Baruch ben Neriah, a name which means Baruch blessed Son of my Candle is God was the personal secretary to the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah prophesied during the period leading up to the destruction of Jerusalem in 587-586 BCE at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon.

Following the death of the legendary Solomon, the Kingdom of Israel, united for the first time by his father David, split into northern and southern sections. In the year 721 BCE the Northern Kingdom, which had retained the name Israel, and whose capital at Samaria was sacked by Sennacherib, King of Assyria. Over the next century and a half, the Southern Kingdom known as Judah, having escaped Assyrian conquest through paying a heavy tribute in gold and silver, most of which robbed from the Temple, continued to survive through a political swift-footedness and double-dealing. A culture of political duplicity and self-serving inertia misled the nation away from remaining faithful to its covenant with God. Around 590 BCE Judah’s luck began to run low. A foolish alliance with Egypt provoked the Babylonians to sack the towns of Judah and lay siege to Jerusalem.

God ordered Jeremiah to prophesy, i.e. speak truth to power, in this case before Hezekiah, King of Judah. Speaking truth to power was a process that went badly for Jeremiah and his secretary Baruch. Jeremiah ordered Baruch to read his prophecies of warning to the people gathered in the Temple on a day of fasting. The task was both difficult and dangerous, but Baruch performed it without flinching. It was Baruch, who in the middle of the siege of Jerusalem advised Jeremiah to purchase a piece of land at Anathoth, land previously laid waste by the Babylonian encampment, as a symbol of hope for the eventual restoration of Jerusalem.

In 587-586 BCE Jerusalem fell. Nebuchadnezzar carried the treasure of the Temple along with the King, the nobility and the clergy into a 70-year captivity in Babylon. It is thought that Baruch escaped into Egypt, where he soon died after the fall of Jerusalem.

This was indeed a dark and dangerous time to have lived. Yet, like his master Jeremiah, Baruch’s message in the first 9 verses of the 5^th chapter of his writing is one of hope and encouragement. Amidst the disaster of conquest, in the wake of a profound disillusionment resulting from the folly of political adventurism, Baruch speaks of Jerusalem taking off her garment of sorrow, and rising to the height to look toward the east in order to see her children gathered from west to east rejoicing that God has remembered them. There was nothing in his day-to-day experience to support such a hopeful worldview.

*

I sense a shift in the atmosphere. I am not talking about the weather, although I am talking about the climate. As our daily lives are so affected by the shifting patterns of the weather, we often miss the more subtle yet ultimately, more momentous changes in the climate. I became aware of a shift in the atmosphere around the issue of climate change during the recent high-level Paris Conference. Unlike previous conferences, this seemed no longer a fringe event. With nearly all countries represented at the highest levels of their leadership, Paris confirms that outside of the current US Congress, the world as a whole is now ready to address the urgency of climate change. At long last climate change and the contributory effects of human agency are now universally recognized as the number one issue facing the future of humanity.

I also noted as a regular listener to NPR that the extent of the coverage of the Paris conference was truly BBC-like. I don’t listen to commercial radio so I don’t know how this sector covered the climate talks though I imagine there was little coverage. One might naturally expect NPR to focus on coverage yet it delighted me to discover that it was the number one topic around which more regular elements of the NPR schedules were arranged. In my memory, this has not been the case before. These two factors taken together evidence something having shifted in the collective consciousness. Climate change is now a priority, or I certainly hope so.

**

Returning to the metaphor of weather and climate, the Holy Scriptures record the unfolding of countless lives lived amidst at a level of weather. Weather is confusing because it is continually changing and serious events can always be dismissed as freak occurances. Yet, threading through the shifting day-to-day weather patterns as event is a more comprehensive story of climate and the imperceptibility of shifts in climate. I use imperceptibility to mean not so much hidden, but that it’s easy for us to be wilfully misled and lulled into a false sense of sercurity.

Jeremiah with his secretary Baruch, alongside Isaiah, Malachi, Amos and the other great prophets of Israel sought to draw attention to the direction of climate change among people who could only see the weather patterns from one day to the next. In the weather we can see the folly of the shifting patterns of human choice. Weather reveals the the cumulative sinfulness of human decision-making. Yet, running over the top of the weather is a climate message; a message of hope and unwavering belief in the providential dream of God and its ultimate fulfillment.

***

Generational change, the succession of one generation by another, then another, and then another – is woven together within a narrative I call the transgenerational vision. In the midst of dark times, events spell danger and devastation, times during which our hopes sink as our fears rise. The transgenerational vision is the manifestation of hope.

Baruch, while he knew such times of darkness, disillusionment and despair, became the voice of hope.  Hope expresses and keeps alive the power of the transgenerational of the recovery and thriving of God’s people down through each generation, regardless of the appearance of things. In the midst of fear and terror of the kind reached only in places like modern day Syria, Baruch articulated God’s message as a message that can only be comprehended when we step back from the immediacy of everyday experience to behold the level of the transgenerational vision – God’s vision.

Baruch and his master the prophet Jeremiah were threatened and abused by the powerful whose self-interests deafened them to God’s call to remain faithful to the covenant. They were mocked and humiliated by the ordinary people blinded to their own best interests by their collusion with a set of social and political values that placed misguided national and cultural interests – the politician’s easy answers to complex questions– before the dream that God had for them.

How little things change. We too live in a time when the dreams of the governed are increasingly betrayed by those they elect to govern. In misguided expectation of recovering the dreams of the past they give credence to demagogues who offer easy comfort through the ancient evil of scapegoating. The truth is that increasingly those who govern, while they maintain their power through the assiduous mining of our fears, no longer represent us. Rather they are now in hock to the moneyed interests that put them in power and to whom they are beholdended. The easy manipulation of our fear coupling with our growing civic ignorance simply ensures our continued collusion in processes that continue to belie our best interests as a people and nation, further distancing us from God’s dream for us.

****

Advent is a time for reflection on the urgency to embrace the message of the transgenerational vision. This is a message that counsels us to stand firm in the face of rising fear that robs us of our courage, our compassion and hope.

Advent is time for reflecting on hope. Hope is a cardinal virtue, but it’s tricky because of our tendency to confuse optimism with hope. Hope based on optimism disappears when optimism inevitably turns to more pessimistic outlooks. Hope has nothing to do with optimism but everything to do with faith. The letter to the Hebrews states that faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see.

Hope is the expression of a high-level confidence in the goodness of God’s dream for humanity. Amidst the signs of impending catastrophe, Jeremiah purchases the parcel of land in Anathoth as a symbol of a future he hoped for, but could not see, and did not live to see.

If our confidence is rooted only in what we can see, and in what we can initiate and control by our own efforts, then hope is doomed to disappointment. By contrast, hope is the assurance that what we hope for is to some extent already present to us. The practice of hope simply makes it more so.

The best practice of hope is to commit to planting the seeds in our own generation for the future we want for our children and their children’s children. For most of us this means that we build a strong civic awareness of the need for sound governance, justice, equality and the rule of law. That we take steps to ensure that we have air we can breathe, land and crops we can successfully farm; that we direct our efforts to the preservation of ecosystems that support the diversity of life in, and of our oceans, lakes, rivers and forests. This is God’s intention for creation, the protection, and the preservation of which has been entrusted to us.

*****

Beginning with this Advent season, might this become the practice of our Advent hope that through the seeds we plant now the future may not simply be a repetition of the past? Things will need to change, particularly the reestablishing of government that serves the needs of the governed and not the entrenched interests of superpacts, extractive fossil industries, the NRA.

The Theologian Paul Tillich put it beautifully when he wrote:

Although waiting is not having, it is also having. The fact that we wait for something shows that in some way we already possess it. Waiting, anticipates that which is not yet real. That is, if we wait in hope and patience, the power of that for which we wait is already effective within us. Those who wait in an ultimate sense are not that far from that for which they wait. Theology of Culture as compiled at http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=378&C=83

Tillich’s theme: the power of that for which we wait is already effective within us – what are we waiting for this Advent?

I

. . . almost nobody resists the temptation to jazz up the humanity of Christ. The true paradigm of the ordinary American view of Jesus is Superman: “Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It’s Superman! Strange visitor from another planet, who came to earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American Way.”  If that isn’t popular Christology, I’ll eat my hat. Jesus gentle, meek, and mild, but with secret, souped-up, more-than‑human insides bumbles around for thirty-three years, nearly gets himself done in for good by the Kryptonite Kross, but at the last minute, struggles into the phone booth of the Empty Tomb, changes into his Easter suit and, with a single bound, leaps back up to the planet Heaven. It’s got it all — including, just so you shouldn’t miss the lesson, kiddies: he never once touches Lois Lane. 

Capon notes that the human race has always been deeply unwilling to accept a human messiah. He notes that we don’t want to be saved in our humanity; we want to be fished out of it. We crucified Jesus, because:

… he claimed to be God and then failed to come up to our standards for assessing the claim. It’s not that we weren’t looking for the Messiah; it’s just that he wasn’t what we were looking for. Our kind of Messiah would come down from a cross. He would carry a folding phone booth in his back pocket. He wouldn’t do a stupid thing like rising from the dead. He would do a smart thing like never dying.” [pp. 90-91 of The Romance of the Word: One Man’s Love Affair with Theology] 

II

In John’s Gospel when standing before Pilate, Jesus seems to accede to being described as a King. He asserts that though a king his kingdom is not of this world. Unlike an earthly king, Jesus admits that he has no army to enforce his rule. Jesus is saying that to the extent that he carries authority he could be described as a king, but an unusual one in that he has no power apart from being the herald for the inbreaking of God’s rule. It’s not his kingship which matters. It is the kingdom of God that counts.

This is not only a rebuke to Pilate, more importantly we see in Jesus’ action before Pilate a warning to his disciples and followers that he has no intention of embodying their traditional expectations of him as the Jewish Messiah, i.e a warrior king, first-century Superman, who will deliver them from their experience of vulnerability.

So words like messiah are tricky. What makes matters worse is that Jesus gives such a poor, inarticulate performance before the seat of ultimate earthly power and bears the consequences. We certainly have no intention of emulating Jesus in this particular example.

Jesus’ strength lies in his very vulnerability. This is a nice phrase but what does it mean? It means that God can do nothing with our pretence of strength. Our pretense of strength squeezes God from our frame of reference. Our vulnerability, on the other hand, offers God an invitation to enter into our picture of the world and to partner with us. Jesus’ vulnerability becomes an opportunity for God to act.

Vulnerability is the forbidden word in our present mindset. Attitudes that 10 years ago would have been regarded by the majority as extremist views now hold centre stage among the leaders at the current stage of the Republican presidential nomination race. You don’t need to be a brain surgeon to figure out that this is because as long as we deny our vulnerability, fear makes us easy to exploit.

III

This week I was listening to someone speaking on the World Service of the BBC. I can’t recall his name now, yet I remember what he said when he noted that the American public believes that America can be sealed off from terrorist attack. He contrasted this attitude with the one in France and Britain where everyone realizes that the next attack is inevitable, it’s only a matter of time and the fallibility of even the most vigilant of security services.

This doesn’t stop the respective governments of Britain and France, and now other Western European nations from mimicking the certainty of American political utterance. Yet, the truth is that in an international world predicated on the freedom of movement of goods, services and people, no nation can seal its borders. It comes down to a matter of when and how we recognise this as a fact.

Our politicians do us poor service when they present themselves as having simple answers to complex problems. Neither isolationism nor interventionism offer a solution. Increasingly draconian measures that erode the very cultural values that make us who we are and pose an even greater threat to us than any enemy we face. The recent vote in the House to effectively halt the trickle of refugees from the Middle East into this country is an example in point.

There are something like 1700 Syrian refugees that have arrived in the US after an arduous two-year vetting process. It has been pointed out that why would ISIS agents pose as refugees and take the torturous two-year vetted route of entry when they can enter immediately on a student visa or with a European Union passport through the visa waiver system. Therefore, singling out refugees is simply a smoke screen for the impossibility of action and a classic scapegoating of those most in need of our help.

That the fear of being vulnerable unleashes a virulent strain of paranoia in any culture, is not a new discovery. We see this coming to the fore as the voices of racial, religious and cultural purity gain ascendancy across the world as otherwise helpless politicians and leaders seek to advantage themselves through the exploitation of fear. Everywhere we see the mounting consequences for populations whose fate is to pose the spectre of the utter helplessness we so desperately try to defend ourselves from recognizing. Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us:

We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds: we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men [and women]. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?

As Pius XI might have foreseen the increasing resort to authoritarian responses to confront authoritarian assaults leads to a distortion that ultimately makes it hard to distinguish between friend and foe.

IV

The deepest insight of the Judaeo-Christian Tradition is that humanity is made in the image of God. Like all profound insights the implications of this are rather far reaching to contemplate. So instead the Church has always had a tendency to reverse this central insight and to see God as refracted through our image of ourselves.

When God becomes remade in our image the result is that violence, oppression, hatred and fear become divinely sanctioned – Christ dons the trappings of our earthly rulers’ pretence of strength. To realize that we are made in the image of God requires us to embrace vulnerability and be changed by this experience. This impels us to focus on solving problems at source. This is what it means to be agents, not of a worldly rule given the fig leaf of divine sanction, but of the continued inbreaking of the  Kingdom of God. As with Jesus, we may discover there is a cost attached.

An anonymous Franciscan blessing goes:

God bless us with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships so that we may live deep within our heart. May God bless us with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that we may work for justice, freedom and peace.  May God bless us with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war so that we may reach out our hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy. May God bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a difference in this world so that we can do what others claim cannot be done. Amen

 

A nation that forgets its past is vulnerable to becoming a victim of its future.

The events of Friday night in Paris are a reminder to all of us, if ever we needed it, of a changed and rapidly changing world. Our hearts reach out to the people of Paris as they awaken to loss and the recognition that lives have now been changed, not only for those who have been hurt or killed in the carnage of Friday night’s attacks but for the general population at large. Our lives have been changed along with theirs.

We have become inured on a daily basis to increasingly frequent reports of terrorist attacks in far-flung places with whom we feel only but a distant connection. Paris changes that. For we are rather frighteningly aware that Paris is also London, New York, or any of our major metropolitan cities. We are linked to the citizens of Paris as we are to those of London through ties of historical and cultural affinity. These form the basis for a human affection that links us to Parisians in ways that we can feel, for when human beings identify with one another, then fear and pain become shared.

Reports of terrorist attacks in the Middle East, or Africa, or South Asia affect us less because for most of us these affect people with whom our connections feel less intimate. We look on with horror. Yet, our response finds more of an echo with the words of the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain who in 1938, shortly before flying to Munich to sign away the national sovereignty of Czechoslovakia in appeasement of Nazi aggression said:

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. 

We speak of terrorist violence as senseless. This is an expression of our inability to comprehend the motivation for such cruelty. Yet, we deceive ourselves when we hide from the reality that terrorist attacks upon unsuspecting civilian populations make perfect sense. Peter Neumann, Professor of Security Studies – what a title- at King’s College London, commenting on the events of Friday night:

This is the attack everybody has been dreading for at least a couple of years. This is really important because it is the essence of terrorism, it is not only about people being killed it is about creating a political effect. What worries me most is that we will see in France and other European counties a polarization, with different extremists egging each other on …. trying to take advantage. It’s about dividing societies. This was a big attack but even relatively small attacks are dangerous because of the political situation, because of the chain reactions they cause.

The shot that reverberated around the world

On June 28^th 1914, in the Bosnian city of Sarayevo, a city situated along the fault-line dividing the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. For the nations of Western Europe and America, Sarajevo was a place about which little was known. It was here along the ancient fault-line between the Christian and Islamic spheres of influence that a young Serb nationalist shot and killed Archduke Ferdinand Habsburg, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. This single, isolated event triggered a chain of events that ricocheted across Europe, catapulting it into the bloodiest war in its very bloody history. The First World War and the Armistice signed four years later, established the conditions that led into the Second World War and the Cold War, as well as just about every isolated hot war since then.

Most of us know from our history books that the event in Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914 led to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires. We may dimly remember that it also caused the collapse of the Ottoman Empire creating the genesis for events that today are playing themselves out, tearing apart the ancient societies of the Middle East.

As if we needed further reminding after weeks of viewing the plight of hundreds of thousands of Syrian and other refugees, in Paris on Friday night the consequences of the disintegration of Iraq and now Syria, broke through our mental levees and flooded into our consciousness.

History forgotten

With the vacuum left by the Ottoman collapse, as the victors of the Treaty of Versailles, the British and French were able to divide the Middle East into respective spheres of influence. Together, they drew meaningless lines on the map. Palestine, which included modern Israel as well as Jordan, and Iraq were created to be a British sphere of influence, together with the existing nations of Egypt and Iran. Syria and Lebanon were created to become an area for French influence. Both countries supported Ibin Saud to unify the desert tribes of the Arabian Peninsula into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

However, it was the creation of Iraq and Syria, little more than arbitrary lines on the map that made so little sense. In the case of Iraq, Bedouin Sunni Arabs were lumped together with Kurds and Shi’ite Arabs. The Bedouin and Kurds shared the Sunni form of Islam but were divided by ethnic identity. The Arabs shared ethnicity but were divided by religious tradition. The Kurds sprawled across the artificial borders of the new Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. The Shi’ite Arabs shared a common religious tradition with their Persian neighbor. In the case of Syria the rest of the Bedouin Sunni Arabs not included into Iraq were lumped together with the urbanized and cosmopolitan Levantine cultures of Damascus and the Mediterranean coast. In Lebanon, Sunni, Druse, Christian and Shi’ite populations were forced into a unitary state.

With the retreat of the colonial powers after 1945 and an increasing American influence in the region, the stability of Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Iran was maintained through Western support for ruthless dictatorships that maintained stability through oppression. Iran was the first domino to fall.

We all know the rest of this history and how we come to the tragic events in Paris on Friday night. What we don’t know well enough is how responsible the several generations of Western political leadership is for what we see coming to pass. Violence only begets more violence. No one has clean hands.

Coming closer to home

Wednesday of last week was Veterans Day, which is always the 11^th November because at the 11^th hour, on the 11^th day, of the 11^th month in the year 1918, the guns on the Western Front fell silent, bringing to an end the First World War. The Allies celebrated November 11^th as Armistice Day, keeping the minute of silence at the 11^th hour. In the US Armistice Day was renamed Veterans Day in 1954 following the Korean War.

In the UK, the renamed Remembrance Day continues to be marked by the wearing of the red poppy, as it does also in France and Belgium. In these countries remembrance of the war dead grows in strength as a national commemoration with each passing year. The wearing of the poppy has fallen into disuse in the US and the link to remembrance seems to have weakened as the years have past. At St Martin’s we have marked Sunday 15^th November as a day of remembrance, a time for the solemn commemoration of the war dead. To these we now must add the victims of terror, both cultural kin and foe.

Why keep this morning of solemn remembrance? Well, one answer is the rector is importing his British cultural observances. Yet, the deeper reason lies in a recognition that as our American culture loses the desire to remember, we need to be reminded that what we no longer remember, we are destined to repeat. If violence begets violence, then violence forgotten, repeats itself creating spirals of escalating horror.

On Veterans Day, we are quick to express our support for the men and women currently serving in our armed forces. The President pays an official visit to Arlington’s tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Yet, the rest of us seem to have loosened our remembrance of the war dead. We no longer wear the poppy, the symbol of the carnage of war. In the loss of that memory and the customs that keep it alive, we also lose the capacity to move beyond sentimental expressions of support our troops into a more somber contemplation of why we continue to put our young service men and women in harms way. Many of us are left scratching our heads, not daring to voice the question: and for what end? 

The separate commemoration of Memorial Day, instituted by President Lincoln as a solemn commemoration for all the dead of the Civil War, has now degenerated into just another of the proverbial three-day weekends. The national memory of the sacrifice of our sons and daughters falls lost somewhere between these two commemorations, both of which are now in need of a restoration if they are to fulfill our need for a satisfactory experience of national remembrance.

Coda

The Old Testament lesson recounts the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. This is a story that comes down to us out of the predawn of the Jewish religion. Recorded in its present form at a much later date and presented as a story about God rewarding complete trust, there are echoes of a more disquieting time when child sacrifice may well have been part of a more primitive Israelite deification of the violence of fear. As is the custom of all such wrathful deities, they require a scapegoat appeasement.

Among the flower of Britain’s youth being sacrificed to this same angry God in the trenches of the First World War, a number of poets, among them Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen sought to find a voice for protest. In The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, Wilfred Owen, a young poet of extraordinary giftedness, who died seven days before the eventful 11^th of November in 1918, penned the grief of his generation and all generations whose misfortune is to be caught in the folly of war. He wrote:

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went, 

And took the fire with him, and a knife. 

And as they sojourned both of them together, 

Isaac the first-born spake and said,

My Father, Behold the preparations, fire and iron, 

But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?  

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps, 

and builded parapets and trenches there, 

And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son. 

When lo! an angel called him out of heaven, 

Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, 

Neither do anything to him. 

Behold, A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns; 

Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him. 

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

For the Fallen, is an ode from the pen of Lawrence Binyon, another young poet serving in the trenches. For the Fallen has become immortalized as the Ode of Remembrance, recited across the British Commonwealth at all Remembrance Day Services. 

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.

I commend these words to all of us, not only in memory of our own fallen, but in memory of all the victims of terror. 

An interpretation of the fable of the widow’s mite 

For some time, we have been following the events of Jesus’ road trip from Galilee to Jerusalem. In Mark’s narration of the events along the way Jesus has now reached his destination.

Mark 12:38-44 is one of the most remembered passages in the New Testament. It is a story that inspires and disturbs by turn. The actions of the widow who puts into the Temple treasury all the money she has appeals to a part of us where we would like to be more deeply motivated to trust, and through trusting to become more generous than we usually feel it is prudent to be.

I know that within myself the courage to trust to a sense of abundance is fought with on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. Within this pericope – from the Greek meaning an isolated selection of text – we have the appearance of generosity that costs everything pitted against the appearance of costless generosity. Jesus observes the wealthy giving large sums of money to the Temple treasury. In doing so, he notes tow things: their self-satisfaction and public pride and that their generosity costs them nothing.

Mark 12:38-44 has a fable-like – a short tale that packs a heavy moral punch – quality. He sets up a comparison between those who give only what they can afford to miss – and the widow who sacrifices all she has. This inspires and shames us to want to be more generous and self-sacrificial.

We should be more honest with ourselves and face-up to our struggles to live from trust in a spirit of God’s abundance. Yet, for the most part, we continue to choose to live under the weight of insecurities, fuelled by a fear that what we have, we have to hold onto. Few of us feel able to risk the widow’s generosity.

A new interpretation of the fable

But is generosity the point of the fable? If verses 38-44 are reconnected with the overarching thrust of Jesus’ teaching a very different interpretation confronts us.

On his first day in Jerusalem, Jesus sits observing the people dropping offerings into the Temple treasury. He watches the goings on and identifies a woman, whom he believes to be a widow. What escapes us is that Jesus also knows that she has no son or male heir, otherwise, it would be her son who would be making the offering.

In Jesus’ day, a woman without sons could not inherit or manage her deceased husband’s estate. Such estates were vested in trust to the Temple authorities to manage rather like a court-appointed trustee of our own day, appointed to manage the estates of minors or others who have less than a full legal status.

The Scribes and Levites in the absence of laws on financial regulation fraudulently devoured the property they administered in trust.

To add insult to injury, this woman, the likely victim of institutional embezzlement comes to the treasury and gives all of what little money she has left.

The traditional interpretation implies that Jesus praises the Widow’s action. Yet, nowhere in the text does Jesus praise her or imply any approval of her actions. Neither does he explicitly judge the rich in this passage. We are the ones who read in judgment and approval respectively, drawn from our awareness of Jesus’ wider message about the difficulties of wealth when it comes to the spiritual life.

Jesus, to say the least is an anti-establishment figure. His preaching of God’s Kingdom stands in opposition to a religious system based on the fraudulent exploitation of the poor. When seen within the larger context of his message, Jesus’ observations at the doors of the Temple treasury are less about generosity than they are a challenge to the way religious tradition has the potential to condition us to act against our own individual and group best interests.

Jesus observes a Widow acting against her own better interest because she is conditioned to do so by the religious system she lives within.

Addison G Wright in his paper on this text, Widow’s Mite: Praise or Lament? — A Matter of Context, says:

and finally there is no praise of the widow in the passage and no invitation to imitate her, precisely because she ought not to be imitated.

Setting the fable in a larger context

Organized religion always plays an ambivalent role in any society. On the one hand religion motivates and inspires people to transcend narrow self-interest in the service of a wider common good.  Yet, at the same time, organized religion easily becomes a pillar of the status quo, and as such, it blinds us to the need to question a system that privileges some and oppresses others. Whatever the merits of the widow’s actions she is a victim who cannot see beyound what her religion has conditioned her to see. She is thus blinded to her own best interests by her encounter with her religious traditions.

This last week I had to do some long-delayed work on the St Martin’s website. This was mostly a matter of updating content as we move towards a major experiment in the way we organize our Sunday mornings; making sure the changes are well signposted for visitors to our website. 

In the E-news this week, I wrote about our need to increase the number of portals through which the spiritually curious can enter into our community encounter with God. Our website has now replaced our red doors as the most important portal of entry into St Martin’s. 

The home or landing page is always a challenge. What do you put here that will grab the fleeting attention of a visitor to the site? The home page is where we communicate the essence of our message.

The difficult question for me is not so much what is our message, but how much of it to put in this crucial home page location?  The hard part is to say enough but not too much. Say too much and you overload the fleeting attention span of the casual site visitor. It seems today that every parish priest is required to be an expert in the subtleties of marketing and brand management.

If you visit stmartinsprov.org you will encounter in the first sentence the core of our message.

We are a Christian community exploring and interpreting the tensions when 2000 years of Christian Tradition is engaged by the opportunities and challenges of 21st-century life.

There are 10,000 words of meaning packed into this one sentence and I have spent an inordinate amount of time worrying over whether tradition engages the opportunities and challenges of modern life or is engaged by the opportunities and challenges of modern life? You might this is hair splitting, but it matters.

The rapidity of change in modern life is increasingly stressful and the core of our message as Episcopalian Christians is that we believe in the continuity of the Christian Tradition (scripture, tradition, and reason) with a capital T. For us it is a conduit through which God speaks. Yet, we recognize that the simplistic application of the Tradition to modern life, i.e Tradition engaging modern life, solves little beyond further straitjacketing people into lives that are too tight for them. Instead, we believe that when Tradition is engaged by the opportunities and challenges of contemporary life something powerful emerges from having to navigate through the resulting tensions.

The Temple in Jesus’ day was the place for powerful and life-changing encounter with the living God. At the same time, it also represented a systematic accommodation with the powers and principalities of this world. It was the thin place where God was encountered. It was also a system that ideologically blinded people to its operation as an instrument of their oppression.

Christian Tradition bears a legacy that has become largely discredited. For many in our society its failure to speak truth to power, preferring to align with the interests of this world has robbed it of authority and credibility. It is viewed as something that continues to thicken rather thin the blindfold across our eyes. Yet, Christian Tradition is first and foremost the transgenerational transmission of the Gospel – the good news- to each succeeding generation through which the collective human experience of being in relationship with God flows. Despite its capacity to become corrupted into an agent of oppression, Christian Tradition, as the good news of God is the chief means by which we free ourselves from the manipulation and oppression of the business as usual mentality of the world.

Crammed into the one sentence on our website is an attempt to articulate that our St Martin’s community is a place where Christian Tradition is engaged with from the perspective of the lives we actually live rather than something imposed that does violence to the integrity of our experience in our own time and place. When this engagement takes place, renewed by our encounter with it, Tradition becomes something with the potential to speak wisdom to the issues and conflicts that lie at the heart of our lives, awakening us to where our best interests really lie.

Observing the fervent celebrations of Halloween, an anthropologist studying American culture might add a line in a learned paper:

The eve of All Saints and All Souls remains one of the great folk religious customs that unifies the otherwise fractious and quarrelsome North Americans. 

A little history

The weekend of November 1^st  All Saints-All Souls marks a cultural event that has deep religious roots, the significance of which seems lost to most of the population who celebrate it. All Saints-All Souls is one of those thin places, a term from Celtic spirituality identifying a transitional space in time. Thin places can also be locations of place. Glastonbury and Stonehenge are two of many English examples. The commemoration of All Saints-All Souls constitutes a thin place in time opening a strange window into our popular culture, through which flow two great pagan religious traditions, one European, the other Mezzo-American, both with deep roots predating Christianity. All Saints- All Souls is the Christianization of the pagan Celtic Halloween. The great Latino celebration of  Día de los Muertos, similarly is the Christianization of the Aztec goddess Mictecacihuatl, that center of a tradition of ancestor worship.

The significance of both these celebrations lies in the eruption of ancient pagan folk religion, which like all folk religion lies buried underneath the brittle carapace – the hard shell of Christianity. On the 1st and 2nd of November each year, the dead-hand of both Protestant and Catholic orthodoxy is shattered by the eruption of deep pagan currents running in the subterranean rivers of the collective unconscious of both Anglo and Latino cultures.

On Friday night, Al and I were FaceTiming with our 10-year-old granddaughter who was modeling for us her Cinderella costume including a long blond wig that completely transformed her appearance in preparation for her trick or treat escapades. Little does she know that the popular practice of trick or treating owes its origins to the great Celtic

celebration of welcoming the transition of the seasons from autumn to winter. On Samhain, the door to the other world opened and feasts were prepared for the souls of the dead. Like our children today, our forebears protected themselves from harmful spirits by disguising themselves with weird and wonderful costumes and painting their faces into grotesque caricatures to hide their true identities from the evil spirits.

Following the English reformation, the celebration of Halloween was discouraged. For the English, the need for a lively celebration at this time of year was transferred to 5th November, the commemoration of Guy Fawkes. Guy Fawkes or bonfire night celebrates with bonfires and fireworks another cultural form of vanquishing of demons, this time the Papist demon Guy Fawkes and his Jesuit friends, who failed in their attempt to blow-up the Houses of Parliament during a visit of the King, James I. Incidentally, on that occasion of the King’s visit to Parliament, intended by the conspirators to be his last, one Roger Williams, secretary to the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Coke, accompanied his patron among the courtiers and officials in attendance on the King that day. In place of trick or treating, English children used to go from house to house carrying a straw effigy of Guy Fawkes. As householders opened their doors they were greeted with the cry not of trick or treat, but of penny for the guy.

Among the Puritans who settled in this part of America, the celebration of Halloween was strictly forbidden because of its demonic overtones. It seems the popularity of Halloween takes root in America among the millions of later Scots and Irish immigrants who, in their own part of the British Isles, had refused to abandon the old Celtic festival.

Our human nature

Human Nature expresses itself through culture. Our cultures are punctuated with small openings which allow expression of deeper psycho-spiritual needs.  We need these openings to illuminate what otherwise becomes the mind-numbing monotony of the here and now.

In the 1789 and 1928 editions of the Book of Common Prayer, the prayers of intercession were introduced with the words: Let us pray for the whole state of Christ’s Church, Militant here in earth.

That odd word militant refers not to aggression but to you and me. We are the Church Militant – the Church on the march in the world.Yet, we are not the whole Church. We are only the Church active in this world. The whole Church includes two other states, traditionally referred to as the Church Expectant, and the Church Triumphant. This is the vision of the three-tiered universe, an inspiration that draws from the imagery of the Book of Revelation, from which the epistle reading for All Saints is taken.

The endurance of the pagan roots of Halloween and Dia de los Muertos, as vibrant contemporary expressions of popular culture, give testament to the human need, from time immemorial, to hope for more than the idea that life is this world is all there is.

In abandoning the medieval imagery of the Book of Revelation, let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The division between All Saints and All Souls expresses our deep human psycho-spiritual need to build meaning in the face of the reality of death. All Saints is a celebration.

Through remembering the great exemplars of Christian living, we celebrate a joyful expectation of our continued life in God. Yet, in the face of death we experience sorrow, loss, bewilderment and pain as those we have loved are no longer physically present to us. All Souls expresses this element of human need. Our hearts still reach out for those we have lost. Our hearts open in the urgency of prayer for those who are still achingly loved and yet no longer present to us.

Love and a sense of continued relationship compels us to pray for our loved ones, who comprising the visions of a Church Expectant wait in the hopeful expectation of their fulfillment. A sense of need likewise compels us to seek the prayers of the saints and Saints, whose love and support we implore having already attained the joy of paradise in the Church Triumphant. For we are all united in one Church through the timelessness of relationship now lived out through prayer – uniting militant, expectant and triumphant states of being.

What of Scripture?

The gospel for All Saints is the story of the Raising of Lazarus from John’s Gospel. This is a powerful story in which the themes of faith and grief are linked together. Jesus confronts Mary and Martha with the need to trust, to risk a leap of faith. He asks them to trust and believe in something greater than surface appearances. It seemed to them their brother was dead. In the face of the human grief that accompanies death, we see the deep humanity of a Jesus disturbed by grief and sorrow. It seems that grief and faith are not incompatible, but complementary.

In the Gospel story of the Raising of Lazarus, God shows us that death is only a biological event, not a human event! Biology ends because it is a condition of life in the Church Militant. Contrastingly, being human is a continuous event that transcends the event of biological death, spanning between the dimensions of militant and expectant life.

Human life is a process of journeying into the fulfillment of God’s Covenant made with us in Christ. This is a promise that our humanity is more than an accident of biology. It is nothing short of the promise of incorporation into the life of the divine community that is God. In the words of the Burial Service of the Book of Common Prayer

For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended; and when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for us a dwelling place eternal in the heavens.

In the culture in which I was raised, making a fuss was considered as something that could only invite personal embarrassment. If you made a fuss, in effect you were drawing attention to yourself, and drawing attention was tantamount to inviting social judgment. Consequently, I am someone who hardly ever makes a fuss, at least, not in public. The one exception, are high-end restaurants. Here I have learned to overcome my conditioning when I am encountered by an attitude of condescension, the kind of attitude that with concealed subtlety communicates that it’s a privilege for me to be eating in this elegant and glamorous restaurant while paying through the nose for the privilege of being condescended to. This being the exception, I often find myself hotly ruminating in my mind – going over and over again what I should have said to this or that person, in this or that situation, had I been less inhibited by my fear of embarrassing myself by making a fuss.

As we travel through the enveloping cool of autumn, a season that always conjures up for me the opening lines of Keats’ Ode to Autumn:

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless                                                                                                             With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

I am mindful of another season that I secretly dread; that of the parish’s Annual Renewal Campaign or ARC, when as rector I run the risk of making a fuss, or at least provoking the opprobrium of my more conservative parishioners who consider it bad taste for the rector to talk about money, in church. This year at St Martin’s I have enjoyed the relief of being able to soft peddle the usual message about financial stewardship because this year, the ARC occurs within a larger process of our adoption of the RenewalWorks spiritual inventory.

Like many parishes, at least in the Episcopal Church, we struggle with financial stewardship. Often this is presented as a budgetary issue, and meeting proverbial budgetary deficits is an element for careful, and dare I say – prayerful consideration. Yet, for us at St Martin’s, a community where the financial generosity of its members is regularly expressed when it comes to paying for large ticket items such as our recent restoration of the St Martin window, we discern that the challenge of financial stewardship facing us is to deepen our response to the call of discipleship. By this, I don’t mean to suggest the proverbial report card comment – must try harder. I am talking about our need to find a satisfaction for the unnamed yearning of our hearts.

Several years ago, when I served at Trinity Cathedral in Phoenix, I coined the sound bite – opening our wallets as widely as we long to open our hearts. Glibness aside, in my own life of discipleship, financial stewardship takes me to the heart of an internal struggle to overcome an ingrained attitude of scarcity and to experience life- abundance. To live with gratitude and generosity from a belief that there is always enough, because in my life the experience of enough is more than anything else, an attitude of mind and an orientation of heart. An attitude of scarcity often goes hand in hand with an anxiety about making a fuss. Both are the products of certain kinds of cultural experience.

Invitation to conversation through the gospel reading

The story of Bartimaeus son of Timaeus takes place on the outskirts of the Biblically rich city of Jericho. This is a multilayered story in a sequence of multilayered stories that Mark offers us concerning Jesus’ road trip to Jerusalem. This road trip recalling Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem is for those who travel with him the road trip to discipleship. Mark recounts a number of incidents along the way that are all linked by a call to discipleship. Mark chronicles events of blindness and clear-sightedness. The healing of the physically blind becomes the metaphor for another kind of blindness, that of the mind and heart; a blindness repeatedly displayed by the Disciples.

Bartimaeus is a poor man, not simply poor materially, but according to the prevailing religious attitudes of his time, poor spiritually as well. For the religious of his day, his blindness was an indication of his being out of favour with God. Bartimaeus has placed himself by the roadside so as not to be missed by Jesus as he passes. When he hears Jesus approaching he begins to make a fuss, and as others try with some severity to silence him, the crescendo of his fuss-making only increases.

Bartimaeus sits by the roadside on the outskirts of Jericho, which in the 6^th chapter of the Book of Joshua we are told was the first town to fall to the Israelites who leveled its walls by making a huge commotion of feet tramping, trumpets blaring, and voices shouting. On the roadside, on the outskirts of Jericho, Bartimaeus sits making a commotion as he calls repeatedly: Son of David, have mercy on me!

Towards cathexis

Bartimaeus’ use of this historic phrase Son of David is a code phrase for his recognition of Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus, moving amidst the throng of people is halted in his tracks and turning around he tells the crowd to bring him to me. Mark then shows us a man, not a blind man who haltingly rises and moves with caution towards Jesus, but a man who throws off his cloak and springs up and rushes toward Jesus. Jesus asks him the proverbial discipleship question: What do you want me to do for you? Compare Bartimaeus’ response to that of James and John to the same question, reported by Mark in last week’s incident along the road. Bartimaeus with simplicity says: My rabbi, let me see again! 

Whenever we respond to the call of discipleship, Jesus simply asks us: what do you want me to do for you? Unlike Bartimaeus, we will often not know how to answer. For me, the point of this story lies in my recognition that Bartimaeus receives his sight through an experience of cathexis.

Cathexis is a term that refers to the investment of emotional significance in an activity, object, or idea. Bartimaeus becomes deeply invested in the one his heart has been yearning for because the intensity of his yearning heart creates a moment in which he experiences a profound realignment with Jesus.

Sometimes to obtain that which our hearts yearn for requires such a realignment. Realignment, results when we risk to step outside of our sense of social conformity and make a fuss, weathering the storm of public rebuke for doing so. Bartimaeus’ heart moves from yearning via commotion-making to investment in the one for whom he has been longing. Through becoming invested in Jesus, he now moves into the relationship of discipleship.

Today over lunch at St Martin of Tours in Providence, our RenwalWorks leadership team meets to begin to review the data from our recent RenewalWorks online survey. At this point in time, it’s not for me to speak too much about my impression of the data from our responses. What I can say, because it relates directly to my exploration of Mark’s story of Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, is that our survey results provide breathtaking evidence of the strength of the yearning of our hearts for God. The possibility of cathexis is in the air!

Last week I took the easy way out. I preached from the Letter of James instead of tackling the thorny text from Mark, in which Jesus talks about cutting off hands and feet and plucking out eyes in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. James chapter 5 is a significant text for any Christian community with its vision of healing as flowing from the dynamo of the community’s prayer, channeled through the elders of the Church and other individuals who have been called by God to this particular ministry. Nevertheless, avoiding the gospel because the text is too challenging is something I don’t feel I can pull off two weeks in a row.

Mark Chapter 10, contains a series of events, all of which are interconnected by Mark’s use of the word and, implying linkage. The chapter opens with today’s reading in which Jesus delivers what on the face of it appears to be a clear teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. For most of the last 2000 years, the Church has understood this text as a prohibition on divorce.  Christian’s who still hold to a literal interpretation of the Bible continue to read Mark 10: 2-16 this way. For different reasons, the Roman Church also interprets this text similarly.

In the Episcopal Church the remarriage of divorced persons is at the discretion of the bishop, who on the recommendation of the priest concerned gives or withholds his or her permission for the marriage to be solemnized in church. When I am approached by two persons seeking marriage, one or both of whom have been previously married, I am required to ask the person or persons to share with me their perception of the issues that led to the failure of the previous marriage. The quality of this conversation will determine whether I feel able to advise the bishop to grant their request to marry again in the Episcopal Church.

What is the scriptural authority for this practice? Many continue to see the Church’s stance as simply an accommodation with the declining moral standards of the secular world. Maybe, so, it certainly can be read this way. Yet, the recognition of divorce is not the first time that the humanist-inspired championing of civil rights in a secular society has led the Church to review its previous stance on the interpretation of Scripture.

Mark 10: 2-16: a softening of the heart

There are two distinct scenes in this passage The first scene opens with a conversation between Jesus and some Pharisees, in which they seek to force Jesus to come down on one side or the other of a dispute between them. Judaism held two competing views on the interpretation of the writ of divorce. The strict party allowed divorce only in cases of (the wife’s) sexual infidelity. The more tolerant party allowed a number of justifications for divorce. The question the Pharisees put to Jesus in effect is – teacher, which interpretation do you favor? Jesus shocks them with his answer the effect of which is to say – I do not favor divorce under any circumstances. 

What is in Jesus’ mind becomes clearer when we recall that he reminds the Pharisees that Moses’ allowance of a writ of divorce was an accommodation with the hardness of the human heart. He compares this accommodation with God’s intention at creation. God intended the marriage relationship between two persons to be a sign of the covenant between God and humanity. When Jesus says: what God has joined together let no one separate, he is saying that God’s intention takes precedence over the Mosaic writ of divorce. The Pharisees go away muttering to themselves.

A second scene now opens with Jesus talking privately with his disciples, who ask him to explain himself again. Jesus then utters these words: Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. So far, no surprises here. But then he says: and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. The disciples must have been shocked by this. What on earth is he talking about? Surely, they think, Jesus must know that a woman cannot divorce her husband?

Jesus is making clear that God’s intention at creation is for marriage to be a relationship between equals and not simply a legal property arrangement that can be put aside by the man whenever he chooses because the patriarchal law accommodates his superior status as a male.

Now, there are two ways of reading Moses’ allowance for a writ of divorce. Although the writ became a weapon in the hands of men, perhaps its original intention was for the protection of women. The writ of divorce ensured that what little legal protections marriage gave a woman, could not be lightly put aside by her husband without his having to go to court to do so, thus preventing a cruel and capricious husband simply casting his wife out of the house. Jesus is saying that Moses allowed a writ of divorce as a necessary protection for the woman against the hardness of the male heart.

A curious echo of this continues in England. In the marriage services of the Church of England the couple sign the register in front of the congregation because the marriage register of the Establish Church is the legal register of marriages. After signing the register, the couple sign the certificate of marriage, which the priest then gives to the bride.

As I handed over the certificate I would explain this ancient practice to the couple telling the bride that the certificate legally belongs to her and not to her husband. Now, an anachronism, in the past the certificate was her proof for the protections accorded her by marriage in an otherwise patriarchal society, in which property law accorded her few rights.

A relationship between equals

Jesus endorses our modern acceptance of human beings as relational beings. God is relational and the very act of creation is a desire for relationship with human beings. Through forming relationships with one another, we come to be reflections of God.

We are relationship seeking beings. Yet, as with every other aspect of being human our relationships are also fallible. Some succeed while others fail. The quality of our relationships is an expression of our emotional maturity. The failure of our relationships is often, sadly, an expression of our emotional immaturity.

In marriage preparation, I invite a divorced person seeking remarriage to share with me their perception of the reasons why their marriage ended in divorce. In their story, I listen for the echoes of sorrow. I am hoping that I can hear in their story a sense of loss – a  loss of innocence. I listen for signs of the pain and disillusionment at finding failure where they hoped for fulfilment in relationship. My question is: how has this experience of loss of innocence deepened their self-awareness so as to better equip them to have a more mature expectation of themselves and their new marriage partner? It seems to me that no-one who had been through a divorce has 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.

Because the loss of our innocence leaves a deep and often ugly scar in us, it is all the more important that we have an opportunity to learn from experience by making a new and fulfilling marriage with another person. In this way, a second marriage holds the promise of reparation. In God’s relationship with us there are always second chances. Why should this not also be so in our relationships with one another?

The Mosaic writ of divorce had become by Jesus’ time an expression of the hardness of the human heart. Jesus moves the goal posts away from the legalistic debate among men concerning the justifiable grounds for divorcing one’s wife, into a new conversation that recalls God’s intention for marriage as a covenant reflecting God’s love for us in creation. There is more than a hint here, at our own contemporary approach to seeing the relational failure resulting in divorce as an expression for the softening of the human heart.

As Anglican Christians in the Episcopal Church we live in the tension between our parental generation’s interpretation of Scripture and Tradition and the reality of the lives we actually live; lives also illuminated by a fresh encounter with the written Word of God. This place of tension is where we expect to encounter God, not only in our successes but also in our failures. It is in this tension that God comes looking for us.