination by a sinful world that allows contraception and gay marriage. If James were to use a more  more contemporary language he would be speaking about our implication in a society that perpetrates and perpetuates injustice.

James is saying don’t let yourselves become co-opted into the systemic abuse and corruption of power. Do not deceive yourselves that it is acceptable to justify  discrimination and exclusion through an uncritical stance towards wealth and privilege. Essential human dignity requires a means for leveling the uneven playing field upon which access to opportunity really depends.

I invite us all to put the political label of our choice to one side and take up only one label – that of being Christian. We need to reject the capture of the Bible by strident political voices. Their version of Scripture reduces it to a very narrow definition of what it means to be an American. To be an American in this view is to celebrate the rights of ones own self interest and to live in the pursuit of ones own personal well-being. It is to give oneself over to a language of fear and greed that flows unbridled from the human heart, polluting the public discourse.

James, invites us to become doers of the word and not merely hearers whose listening is distorted by the corruptions of hearts, rooted in fear. We need to pay close attention to the state of our own hearts.

Only the human heart, Jesus reminds us, has the true power defile us and to  obscure the lineaments of God’s own life in the lives of those who claim to be his children.

One day last week I am sitting in a crowded cafe. I am waiting for a friend who is a few minutes late. Why is it that I always think it’s no big deal if I am a few minutes late, yet it feels so inconsiderate when others keep me waiting?  Seated a little way from me is a couple having that kind of sotto-voce intense conversation that immediately arouses my curiosity. I can’t really hear what they are saying. However, I am curious about the atmosphere of emotional intensity enveloping them. I try not to listen. Yet, at the same time I’m curious about the conversation. As I sit there the Gospel reading for this morning which, I have been pondering for several days, comes to mind. Maybe you think that a little odd?

For me the connection between two apparently dissimilar events is actually one of familiarity. What is familiar to me is an experience of being drawn to the intensity of someone else’s conversation while not having the foggiest idea what the conversation is about.  My experiences in the cafe and reading John’s Gospel share the similarity that both are like eaves-dropping-in on someone else’s conversation the origin of which, I am not privy to. I have this experience a lot reading Paul’s letters. It is also a familiar experience when encountering the long Jesus discourses in John’s Gospel.

If I approach the text of this morning’s Gospel with the same curiosity I felt in the cafe, what stands-out for me in this segment?

Most obvious to me is Jesus’ continuation on the theme I am the bread of life. He goes further in likening his flesh to the bread that is given for the life of the world. As Catholic Christians, Episcopalians hear this as a reference to the Eucharist, although for John it is more likely a reference to the Crucifixion and Resurrection. Yet, its not John’s theological point that arouses my curiosity here. I am more curious about the intensity of the discussion! Jesus’ interlocutors clearly don’t understand him. Like most of us they are incapsulated by the limitations of their imaginations. At first they dismiss Jesus as simply the son of Mary and Joseph. Then they go a little deeper into their collective memory and connect Jesus’ words with Moses and the Mana in the wilderness.

Now here’s a curious thing. When I am trying to explain something and others appear not to comprehend I take more trouble to explain. This usually requires controlling my irritation and appearing to be tolerant and reasonable. Here, Jesus does the opposite. He becomes more extreme in his comments, infuriating his hearers to greater indignation. We will see more of that  in next week’s continuation.

As eavesdroppers on this conversation one of the things we don’t know is that John is probably projecting his issues into the conversation. John was writing for  a small Jewish Christian community, at the end of the 1st century, in Jerusalem. John’s community found itself sharply at odds with the Jewish authorities. This is reason enough for John to closely identify his experience with that of Jesus. John uses the phrase the Jews clearly as an insult. Consequently in our own time many have accused John’s Gospel of laying the foundations for AntiSemitism.

Again, what we don’t automatically know from the text is that the word John uses really refers not to Jews per se but to Judeans in distinction to Galileans or possibly even Samaritans.  All are Jews but some are Republicans, and some are Democrats, and frankly, some are beyond the pale.  I leave it to you to decide which is which.  Jesus, like John himself, is being confronted by the Judean faction. As we see from their conversation this is a faction assured of their  superior claims to religious orthodoxy and racial purity.

Yet, what really draws my attention and arouses my curiosity comes in the passage where Jesus says:

Do not complain among yourselves.   No one can come to  me unless drawn by the Father who sent me  … .

The implications of this statement go to the heart of the struggle between two approaches to faith currently dominating the American Christian scene. This is the struggle currently played out between mainstream Christianity, in both its conservative and progressive wings, and what I term American popularist Christianity.

Mainstream Christianity is represented by Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Congregationalists, Moravians, some Baptists and Episcopalians. Despite the many things might divide them they all officially teach that it is God who draws us to through Jesus. Yet, our culture is deeply influenced by a popularist Christianity which many Baptist, Neo-Calvinist, Pentecostal and Nondenominational Churches embrace. In these Churches one hears little about God other than in formulaic references. The primary focus is on our coming to Jesus. Their image of Jesus is startling to me. They see Jesus as a kind of Son of God super hero guy who will be your buddy if you ask him.  While at the grass roots level many mainstream Churches can also become infiltrated by popularist tendencies this is not often the case in the Episcopal Church.

I spent my final year of seminary education as the Oxford exchange student at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, which is an Episcopal Seminary and part of the Graduate Theological Union at the University of California, Berkeley.  Here I was introduced to a joke some of the more waggish students used with each other when someone suddenly grasped an understanding that opened up fresh and new possibilities.  Someone would say: “oh, so and so has had a come to Jesus moment”.

Like good Episcopalians we were being ironic. For come to Jesus is the battle cry of popularist American Christianity.

At Trinity Cathedral, the pulpit towers somewhat above the congregation. As I survey the congregation sitting before me from my lofty perch seven feet above contradiction, I am often struck by how diverse a community we are.

I see traditional life-long Episcopalians, faithful sons but mostly daughters of the Church, for whom the prospect of a personal relationship with Jesus has hardly ever crossed their minds. In my everyday encounters  I listen to these parishioners speak about their faith largely in the language of service to others. I often note an instinctive humility in them which prevents them from thinking that they are special enough for a personal relationship with Jesus. They understand themselves to be religious yet, not necessarily, spiritual.

I notice others for whom a highly educated theology makes such a popularist sentiment as come to Jesus or personal relationship with Jesus seem – well – too sentimental.

I notice many newer members and enquirers who may have once embraced the popularist stereotype of a personal relationship with Jesus, but now, find it like a suit of clothes that they have long grown out of. They are searching for something deeper.

I see others who may not be very clear about why they are here. I hear them openly confess that they don’t know who God is let alone what relationship with Jesus might mean. I hear them express to me a surprise that they are even in a church. Yet, intuitively they know, one might say, they are being drawn by a need for something that will bring deeper meaning to their experience of life.

The one group I do not see is those who are seeking black and white, true and false answers to help them steer through the bewildering anxieties of modern life. The Episcopal Church is dismissed by these people as too easy a religion. In fact, however, this attitude masks the reality that a tradition that does not give simple answers to complex problems is actually too hard – too difficult  a religion to tolerate.

The broad groupings I have identified have something in common, traversing and containing our diversity. Everyone in some shape or form experiences themselves being drawn.  Some are clearer than others about their feeling of being drawn and the identity of that to which they feel drawn.

Next Sunday the Annual Renewal Program Group meets for the first time. This is a group of persons who have kindly consented to my call to meet together to plan our annual stewardship renewal process. During the months of September and October culminating in the first week of November I will invite us all to enter into a more intentional learning conversation which takes seriously Jesus’s words: No one can come to  me unless drawn by the Father who sent me … 

At the heart of this conversation lie a series of questions.What does it mean to be Christian in the Anglican Tradition?  Who is God for us?  How do we conceive of, and experience this God?  How, and what, does it mean to be drawn into relationship with Jesus Christ? How might relationship with Christ differ from populist images of come to Jesus?

In Jesus’ words: no one can come to  me unless drawn by the Father who sent me, I take some comfort.I invite others to do so as well. I don’t necessarily know what these words mean for me at any given moment of time. Yet, I am comforted to know that the drawing closer is God’s work in me and not my work for God. For once I do not have to take the initiative. Only one thing is required of me and I suggest of all of us. It is to be open to that which has yet to become known in our lives. So that through that opening, God may draw us more and more deeply into that realization for which our hearts most deeply desire.