Missing The Point: Mark 10 35-45

Mark 10: 35-45 sits within the unfolding of a series of events on the road trip Jesus takes towards Jerusalem. Like all road trips, for some time we remember the isolated events that happen along the road. Over time however, our memory of isolated events along the way, which at the time occur within their own discrete context, become reshaped by the larger meaning and purpose of the road trip itself. So each week we note the happenings along the way, but also need to keep them in the larger perspective of what this road trip is about for Jesus.

The incident concerning James and John’s request to Jesus for the ultimate places of honor strikes me as a difficult reminder of our human propensity for over-valuing ourselves. Within Mark’s larger road trip narrative this is the third time the disciples have not heard Jesus correctly, or so it seems. Along the road, Jesus takes time to explain to his disciples his larger purpose for making this journey. He speaks of his expectations of humiliation, failure, death, and resurrection that lie ahead.

How did he know this? Is Jesus omniscient? Does Jesus share God’s bird’s eye panorama of the events unfolding? Maybe? However, I prefer to think of Jesus not as omniscient but as simply bringing to bear a very human awareness, unclouded by wishful thinking. Jesus knows all too well the consequences of confronting systems of power and oppression. He seems amazingly free of any fantasy expectation that he is going to win in this confrontation.

Along the road, Jesus speaks of the inevitability of his impending death three times. After the first time, Peter is so incensed he rebukes Jesus. A second time Jesus tries and while he’s speaking the disciples argue out of his earshot, or so they think, about who is going to be the most important among them when they reach the road trip’s destination. For them, the road trip is a political campaign tour on the way to winning the election. They are the Jesus campaign activists seeing him as the candidate of choice for the position of Messiah. They expect that when he wins power, there will be goodies for everyone who has supported him. Jesus tries one more time to tell them what to expect, and again his words fall on deaf ears.

The other disciples when they find out what James and John have asked Jesus become indignant, and maybe this is our response to them as well. Isn’t indignation our response in the face of another’s blatant attempts to curry favor?

Now maybe James and John, a story coming out of the mists of time has lost any real power to affect us beyond being mildly amused at their audacity. Yet, this story needs to be connected up with our own experience. When we relate to James and John’s grab for power, ditching their friends along the way, this story is a story that uncomfortably resonates with our ordinary everyday lives and becomes a conduit for our feelings of outrage at the unashamed grab for power and influence by others. Yet, the more complicated truth is, aren’t we also James and John?

Mark presents the disciples as stupid and slow to understand, in the grip of a fantasy of having their own day basking in the sunlight of freedom and prosperity. Yet, they are only doing what Christians have done ever since – view Jesus through the prism of our own worldview and self-interests.

It seems to me there are two ways of seeing James and John and all the James’ and John’s we daily encounter in our everyday lives. We can see them as main-chancers. Coming from near the bottom of society the promise of social advancement as followers of the man who was about to take Jerusalem by storm, must have been too much to resist. We can also see them as a kind of everyone. We all live in tension with our unfulfilled needs and longings to be more than we are, to be better than we are, and maybe more pressingly, to have more than we already have.

Missing the point

What is remarkable is not the motives behind their request. These seem all too understandable enough. What is remarkable is Jesus’ response. What is remarkable is that the disciples missed the point, and so do we, but for different reasons.

The ironing out of a confusion

We live at the end of a line of political and social development that has given us social democracy, sometimes also referred to as liberal democracy. Social democracy is characterized by the possibility for social mobility alongside the idea that the governed should determine who governs them. The old hierarchies of power and influence still pertain – after all human nature is still in a process of perfection, yet social mobility has until comparatively recently been a striking characteristic of our democratic society. Fuelled by a national system of education coming on the back of secularization, that grand post-Enlightenment momentum of social perfectibility, hitherto undreamed of possibilities for social and economic mobility opened up for many ordinary folk in our grandparents and parents generations.

Sadly, we now seem to be at the end of this line of social and political momentum and our 21st-century society seems to be coming to more closely resemble some of the gross inequalities more characteristic of Jesus’ time.

Another characteristic of social/liberal democracy that blinds us to the radical nature of Jesus response is our familiarity with the development of an ethic of public service. The age-old pattern of governmental appointments as tools for personal self-aggrandizement and financial enrichment through public theft was in the 20^th century replaced by the concept of a civil service, the members of which were paid out of the public purse in order to serve the interests of the public good. All of this would have been quite alien in the society of first-century Palestine, as well as much of the following 2000 years of European social history. As with social mobility, as the 21^stcentury progresses, notions of public service (servanthood) seem increasingly to be the mark of a previous age.

To our ears, Jesus teaching on servanthood, the first to be last and the last first is not so revolutionary, though it remains difficult to put into consistent practice. However, to the ears of his followers, it was incomprehensible – literally speaking. As human beings, we can only comprehend that which is already imaginable. Jesus suggests a radical vision for social relations beyond the social imaginary of his first-century hearers, and so – they literally miss the point. Each time he reiterates his vision of servanthood as the way his followers should relate to one another, the response is startling. It is as if a cone of silence comes down between him and them, preventing the words he speaks from being heard by them.

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The disciples do eventually come to belatedly understand. Because Jesus with self-sacrificial consistency models the way he wants them to behave, they eventually do come to understand. Their still patriarchal and hierarchical worldview notwithstanding, the followers of Jesus come more and more to be able to not only comprehend his message but to begin to live it out in practical, everyday ways.

Here, is where the confusion needs to cleared up. It’s important to note that the development of a culture of servanthood is not the fruit of an early kind of project of self-improvement, which secularization and social democracy have shaped us to value. The followers of Jesus are radically changed not by their own growing social sophistication, but by what his death allows God to do. God raises Jesus to life, after life after death.

For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.

In the Tradition we have often come to see Jesus’ death as the price God paid to liberate us from the death of sin. There is a strong tendency to see Jesus as a heroic figure, freely and nobly offering up his life for the world. However, the efficacy of Jesus’ death lies not in its nobility, nor in it being the blood price demanded. The efficacy of Jesus’ death lies in what it allows God to do. Jesus’ death leads to the possibility of resurrection. This is the new thing that God does. And one of the most immediate fruits of this new thing, this fundamental change, is the development of a real culture of servanthood as the unique mark of community among the followers of Jesus.

Arriving at the point

The disciples do not achieve the servanthood Jesus called them to through the expansion of their own individual and social imaginations. The did not achieve anything. Instead, they became transformed as the spirit of Jesus was given back to them in the form of the Holy Spirit. It’s the Holy Spirit, not their self-improvement, that empowered them to emulate Jesus’ example of servanthood.

Bringing the point home

This last point is for us, the crucial one. The question of servanthood lies at the heart of our journey of spiritual renewal at St Martin’s. The danger is that we will be content to simply exemplify the best of our secular society’s notions of mutual respect and in the broader world, the ethic of community service motivated and empowered by our acceptance of the best traditions of social democracy. If our aim is to only do what good people do then we will miss our mark. Because, if this is all that happens we will as individuals and as a community remain unchanged. Remaining essentially unchanged means remaining unsatisfied.

I believe that our spiritual deepening has important implications for how we treat one another, how we serve and allow ourselves to be served by one another. This is not just a matter of becoming better than we are, doing better than we’ve done. It is a matter of becoming transformed by the power of God’s Holy Spirit moving among us. Like the first followers of Jesus, for us following Jesus is not a matter of self-assertion, not a matter of finally getting it. Following Jesus is a matter of allowing ourselves to become transformed by the power of the Spirit working among us. Like the first disciples before us, only radical transformation can bring about the change that our hearts are yearning for.

October 17, 2015 0

Gripping Tightly or Holding Lightly (Mark 10:17-31)

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The Rev. Linda Mackie Griggs, Deacon and Director for Spiritual Formation, St. Martin’s Church.

Two wrenching images stand out in today’s Gospel lesson. The first is of a young man grieving; trudging away as if weighted down by everything he owns—realizing for the first time the what the high cost is of following Jesus. The second image is that of Peter—aghast, perplexed, standing with his empty palms outstretched to Jesus, complaining, “Look, we have left everything and followed you”! Imagine all the disciples clustered together behind him, no money, bag or possessions between them—Breathlessly asking, “Then who can be saved?” They must feel, even if only for a millisecond, like twelve victims of a massive theological bait-and-switch.

But as is typical with Jesus, what seems at first blush to be an overwhelming challenge is really an invitation. He has taken the original question, about how to inherit eternal life, and transformed it instead into a description of the Kingdom—the Reign of God. But Jesus hasn’t so much evaded the man’s question as he has tried to shift his perspective.

We have a clue to Jesus’ objective at the very beginning of this encounter. The man kneels, paying homage, and calls him, “Good Teacher”. Jesus gently rebukes him, pointing the man’s attention away from himself and toward God: “No one is good but God alone.” It is this statement that sums up everything that follows.

Jesus asks the man about his knowledge of the Law, by reciting the Commandments. Note, however, that he names only six of them, not all ten.The ones he cites are the LAST six—the ones that have to do with relationships of people with each other. The four Commandments that Jesus has left out of his list are the ones that focus on peoples’ relationship with God:

You shall have no other gods;

You shall not worship idols;

You shall not take God’s name in vain;

You shall keep the Sabbath holy.

These four are the ones that should align our priorities. When that alignment happens, the other six Commandments fall into place. It’s like Jesus said in Matthew’s Gospel, “You shall love the lord your God, and your neighbor as yourself.” God first, neighbor next; everything that comes from this is like a tree which grows from a single fundamental nourishing root; God alone.

And Jesus’ questioner thought he was doing everything right—He had kept Jesus’ list of Commandments all of his life. He was a good man. But Jesus needed him to internalize the fact that unless he had God as his focus, his good intentions would ultimately fall to shreds.

There was One Thing lacking—one thing that was the thread weaving through it all; a realignment of his priorities. And so Jesus tells the man to rectify his focus—to shift it back to God: “…go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” And the man leaves, grief-stricken, because he has many possessions.

The common perception is that the man is devastated because he has decided that he won’t be able to follow Jesus. But what if it is because he’s decided he WILL follow Jesus, only now he knows what it will cost him?

He realizes he’s got to let go. Letting go of our idols, by definition, requires loss. It also requires Trust. Trust that, though we are leaving something cherished behind—money, status, pride, resentment, anger (and yes, it IS possible to cherish and idolize our anger and resentment)–that it will be okay. That somehow, the loss will be worth it. Somehow.

But it’s hard. And Jesus knows that. Which is why, “looking at him, Jesus loved him”. He knew that what he was asking for was a leap of faith into the arms of God. He knew that, human frailty being what it is, God’s children tend to hold tightly to things. Prying those fingers loose is some kind of spiritual heavy lifting.

Jesus said, ‘…how hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” He uses the ludicrous image of camels in tiny spaces to illustrate the difficulty—Scholars have tried to explain it away and make it somehow more palatable. But the message is clear: Letting go is a tight squeeze. But it’s vitally necessary for our wholeness as human beings and as beloved children of God.

We know from the first months of life the importance of holding on to something. Babies have a grip reflex—where you can gently press your finger into a baby’s hand and he will automatically grab on tight– That reflex is so strong that babies can sometimes hold their own body weight. We need to know how to pick things up and move them from place to place. We need to know how to hold a spoon, or a pencil, or take someone’s hand. But the reflex itself only lasts three or four months into a baby’s development, until she begins to close and open her hands voluntarily. So even our developmental DNA knows that proper motor skills involve not just holding tightly, but letting go. It’s the only way to make progress. You can’t just keep carrying along everything you pick up without leaving some stuff behind as you discern what you need and what you don’t. And if you’re loaded down with a lot of junk, how can you grasp what is really important when you find it?

Our spiritual and emotional selves can learn a lot from our physical selves. God’s Kingdom isn’t about staying stuck and weighed down. And that is what happens if we continually hold tightly to an ideal of perfection and achievement and acquisition that we can never attain because the bar of worldly expectations will always be set higher than we can reach.

You may have heard of what John D. Rockefeller said to someone who asked how much money is enough. He responded, “Just a little bit more.”

But it’s not just about money that Jesus was speaking. The idea of letting go also pertains to the misconception that life should be perfect and painless and effortless, if only we do it right. Whatever ‘it’ is.

We do our best. We work, we save, we exercise, we eat our fruits and vegetables, we follow the rules. And still jobs are lost, health fails, loved ones die, tragedies and natural disasters wreak havoc.

Jesus offers the rewards of the Kingdom in this age, but it is not what contemporary culture—our own or that of the first century—would expect. Jesus warns us to expect that things won’t be perfect—that the Kingdom entails “persecutions”. There are battles to be fought and suffering to be encountered. This is the counterintuitive Kingdom that Jesus describes. It asks us to give up so that we can gain even more.

But what is it that we gain? This is not some prosperity Gospel, which falsely promises that giving your money away is going to yield a bountiful financial return. This is wrongheaded and dangerous teaching.

No; when Jesus says that we will gain a hundredfold brothers, sisters, and fields, he speaks of the brothers and sisters in Christ that we are called to serve, in fields of generosity, justice, and compassion. And the joy that it brings is not the same as superficial happiness. Joy is God-rooted—deeper, richer, more eternal, and most often seasoned with deep knowledge of pain and struggle.

One of my earliest memories is of my own baptism. It may have been only a dream, but I remember myself as an indignantly squalling freshly-splashed infant. Mostly , though, I remembered love: The love of my new church family as I was paraded up the aisle of my little church. I remember being held; held in strong arms. Safe, secure. I myself held nothing; instead, I was held, and I trusted those arms.

This morning we will baptize Ryn Mulholland. We will vow that by our prayers and witness we will help her to grow into the full stature of Christ. What will that look like? What will we teach Ryn about the Kingdom of God?

We will teach her that being a Christian is countercultural. Being a Christian invites her to hold lightly, not tightly, to the superficial criteria of success that our culture offers. Being a Christian asks that she move through this world, not fearful of scarcity but reveling joyously in the abundance and wholeness of a life lived securely in God’s embrace. We will teach her that the Kingdom is an enormous family—hundredfold brothers and sisters who love her. We will teach her that the Kingdom doesn’t mean that life is easy.

The world is a scary place sometimes. Pets die, friends move away, knees are skinned and bones get broken, but we, the whole Christian family, are with her all the way, through seasons of despair as well as joy, holding her in prayer and love.

We will teach her that seeing the world through the eyes of the Kingdom means seeing how she can hold others through Christlike compassion and service. Most of all we will teach her the countercultural lesson that there is freedom in letting go, freedom in trusting God, and in living faithfully into the knowledge that, for God, all things are possible.

October 13, 2015 2

For the softening of the heart

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.

October 3, 2015 0

Healing: Miracle or Cure?

A little background on the Letter of James

Over recent weeks, the epistle or second lesson has been taken from the Letter of James. Traditionally the letter was ascribed to James the Just, the brother of Jesus, and first Bishop of Jerusalem. This James is different from James the Great, one of the sons of Zebedee, mentioned in the gospels. Some modern scholars dispute James the Just as author, noting that the quality of the Greek is indicative of a higher level of education than might be expected from a brother of Jesus, preferring to see the letter’s authorship as anonymous. Written in Jerusalem, the letter addresses Christians in the diaspora. The date of the writing is uncertain.

What is distinctive about the letter is its very pastoral style and content. It focuses on behavior, calling believers to live according to a higher standard of behavior than normally expected in the world. To a modern reader, the judgments meted out to those who fall short seem rather exacting.

In chapters 3 and 4 James explores the themes of self-control and personal restraint, identifying the tongue for particular comment. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire. And the tongue is a fire. He notes that the greatest damage to relationships and communities is done by the unbridled tongue. Today, we often say of such a person, she or he has no filter, for whatever comes into the mind pours out of the mouth. James notes that real wisdom and understanding are expressed only through the gentleness of our actions. He strikes a somewhat modern psychological tone when he notes in chapter 4 that when envy, ambition, and selfish cravings are at war within us, then disorder in relationships and disharmony in community, will be the result.

The power of prayer

The letter of James contains one of the most eloquent passages on prayer to be found anywhere in the New Testament. In Chapter 5:13 we come upon this beautiful passage:

Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up, and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. Therefore confess you sins to one another and prayer for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.

This passage is often read as an invitation at services for healing. Normally in our Episcopal context, healing services are led by a priest, who stands in the stead of those James refers to as the elders of the church. Yet, James also invites us to pray for one another. He notes that this prayer for each other’s healing provides another powerful conduit for God’s healing.

Clearing up one confusion

In our somewhat hierarchical structure, it is easy to see the prayers for healing from a priest in the sacrament of anointing and the laying on of hands as more efficacious than our prayers for one another’s healing. It’s true that while we can all lay hands on one another in prayer, only a priest has the authority to administer an anointing. This tension often translates into the expectation that the sacrament of healing is dependent on the presence of a priest.

This attitude is tantamount to what I call a belief in strong and weak medicine as in: he-im strong medicine – as Native Americans are given to say in Hollywood Westerns. It’s an understanding of prayer as somewhat magical. The miracle of healing is a conjuring up of a powerful magical medicine. Our hierarchical view of ministry leads us to view the priest as possessing strong healing, whereas baptized laypersons possess healing in a more diluted form.

But according to James the power for healing that resides in the elders of the church is not a product of their stronger magic. It is an expression of the prayer of the whole church –everyone’s prayers, concentrated and channeled through the conduit of the priest as a representative of the whole body. In this sense, the priest needs no special temperament for healing, for he or she is simply the conduit for the healing power of a community of prayer. In addition to the priest as the embodiment of the community of prayer, God also calls particular laywomen and men, who by virtue of their baptism are given a special temperament for healing. This is a personal charism or gift, to be used for the strengthening and healing of one another within the whole body of the faithful.

Clarification of a second confusion

Healing for those who still maintain a pre-modern mindset, is (mis)understood through the language of miracles. A miracle is defined as: an event not explicable by natural or scientific laws. Such an event may be attributed to a supernatural being (God or gods), a miracle worker, a saint or a religious leader. In contrast for those who hold a modern mindset, healing is often (mis)understood as curative. Used as a verb, cure means to: relieve the symptoms of a disease or condition. When used as a noun cure refers to: a substance or treatment that cures a disease or condition, i.e. a medicine.

Note the bracketed prefix – mis – above. For, from a spiritual or theological perspective healing is neither miracle, nor cure. Healing is an action of God, usually mediated through the prayerful orientation of the community, which brings about for the recipient a strengthening in confidence, an alteration of perception, and a shift in perspective. Healing restores us to both wholeness and holiness, and the process by which it occurs is complex and various.

In a sermon, I cannot wander into the complexities of the process of healing as it affects our physical, emotional and spiritual health. As we look forward to having more time for Christian Formation at St Martin’s, healing is an area I hope we can with some urgency, begin to explore in seminar and workshop format. A key area for further exploration is the complex nature of the psyche-soma connections and cross-overs. We are so conditioned by a rationalistic scientific point of view that understands soma – physical matter, to be foundational. This view relegates mind and soul to secondary positions as merely registers, places for the reverberation for the primacy of the physical.

A short example: heart issues are understood to be rooted in biological somatic causes, located in the malfunction of the heart muscle. This obscures the connection between stress and the heart’s response. Could not heart failure also be a registering of the emotional condition of unresolved stress, originating in the mind. It might equally be a somatic registering of the spiritual state often poetically referred to as a broken heart.

Yet, if we accept that human beings are psychosomatic creatures, then we have to accept that healing is a complex interplay of factors affecting all three domains. The sermon is a medium severely limited by time restriction and mode of presentation and is not conducive to the exploration of the interplay between psyche, here used in both the sense of mind and soul, and soma. It is enough to say here that healing operates as a dynamic process with divine origins, bringing soma, psyche, and soul into realignment.

Jesus in his ministry, as recorded in the Gospels performs what are usually referred to as miraculous, spontaneous healings. Why does he do this? Is he intent on wooing the crowds with feats of miracle working? Is he setting up a first-century version of medicins sans frontiers? The answer to these questions is a resounding no. Jesus is revealing the power and glory of God, and his healings are intended to bring about a realignment and reorientation in his hearers relationship to God.

The revival and strengthening of the church’s healing ministry is for me a central plank as our community at St Martin’s moves forward on a path of spiritual renewal. Although healing led by a lay person has been available on the third Sunday of the month, it is my hope that as we can gather a larger team of those who discover a call from God to participate in this ministry, we can offer healing prayer routinely on Sundays. The formal sacrament of anointing and laying on of hands is always available on request as is the sacrament of the reconciliation of the penitent.

To come for healing runs somewhat counter to the reserved New England temperament, which shuns public demonstrations of spirituality. Nevertheless, pray that through God’s blessing our renewal will begin to gather momentum. One fruit of this might be that many more of us within our community might feel emboldened to bring ourselves, our suffering, our anxiety, and our struggles for healing. Pray God to also raise up some amongst us who discern a calling to this ministry of prayer and human solidarity.

September 26, 2015 0

Three Themes in Mark 9:30-37

There are three distinct sections to this passage from Mark, chapter 9.

Passing through Galilee.
The question about the disciples conversation along the way.
Jesus’ admonition on what it means to be welcoming.

Tracing Mark’s chronology

Remember two weeks ago we heard about Jesus’ encounter with the Syrophonecian woman? This was a consciousness expanding experience, for Jesus. The challenge presented by this gentile woman, who seems to be the first to openly recognize who Jesus really is, dislocates him from his hitherto understanding of his mission to the Children of Israel. Jesus now opens to the wider implication of a mission to everyone who recognizes the message he brings. God’s open armed inclusion of all within the grace of God’s love and acceptance. For Mark, this is the pivotal point in Jesus’ ministry, because it is from here-on that he turns his face towards the journey to Jerusalem.

Then last week, we were invited into a rather tense encounter between Jesus and his disciples, and in particular, their spokesman, Simon Peter. Having been recognized by the gentile woman Jesus now challenges those who are closest to him with the question – who do you say I am? Jesus then begins to share with them the implications of what his mission really means, for him, and for them.

Tracing Mark’s theology

Mark begins his gospel with God’s open declaration – this is my son, my beloved, and I am very pleased in him. It’s unclear as to who among those present at his baptism get to hear God’s voice, but the point is that we the readers, hear God’s declaration as to who Jesus is. Mark then treats Jesus’s identity as the Christ as an open secret. The Syrophonecian woman – a gentile seems to understand. It is significant for Mark that after the theophany (God event) at his baptism, Jesus is next recognized by someone outside of the dispensation of Israel. Then it’s a case of the disciples, those inside the dispensation playing catch-up.

Contexting

The question continues to hang over us – who do we say Jesus is, or put another way- who is Jesus for us? The difficulty for many of us is that we think we know the answer, because we know Mark’s story and how it ends. It’s not a secret for us. Yet, let’s not dismiss Mark’s notion of the open secret too soon. We know who Jesus is because at one level we know the story. Yet, knowing the story means we know about Jesus. It does not mean that we experience who Jesus is.

Jesus’ question to the disciples has two parts: who do people say I am, and who do you say I am? As part of the generic people, we know who he is because we know the story. Yet, in our heart of hearts can each of us answer – yes, I know who Jesus is for me?

In Mark 9: 30-37 we come to realize just how hard it is to truly know who Jesus is, because the consequences of knowing are rather unsettling. With the three-fold outline of this passage in mind, we see Jesus talking to the disciples about what it means to be who he is as they pass through the region of Galilee. He talks to them about the ultimate implications of who he is and what God is asking him to accomplish. The details are so dire, so frightening that the disciples hear, and yet do not hear him.

Selective cognizance

This is what we human beings do all the time, we select what we want to hear and ignore the rest. Most of the time this is a semi-conscious process. By semiconscious, I mean that if someone were to bring it to our attention we would readily recognize the process. Yet, there are some things so terrible, so frightening for us in their implication that we simply can’t take them in without something blowing up. The hippy phrase – wow that really blows my mind, man – comes to mind here.

Now, the reason we can’t take in the message is because unconsciously we do hear it. It is just that confronted by an imagined sense of utter helplessness, the message is too much for us. This is exactly what we see the disciples doing as they follow along at a distance they think is safely out of Jesus’ earshot. We see them distracting themselves with a pointless conversation. Unconsciously, they feel terrified and helpless in the face of what Jesus is telling them. No, no, no, they psychically scream!

So much of our lives together in parish community involve distracting ourselves with endless chatter about things that don’t matter because we are afraid to really recognize the full implications of why we are here. Do we not chatter on endlessly about our desire to make a difference in the world while keeping our commitment to building Christian communities with the energy and power to really make a difference rather low, in the list of our priorities? Do we not feel a need to protect ourselves from being dislocated by the demands of the kind of discipleship Jesus is talking about in Mark 8 and 9?

Similarly, as a society we are distracted by the spectacle of the massive corruption of our political election process, presented to us as entertainment by an equally corrupted news media. In truth, we are all disgusted by the waste and the wasted opportunities to confront the issues that really matter. While being somewhat entertained we stand helpless before the escalating crises bearing down upon us like the headlight of a locomotive soon to roar upon us from its tunnel.

Jesus response

Jesus takes a child in his arms. For us this seems a tender and caring gesture that resonates with our view of the world where we hold our own children dear and at least in principle, we hold all children dear. Contrastingly, Jesus’ society predates the development of a concept of childhood. Here, children were simply smaller and weaker adults, to be overlooked and disregarded. To be a child was one step down from being a woman. So to represent a little child as the model for the receptivity and welcome of the Kingdom of God was a startling thing. This is an invitation for all of us to embrace vulnerability. In our vulnerability, we are compelled to welcome God.

Welcome and change

To welcome, costs us something. There is an important link between our process of welcome and what we welcome others to. We long to be like little children with their open and trusting view of the world. Yet, as adults we know disappointment and disillusionment. We are caught between our child-like desire to be open and our adult need to protect ourselves.

Resolving this tension is a matter of deepening our experience with the living God, an experience always mediated through the way we negotiate our day-to-day lives. To this end at St Martin’s our key priority areas: inspiring one another to greater levels of engagement in all aspects of our community life, strengthening the message of financial stewardship, and attracting and retaining new members, merge into a single priority:

to facilitate our personal transformation through the renewal of our individual spiritual lives.

Key to addressing our new priority is offering a practical approach to the enrichment of our day-to-day lives through spiritual practice. Spiritual practice – is for me a catch-all phrase covering the application of age-old spiritual wisdom and experience to help anchor ourselves more securely in the face of the escalating demands and stresses of modern life.

In the particular

At St Martin’s on the Eastside of Providence we long to become a more magnetic community – the fruit of transformation in our individual spiritual lives. In my mind, that requires us to become more magnet shaped. This has implications too terrible to contemplate, i.e. changing the way we do Sunday morning.

In our Anglican- Episcopal tradition worship is the focus of who we are. The primacy of worship gathers us, transforming us into a community that celebrates the long relationship between God and the people of God. In Eucharist, we make present here and now this great story, collapsing past and future into this present moment.

To become more welcoming, we think it’s a matter of tinkering with the liturgy, in some cases simplifying it, in others making it even grander and more complex. We think if we offer more services then we will attract more people. All of this smacks of a response of those of us already here, desiring and designing a welcome for those who are already like us.

In Advent, we will launch an experiment that flows partly out of our recent experience of the simplified summer schedule of services. During the four Sundays of Advent we will move from two Eucharist’s on Sunday morning to one, timed to be followed by an hour of Christian formation time, for adults as well as young people, ending around 11.30am. A second, contemplative and instructive Eucharist will be added to the late afternoon – early evening. Our recent experience of this pattern confirmed for us a new and strengthened experience of a more magnetic community as we husbanded our human resources into one place and time.

This is bound to inconvenience some of us who are used to the existing pattern. The chief reason for this change is to offer a richer diet for a world where many are so spiritually hungry.

Jesus called his disciples to mission. It took them a while to be able to face the fearful implications of what this would mean for them. But embrace mission they did, breaking out of the fear shaped prison of their selective cognizance, and in nearly every case, like that of their master, at the cost of their lives.

The question of welcome, that so exercises most church communities boils down to the question Jesus asks us: who am I for you? Am I the comfortable Jesus – distanced by the gospel narrative as a once-upon-a-time story? Or, am I the anchor that holds you firm in the face of the escalating demands of life?

Echoing Archbishop William Temple’s statement that the church is the only organization which exists for those who are not yet its members, let’s work to renew our community as a magnetic – mission-shaped community of disciples, – a community where personal transformation through daily encounter with God us, its members to with energy and joy have an open and welcoming heart for those who have yet to show up.

September 19, 2015 0

Homecoming; Mark 8:27-38

Episcopalian preachers are constrained in the choice of preaching texts by the Lectionary’s three-year cycle of readings. We preach on one of the four texts –OT, Psalm, NT, or Gospel appointed for a particular Sunday. I often lament not having the authority to choose my own favorites. I think that’s probably a good thing? The congregation is spared my hobbyhorses and can be directly addressed by the Wisdom of God. Through the Lectionary cycle, the Wisdom of God invites us as a community into a particular conversation, one that God desires to have with us rather than the one we tend to have with ourselves. Through the sermon, the preacher’s task is to respond to God’s invitation, taking the broader transgenerational conversation of Scripture and contextualizing it within the here-and-now experience of this particular community.

This little summary of the theory of preaching is a way for me to segway into an admission that on Homecoming Sunday, a Sunday when the emphasis is on celebrating the start of a new program year and welcoming everyone back after the recreations of the summer, having been given the choice I would not have selected Mark 8 with its language of getting Satan behind us, self-denial, taking up our cross, and the terror of winning or losing one’s life – but hey? Before I get into the knotty task of contextualizing these challenging comments of Jesus reported by Mark, let me say welcome back! It’s good to see you. Let me tell you I am excited looking forward to where our new program year might take us!

Invitation

Over the coming months – September – November, the transgenerational conversation that the Wisdom of God will be drawing us into, will be channeled through the Gospel of Mark. The good and bad thing about Mark is that he is a straight talker. The economy of his words, the direct immediacy of his syntax – note he has a preference for the continuous present form, communicating an immediacy that can often disquiet those of us who prefer a more polite distance from Jesus’ call to discipleship.

Recently in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus has returned from a visit to the borderlands with a visit to the Gentile city of Tyre. Here, outside his exclusively Jewish context, Jesus is jolted into a larger vision for his mission, a graphic experience for Jesus of learning from experience, the upshot of which is that the message of grace and inclusion is no longer confined to the Children of Israel, but now startlingly open to the entire canine[1] world. He then returns via a healing tour of the Decapolis, an autonomous cosmopolitan region where Jews and Gentiles live side-by-side, before arriving at Caesarea Philippi, where he addresses his disciples with the question: who do people say I am, and more specifically who do you say I am?

A question: do we know who Jesus is?

Homecoming Sunday and the call to discipleship

Each of us is on a spiritual journey. To an extent our spiritual journey and our life journey are parallel strands of experience not always well synced, yet designed to be coterminous, each arriving in the fullness of time, at the same destination. For most of us these parallel strands are in tension. At each turn of the way, the pressures of the life journey seek to overwhelm our awareness of being on a spiritual journey. The nature of our parish community is a communal reflection of our individual negotiation of the tension between the demands of life and our desire to anchor where the restlessness of our hearts find rest in the Wisdom of God. Synchronizing the life and spiritual journeys is a process of learning through consecutive stages of maturing. Thus, Christian communities comprise a series of concentric circles.

In the first concentric circle, we experience little of the tension between the life and spiritual journeys. As individuals we try to be good people in our lives and so association with church is simply, us as good people doing what good people do, connecting with an organization we see as fulfilling a good purpose in the world. Being Christian presents as another version of a desire for self-improvement, we want to be better than we are. For instance, as parents we want our children to have a Christian formation because we want them to grow as fully rounded people. Yet, at this stage of our spiritual awareness Sunday School and Sunday morning soccer are roughly equivalent, and we want our kids to have a bit of both.

The second concentric circle represents a heightening of spiritual awareness. Paradoxically, we experience a sharp increase in the tensions between the demands of life and our spiritual calling. The tension increases here because we’ve caught the whiff of relationship with Jesus, and this becomes something important to us. We seek something ineffable, something too big for us to be able to adequately express it in words. We know that no amount of self-improvement will bring us closer to that which we are compelled to seek. We become increasingly dependent on grace. Negotiating this tension requires of us some difficult choices. We continually revisit our priorities as we realize we can’t make all the choices open to us, equally – we have to choose. Choice opens some doors while closing others and this is often a difficult negotiation. As parents, we want to model to our children our growing sense of the importance of God in our own lives. Because we don’t always feel confident in doing this we seek the support of the Christian community to help us shape them in that experience. However, for our children to have more than a cursory experience of ‘church’ as part of their well-rounded education, they need to catch the spark of our own curiosity and excitement about God. Otherwise, church becomes like school, something they do when young.

The inner-most circle is where the tensions between our life and spiritual journeys settle out a little. The choices we make in the face of the demands in daily life are in greater alignment and harmony with our desire to know and experience being known by God. I am not suggesting there are no conflicts to negotiate and that such negotiation does not come without cost. It’s simply that our sense of spiritual priorities is more established and this becomes a real support in guiding us to the choices we now intentionally make. We have learned a little more about the nature of the difference between the life we seek to win and the life we can afford to let go of. Here, we don’t feel we are good people, associating with an organization for good. We feel inadequate to the central task, no longer one of asserting our own goodness, but of opening ourselves to God.

In this inner circle Jesus’ words about self-denial and cross-carrying, about winning and losing life take on special significance. Often this is the stage of the spiritual journey we reach only after our children have launched upon their own lives in the world. Experiencing a certain amount of new and often terrifying freedom from the constant demands of family life with children at home, we begin to look towards the next phase of our lives, which of necessity moves us closer to a sense that we don’t have a lot of time left. Nearer to death, the earlier urgency of love gives way to a broader perspective and greater clarity.

In a world where all the emphasis is on individual choice and our own ability to progress along a continuum of self-improvement, however defined, we are likely to hear Jesus’ invitation to self-denial and cross-bearing as a heavy and rather irksome personal demand. We mutter to ourselves: I am under enough pressure in life, I don’t need my religion increasing the level of impossible demands. Many of us remain in the outer circle of faith community life because we just simply don’t feel able to meet what we experience as God asking more than we can risk.

To be in the first concentric circle is perfectly acceptable to God because this stage in negotiating the tensions between the life and spiritual journeys is a fine place to begin. My concern is that many of us stay longer in this stage because we misunderstand what God is asking of us. Because we hear God’s call only in purely individualistic terms, we can’t move forward, and there is a danger that after a while this unsatisfying experience causes us to leave the church altogether.

From individuality to community

The call to self-denial and taking up our cross to follow Jesus is not primarily, a call to prove ourselves worthy of the task of achieving personal salvation. It’s an invitation to participate in the life of a community that is a self-denying and cross-carrying community, in other words, a community of the baptized. The most ancient strand of soteriology, i.e. the doctrine of salvation, emphasizes that it is as the people of God that we are saved. It is as a company of disciples that we follow Jesus.

I believe the conversation that the Wisdom of God is calling us into on this Homecoming Sunday is a conversation of welcome. God is saying come, be present, all I require is that you conscientiously seek to participate in the building up of my body in the world. The purpose of the church is not to be a haven for the good, but to witness to the saving actions of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. All are welcome at all stages within a community that supports us as we struggle with negotiating the tensions between the demands of life and our spiritual calling.

As we journey … into the new beginnings of post-Labor Day autumn, what will it mean to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow Jesus? More, certainly, than giving up a few things; more than suffering as part of the human condition; more than moving forward on new paths—peering into autumn’s transitions, we belong to one another. Matthew Skinner

Welcome back!!

[1] My pun on Jesus’ initial disparagement of the Syrophonician-gentile woman as ‘little bitch’, hence reiterating the Jewish disparagement of gentiles as dogs.

September 12, 2015 2

Learning our way towards the Kingdom

The Evangelist Mark, tells of a period in Jesus’ ministry when he appears to be off-line or off the radar, to use an older expression. Mark relates Jesus turning up in the region of Tyre. Tyre was historically the capital of the Phoenicians, an area we would recognize today as Lebanon. By Jesus’ time, this region had become a melting pot of Phoenicians, Canaanite-Syrians and Greeks. Jesus has wandered into and area where Jews were not always welcome. The Middle East was always, as it remains today, a hotchpotch of diverse ethnicities and faith communities living cheek by jowl, not always in amicable terms with one another. Mark does not explain why Jesus journeys into foreign territory. Furthermore, it appears that Jesus is alone. Mark offers no explanation for this, either.

Jesus roams beyond his Jewish homeland into a borderland. I am interested in the term borderland not merely as a geographical reference, but as a psychological designation. The borderland is the place where our psychological references shift.

Within our habitual environment – our habitude, we become programmed to expect only certain things, and to interpret them in familiar ways. Our habitude, an old French word once frequently used in English is from a psychological viewpoint a construction, a mental space inhabited by familiar expectations. Our habitude is by its very nature designed to minimize the possibility of being surprised by the unexpected. Even when we are, there’s no guarantee we will even recognize it.

Mark relays an encounter in the borderland with the unexpected that surprises Jesus. What’s more, being surprised by the unexpected seems to bring about a huge shift in Jesus personal perspective on the world presaging a huge shift in the nature of his mission.

An encounter that changed the world

We all know Mark’s story (Mk 7:24-37) about Jesus’ encounter with the gentile woman who request healing for her daughter. Distance in time and culture insulates us from the tensions running through this encounter. We miss the fact that Jesus’ response to her is from his place of habitude. He rejects her request because as he puts it, it’s not right to give the food reserved for the children of Israel and feed it to the likes of her a gentile dog. Micah Kiel in his commentary on this text comments:

Mark’s Jesus here uses the Greek word for “dog” in the diminutive, but this does not mean Jesus is calling her a “cute little puppy.” A colloquial translation today might be: “little bitch.” Jesus seems unsure of the relationship between the Gentiles and the Kingdom of God.

The reason Mark gives us this vignette is because it presents Jesus as a man, confronted by the unexpected, being jolted into a new understanding of his mission. The woman receives her request and her daughter is healed not because she has skillfully bested Jesus in argument, though this is clearly so, but because Jesus is confronted with a new understanding that expands his mission beyond the confines of his Jewish-shaped -habitual expectation.

What kind of Jesus do we want?

What I mean by this question is, is Jesus a prisoner of our habitude, or is he a figure that surprises us and jolts us into the hitherto unimaginable? So much of our traditional way of viewing Jesus pictures him as omniscient – knowing all things, seeing all possibilities ahead of their happening. This presents a curious picture of Jesus who knows his end and simply journeys towards its fulfillment. It is as if we see Jesus as the key protagonist in a play, who going through the motions knows, as we also know, the end of the story ahead of time.

Speaking plainly, I do not find this Jesus of much help to me. I see this traditional image as an expression of our human desire to put a wide blue distance between Jesus and ourselves. In raising him to a higher plain of consciousness – an omniscient being, Jesus earns our admiration, someone to look up to. Yet, we seldom notice that such an elevation also conveniently excuses us from the now so-called higher – as in beyond our reach -elements of his mission. Our elevation of Jesus gives us an excuse from following Jesus because it’s now a futile exercise in comparing apples with oranges.

The phrase Mark most often uses to refer to Jesus is Son of Man. Most of us seem to prefer Matthew’s more elevated reference Son of God. In Jewish etymology, their meanings are technically interchangeable, yet for us they nuance this question of what kind of Jesus do we want? Do we want a Jesus who unlike us, is omniscient, knowing all things ahead of time? Or do we yearn for a Jesus who like us, can be surprised? Mark presents Jesus as very much like us, a man who was confronted by surprise; a man who could be jolted out of his habitude of familiar expectations and learn.

Learn is the key word here, for learning can be pleasurable, but is most often painful, arising out of a conflict between the familiar and the challengingly novel. The idea that Jesus learns comforts me because I too learn – usually painfully, and I can only imagine that it was as painful and initially disorienting for Jesus as it usually is for me.

A local implication of Mark’s story

At St Martin’s in Providence the Labor Day Weekend signals our entry into the new program year. We do so this year supported by the spiritual inventory program, RenewalWorks. Like many Christian communities we are powerfully confronted by the challenge to grow- growth measured across the board: in numbers, income, levels of engagement, but most significantly, measured in terms of our spiritual deepening. It’s clear to many of us that the key to drawing others, to attaining better financial sustainability, and levels of community engagement is completely reliant on the members of our community learning; learning more about our spiritual needs and the discrepancies between what we spiritually long for and our spiritual practice.

Key to this learning transition is our willingness to close the safety gap –mind the gap – keeping Jesus and his call to mission, at a comfortable distance.

A global implication of Mark’s story

As we watch the agony of the flood of refugees fleeing the carnage of Syria and adjacent regions, as a citizen of the European Union I am appalled at the failure not simply of human charity, but of the amnesia that blinds the more xenophobic countries of the Union to the echo between the historical images of the holocaust and what we all see unfolding across our TV screens. The current crisis is a European crisis, and one that is challenging the EU at its core to learn from its own painful history. Yet, in America the lesson should not be lost on us either, for we are more than willing to look the other way in the face of increasing pressure on our own borders.

The mission of Jesus is not his mission, it is our mission also. Mark’s story is a pivotal point that shows Jesus being (uncomfortably) confronted to expand the boundaries of his mission to reveal the power and urgency of God’s love and acceptance for the entire human race. Let’s stop hiding in our habitude, safely insulated from the demands of too much accountability for one another and allow ourselves to be confronted by the message of Jesus’ encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman.

The problems of our world are huge, and the solutions always partial and incomplete. This does not excuse us from our need for a change of heart!

September 5, 2015 1

‘Little I’ Incarnation

Sermon delivered on August 31st Pentecost 14, by Linda Mackie Griggs, St Martin’s Director of Christian Formation

While it may be tempting to think that we have left behind the Gospel lessons about Jesus as Living Bread, perhaps I should warn you not to get too comfortable. While our text today does seem to have moved on to a new setting, and even a new Gospel writer, we have not left behind the difficult images of incarnation. Only this time we aren’t exploring Jesus’ Incarnation so much as we are exploring our own.

Our story today actually begins much earlier; at the beginning—when God loved Creation into being, clothing countless sparks of life with myriad creaturely bodies—wings, fins and tails; fur, scales and skin; mouths, eyes and ears. The story begins, according to the first creation story in Genesis, as God seeks his first children while walking in the Garden in the cool of the evening, asking, “Where are you?”—three words that embody God’s yearning for relationship.

How do we respond to the ineffable—to that which is beyond physical knowledge or description? There is a spark, essence, a something that God first clothed in physicality—what I like to call “little ‘i’” incarnated. Perhaps James describes it well as “implanted word.” When God first sought out this essence, this little homing device in His children they responded the only way they knew how—through their bodies, their senses, their incarnated selves. They established ritual and worship, marking the men through circumcision, eating certain foods and preparing them in certain ways. Ritual washing of bodies and cooking vessels wasn’t just a matter of hygiene. It was a matter of holiness—of valuing the sacred, and making offerings to God as acts of love and worship. All in response to God’s, “Where are you?”—God’s invitation to relationship. The bodies that humans had been given were used to connect the hearts of the people to the heart of God. This was the gift of their incarnation—heart and body as one.

And this served not only to build relationship with God but with one another. The “statutes and ordinances” that we hear about in Deuteronomy connected God’s people to God and bound the people of God into community—into family. Their physical practices kept them mindful, day by day, of who they were and whose they were. And arguably they would not have survived without it. They wanted to be seen as “wise and discerning people”, distinct from others, as Chosen.

But something happened, and it happened pretty much immediately, as is the nature of fallible humanity. Our beautiful God-given gift of incarnation has a difficult time remaining properly connected to its Source. It’s almost as though there’s a short in the system. Once the idea of sacred is introduced, humans tend very quickly to gravitate toward dualism—to want to pit sacred against that which is perceived to be profane.

So now it’s not just a matter of holiness and relationship, it’s a matter of who is holy, and who is not. Who deserves to be in connection with the sacred, and who does not. I’m worthy, but I’m not so sure about you.

“Hey Jesus, why don’t your disciples wash their hands?” This isn’t an issue of washing up for dinner. It’s a matter of who is worthy of being a member of the family.

And Jesus recognizes this. He knows the stakes are higher than hygiene and conformity. As a matter of fact he has a better idea than the Pharisees of the significance of their simple question. He pegs it as symptomatic of a totally skewed worldview—a misuse of their gift of incarnation and, as a result, of a total disconnection of the heart of the people from the heart of God. “You hypocrites,” he calls them. You have lost touch with the heart of the Law, and you are using rituals to circumvent relationship, not to build it.

And the language Jesus uses shows once again that he is, in fact, probably more comfortable with the concept of embodiedness/physicality than anyone present. It’s amusing that the Lectionary actually leaves out several verses in this passage—perhaps just for brevity in the summer heat, but I’m a wee bit skeptical. These lines, in particular stood out when I curiously went to see what was missing:

“Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, ¹⁹since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) ²⁰And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles.”

Jesus responded to the Pharisees’ indignation about impurity by getting down and dirty about human bodily functions. Jesus had no trouble at all with physicality. He used spit to heal a blind man. He used spit, stuck his fingers in ears AND touched a man’s tongue to heal his deafness. He called a woman with a 12-year hemorrhage, “daughter.” And, as we have heard for the past few weeks, he invited his hearers to eat his body and drink his blood.

Jesus, fully God and fully human, was totally at ease with incarnation, while the rest of us generally squirm.

This discomfort, this uber-focus on bodies as simply bodies, and not as incarnated creatures of God, has resulted in the tendency to devalue others based on various aspects of embodiedness, whether it is practices or physical characteristics. Jesus cited a plethora of sins that issue forth from a heart disconnected from its divine Source: “fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly”, and he was probably just getting warmed up.

All from a simple question about washing hands.

Jesus wanted to open the eyes of his audience. He wanted them to understand that if they refused to truly see all people as incarnated creatures in the hearts of which burn a God-created spark, they risked devaluing them; they risked Othering them.

How might Jesus respond to our 21^st century world? Would he see any change from first-century Palestine? I’m afraid He would see that humans persist with a heart-breaking tendency to discriminate, neglect, subjugate, abuse, and disregard the brothers and sisters whom we deem unworthy because they don’t look or act like us.

And God said, “Where are you?”

Thank God that God is so patient!

One of my favorite Eucharistic prayers is Prayer C. It recounts the history of our relationship with God from the very, very beginning. One of the most distinctive lines is this: “Again and again, you called us to return.” Again, and again. God will never stop waiting for us to remember that we are bound heart-to-heart with God and each other.

How will our hearts respond?

September 1, 2015 0

Credibility

Now is my way clear, now the meaning plain; Temptation shall not come in this kind again. The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason. T.S. Eliot Murder in the Cathedral

The readings for the 13^th Sunday in the season after Pentecost are particularly rich. In the second track O.T. reading from the book of Joshua, Joshua now an elderly man presents the option for the people; they can either follow the God their ancestors worshipped before they entered the Land of Canaan or they can adopt the Gods of their Amorite neighbors. But, they must choose according to what they are willing to do. He tells them that: as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord. The people respond: therefore we also will serve the Lord for he is our God.

The Gospel continues with working it’s way through John 6. Jesus has been speaking about himself as the bread from heaven before moving onto more graphic imagery in which he exhorts his listeners to accept that unless they eat his flesh and drink his blood they cannot have eternal life. In my last two posts, Bread and The Seed of an Idea I explored both of these metaphors in the context of Eucharistic worship.

To choose or not to choose, that is the question

Relationship with God seems always to involve a choice. To be in relationship with God is hard. Despite their affirmations, the Israelites discover over and over again that serving the Lord requires more from them than they are prepared to give. Jesus is not about to win followers through tailoring a seductive and inspiring message. Consequently, in 6:66 John tells us that: because of [his message] many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.

This seems to cost Jesus something. He seems resolute in his message but not exactly unperturbed, left unshaken by its consequences. We can sense him taking a deep breath as taking his courage in his hands he asks the twelve – his core group: Do you also wish to go away? Peter speaking on behalf of the twelve says Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. Phew!

Picture this scene. Place yourself in it. Do you not hear the catch in Jesus’ throat as he puts himself on the line with those who mean most to him. We can see the tears in Peter’s and the other disciples eyes as they acknowledge that for them there is simply, nowhere else to go, no one else to go to, for this is where their hearts have led them. They make a choice.

Although subsequent events reveal that neither the Israelites nor the twelve are ready to accept all the consequences of their choice, their choice places a marker in the ground, a place from which to at least struggle to stand firm. Standing firm is what Paul or a writer steeped in Paul’s thought exhorts the Ephesians to do through the imagery of donning the armor of God.

Choosing and then standing firm is less of a once-and-for-all resolute stand and more of a repetitive cycle of wandering and returning. From time to time, we will be knocked off our marker by what The Book of Common Prayer refers to as changes and chances of transitory life. Sometimes, we will willingly, though misguidedly wander from our marker – the imprint of our choice on the ground. Yet, having made the choice, we have a marker in the ground to which we are able to repetitively return.

Jesus, like his great forerunner Joshua, remains resolutely on-message. He recognises that the consequence will likely be that people will turn away because the message isn’t to their liking, or because it’s too costly for them to bear. I, on the other hand, want to present a convincing image of Christian faith in a world where to choose to be a disciple of Jesus is increasingly countercultural and seemingly non-credible for the majority. The pressure to make the message credible is great.

For me, the treason to do the right deed for the wrong reason is all too real a temptation. Unlike Jesus, who refuses, I am tempted to do the right deed, i.e. win new adherents and attract new people to the parish, but for the wrong reason, i.e. a desire to be successful in my work of building strong Christian community. I want to ease the anxiety of choosing by presenting the choice as credible. The question which present itself every week in sermon preparation is this: does being credible require tailoring the message for the ears of the listeners? Most of the time I think it does. Yet, a closer reading of Jesus ministry shows that this is a temptation he resolutely resists.

This exploration is making me uncomfortably aware that I have a strong need to make the Christian faith a credible choice within the context of a highly educated and intellectually sophisticated community. After all, is this not why they called me to be their rector? Yet, I am also aware that credibility is not the standard Jesus used in constructing his message. Paradoxically, the power of Jesus’ message lies in its challenge to what in any given society is regarded as credible.

What faced the Israelites over and over again was that the pagan religions who’s Gods represented every aspect of human domestic-agrarian-warrior culture were more credible than the overarching and emotionally remote deity Yahweh. The crowds flocked to Jesus because they wanted to hear a credible message that proclaimed liberation from hunger, poverty, and oppression. They fell away because the message they heard was not a credible vehicle for realizing their aspirations.

In Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, Thomas A Becket, Henry II’s hand picked man in the end refuses to tailor the gospel to fit the King’s needs. Four barons take it upon themselves to rid the King of his troublesome priest, murdering the archbishop on the altar steps in Canterbury Cathedral.

Down the generations little changes, it seems. What is the message we choose to hear, I wonder? The disciples of Jesus found themselves in what often struck them as a non-credible place. It was a place of the heart, that made little sense to the mind. Having chosen, they arrived at a place where they became acutely aware that they could choose to be nowhere other and to be with not one else. If you take the courage to choose the gospel, then you find you have little choice. In a society captive to the illusion of power through choice, the option of faith seems non-credible.

Today, so many exhibit the signs of spiritual hunger. The food we are in search of is the food of faith, faith lived through community. The dilemma remains that faith only comes after we take the courage to believe. This might seem to many, incredible.

August 22, 2015 2

A Really Big Caricature

The seed of an idea

Scott Hoezee in his weekly blog The Lectionary Gospel refers to an incident in The River by the Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor in which a child drowns while trying to baptize himself in a river. O’Connor was heavily criticized for this depiction that seems to many grotesque. She responded by reminding us that within the symbolism of baptism is the notion of dying to the old self and being reborn in Christ. She noted that:

In the land of the nearly blind, you need to draw really big caricatures.

The text

Last week in a piece entitled Bread I asked the question: do we at St Martin’s come Sunday by Sunday with a real expectation of eating the bread from heaven?

The bread from heaven is the a phrase Jesus uses in his conversation with the crowd following the feeding of the 5000 in John 6. We’ve spent the last two weeks making our way in bite-sized chunks through this chapter.

This week’s gospel section opens at verse 51 where Jesus, again likens himself to the living bread that came down from heaven. We see that the debate with the crowds is now heating up, initially sparked by Jesus’ question: are you coming to see the signs of God or for a free meal? They don’t like his referring to himself as the bread from heaven. They know this man and because they know his family background the crowd objects when Jesus attributes to himself a phrase they associate with Moses and the feeding of their ancestors in the wilderness of Sinai. Such attribution amounts to a human confiscation of God’s qualities – in other words, blasphemy.

Not being a man to over explain himself in an attempt to avoid an argument, Jesus now ratchets up the level of tension by abandoning the historically significant and metaphorically rich bread from heaven image, an image that is already getting him into trouble with the crowd. Instead, he offers them a really big caricature: his very flesh and blood:

Very truly I tell you. Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you … for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.

The power of big caricature

As with our instinctive reaction to Flannery O’Connor’s story of the boy drowning himself in a baptism seemingly gone tragically wrong, Jesus offers an image to his hearers, which for them, is truly grotesque.

It’s grotesque on two levels. Firstly, it’s cannibalistic, and secondly, it’s blasphemous. The first reaction is the instinctive repulsion human beings feel when confronted by cannibalism. The second reaction is the equally strong and socially programmed reaction of human beings to an assault upon cherished religious images and beliefs.

In the land of the nearly blind, you need to draw really big caricatures!

Intuitively, I draw back from really big caricatures. They offend my need for reasonableness. We live in a political world where reasonable debate has been replaced by grotesque caricature and incendiary sound-bite.

If you are Episcopalian, chances are you have come to the Episcopal Church attracted to the reasonableness and moderation of its Anglican ethos. Anglican ethos has a tendency to smooth over the bumpy caricatures of more extreme and less reasonable forms of Christianity with a spirit of balanced and gentle moderation. Yet, it has to be noted that our great strength at the same time is always in danger of degenerating into a kind of nothingness that is so vanilla that no one can take offense at it. If you never make any demand of people then no one ever has to say no, and we can all happily jog along in the land of the nearly blind.

Revelation is never reasonable

The fact is that the message of Jesus is not reasonable – it is revelatory. Jesus is not trying to convince his hearers of rightness based on the reasonableness of his worldview. In that sense, he’s not very Episcopalian. Jesus’s priority is to shock us out of our cultural and religious insularities in order to catch a glimpse of things from the perspective of a self-giving God. Jesus reveals God giving [his] life to the life of the world. How better to do this than to present an image of religious participation as the ingestion of his flesh and blood, with no apology for the inevitable cannibalistic overtones.

So what do we at St Martin’s think we are doing Sunday by Sunday? Do we really come expecting to eat the bread of heaven? Possibly, when understood as tasteful metaphor. Do we come with and intention of consuming the flesh and blood of Christ? Unlikely, not even if understood as a less attractive metaphor.

I believe that most of us attend compelled by an inarticulate desire for what Anglicanism traditionally has referred to as the awe and wonder of worship, or the beauty of holiness. What does this mean, and what might it look like?

In the land of the blind

In 1979, The Rev. Bruce Reed published his book The Dynamics of Religion. Reed was an example of that great English tradition of a priest deeply involved with a sociological and psychological engagement with wider society. An American focus might be: how does church serve an individual? The English focus finds expression more in the question: how is society served by the existence and practice of the Church?

Drawing from Durkheim as well as Freud, Reed described the process of worship in terms of oscillation. Psychologically, oscillation describes a movement between rational and non-rational states of awareness. Reed understood the non-rational not as irrational, but akin to dream or even psychospiritual states where the boundaries of time and space and individual identity, are in constant flux. Sociologically, oscillation describes the process of movement between individual and collective aspects of experience. Reed noted that a primary function of worship is to focus and then manage the process of oscillation in both senses.

Put most succinctly oscillation is the process of energetic renewal. Psychologically, we arrive at worship clothed in our right minds in order to experience without interruption to rational functioning the irrigation of deeper currents of energy. Interestingly, charismatic worship most clearly exemplifies a process, which for non-charismatic Christians operates mostly at an unconscious level. Charismatic worship allows for a more dramatic oscillation where the influx of the deeper currents of energy for a time, overwhelm the rational state of the worshiper. Charismatic forms of worship meet the needs of communities where the day-to-day experience of suffering rooted in the experience of poverty, racism, and other forms of discrimination, is more intense.

Similarly, in our relationship between our individual and our collective identities, we are empowered individually through our participation in communal or collective rites of passage, in order for our lives to become better shaped by a deeper and more energetic connection with the common good.

Eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ is a psychotic idea. What I mean by this is that to eat human flesh and drink human blood requires a serious alteration of rational consciousness. For example, the Maori of New Zealand practiced ritualistic cannibalism prior to European arrival. They consumed human flesh within a context of religious ritual. The Maori ate the flesh of their enemies only in the highly ritualized context of warfare where cannibalism expressed spiritual domination over one’s mortal enemies through ingesting their flesh.

The interplay within and between – getting to the nub

Jesus did not literally offer his flesh and blood. No one ate Jesus and he did not intend for anyone to do so. He was employing psychotic- non-rational imagery – a really big caricature – as a revelatory device to show that through him, God is doing a new thing. God, through Jesus, is entering into the very heart of created life as an expression of love for the world. Jesus embodies this love through the events of the cross and resurrection. The really big caricature of eating his flesh and drinking his blood is his way of driving home the message that nothing short of complete incorporation of God in the form of physical ingestion will satisfy our spiritual hunger.

I cannot overemphasize two points here:

Communion, i.e. participation in God’s self-giving is not an individualized, esoteric, spiritualized phenomenon according to Jesus. Communion with God requires ingesting real food – bread and wine transformed by collective memory and future hope into the flesh and blood of the Savior. This is the psycho-spiritual event of Eucharist.
Eucharist is also a community event, properly understood when we realize that no one individual can celebrate Eucharist alone. Through the ritual of Eucharist we are incorporated into a communal meal at which it is as a community we take God into ourselves, thus satisfying our need to recharge our individual batteries from the our communal charging station. This is the socio-spiritual event of Eucharist.

Psychospritually, the ritual of Eucharist weaves a complex interplay between the ideas of physical and spiritual hunger, spiritual and physical food. In both cases, ingesting is the way to satisfying our need of God. Sociospiritually, the ritual of Eucharist draws us as individuals into an experience of the communal, an entity greater than the sum total of its parts, also referred to a the Body of Christ. Eating and drinking is the most powerful expression of social solidarity. Consuming the bread of heaven is the most effective way of ensuring that there is enough bread of the world to feed the hungry.

In the land of the nearly blind, this requires drawing a really big caricature!

August 15, 2015 0