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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James offers us three tests by which:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John 6:24-35

My conversation with God is very often bedeviled  by the kind of miscommunication taking place between the crowds and Jesus in this Gospel passage. In my experience seeking God involves a process of peeling back the layers of my expectations. It is only at the end of this circuitous and lengthy process of identifying and confronting my own expectations that I am anywhere near ready to hear something other that what I have been anticipating hearing.

In the ancient prayer known as the Regina Coeli or prayer to Mary Queen of Heaven there is a passage which in the traditional translation of the prayer  goes something like this:

to thee do we cry poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we sigh,  mourning and weeping, passing through this vale of sorrows.

Now this prayer is very close to my heart. It is one of the two constants, the other being the Lord’s Prayer which form the bedrock of my daily conversations with God. My love of the Regina Coeli  dates back to my days as a spiritually enthusiastic youth. In those days I was what in the Church of England  is referred to as a brain-dead Anglo-Catholic. In my late teens and early twenties the label brain-dead Anglo-Catholic fairly summed up what I appeared to be.

Alas, the enthusiasms and idealism based on certainty  which marked this phase of my spiritual journey have long since dimmed. The current label that might better apply to me is brain-alive Anglo-Catholic. This is a more difficult space to inhabit. Nevertheless, despite the increasing use of my brain in my spiritual life, I continue to cherish the Regina Coeli prayer, no longer  however, in its traditional rather florid translation. The increasing use of my brain in my spiritual life has led me to personalize the prayer’s wording. I have replaced:

to thee do we cry poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we sigh, mourning and weeping, passing through this vale of sorrows, 

with:

to you do we cry, children of Eve in exile, mourning and weeping, passing through this veil of illusions. 

Illusion operates to allow us to only see what we expect to see. For the battle to expose my illusions forms the terrain upon which my spirituality is daily worked out. This change in wording reflects my growing awareness that in my conversation with God, its my expectation of what I want or need to hear and to have that forms a veil of illusion. Trapped behind this veil of illusion my experience of being a child of Eve in exile is only strengthened.

I am acutely aware that the way I experience and see the world is highly colored by this veil of illusion. In my seeking God, the place I need to start from over and over again is in the recognition that what maintains my experience of exile from God is my veil of illusion. A veil formed and endlessly maintained  through the projection of my fear of deprivation and my craving for satiation.

A veil of illusion separates the crowds from Jesus throughout John’ Gospel. The passage we heard today typifies this and gives us a clear sense of there being two conversations going on simultaneously. The crowds having been wowed by his feeding of the 5000 demand to know from Jesus  “Who are you? Are you the celebrity who can meet our needs?”  Jesus’ response to them is to ask in turn “What have you come for?” And so the two conversations unfold along parallel lines. The crowd talks about their craving to be endlessly fed with free bread, motivated by the perpetual fear of being hungry. To their questions Jesus responds with God’s invitation to become truly satisfied by bread that does so much more than fill the belly. It’s the bread that gives life. And what is more Jesus identifies himself as that bread. Eventually this frustrates the crowds so much they turn on him and we will hear more of that next week.

Are we able to use this passage to reflect upon how our own fears and cravings drive our desire for relationship with God and our membership of the Church?  As people shaped by an American culture entering the first phase of the 21st Century it should not surprise us to discover  that at one level there is little that differentiates us from the crowds following Jesus in John’s late 1st Century Palestine. At this level human nature remains remarkably consistent across the flow of history. However, the themes that universally echo across generations in specific historical and cultural contexts take on particular intensity in our time.

It has been an interesting week in which we have witnessed the Chic-fil-A fiasco, a rather unpleasant reminder that we are a society where Christian faith continues to be perverted into perpetuating hostility towards expressions of difference. We also witnessed the death of Gore Vidal, that great apostle for the toleration of difference. Gore Vidal provoked enormous hostility from the political Establishment all his life. He was a particular kind of prophet hated by establishment classes everywhere, i.e. an insider, one of them who exposed their corruption and hypocrisy. Strangely enough, a common theme links these two events.  In the week of Gore’s death we yet again have been witness to a dramatic example of the use of executive power and the corrupting power of money to promote the prejudicial dynamics of exclusion and violence, dynamics against which Gore protested all his life.

Perhaps the core characteristic which marks the current operation of American culture is the intensity of two particular illusions. Why is it that in the midst of the most prosperous society the world has known the illusion of scarcity  increasingly drives our fears? We have religious leaders who present salvation as something rationed to the professing elect as if there is not enough to go around.  Why is it that those who are so sure they are saved cannot feel secure in their salvation unless they can identify those who are to them clearly not saved? Girardian ideas of scapegoating and sacrificial victims come to my mind.

We continue to vote for politicians who promise us what can’t be delivered thus reenforcing a specter of scarcity and using it to frighten us into keeping them in power. If there is not enough to go around then I need to vote for the politician who promises to either deliver more to me and my kind or allow me  and mine the means to grab what I need before others take it away from me.

One illusion inevitably gives rise to a second and in some ways its counterpoint. Going hand in hand with the illusion of scarcity is the illusion that our needs require to be satiated. This results not from the experience of having enough of what we need, but from the belief that we need more and more and more of what we need – hence there is never enough. This is a dynamic I will explore further in the Fall.

The illusion of scarcity is a fear. The illusion of satiation is a craving. Both projections hide God’s invitation. Both perpetuate our experience as children of Eve in fearful exile in a world of sorrow. These illusions are mine and they are yours. If we can begin to explore our  illusions and peel their layers away one by one, perhaps then we can become open to God’s promise.

The promise is contingent on our courage to faith. To faith is what it says in the Greek. This sounds odd in English where we speak of faith as possession, something to have or not have rather than an action, something one does. Perhaps the Greek comes closer to the English sense of trust. Trust is something we have the courage to do or pull back from doing through lack of courage.

Jesus identifying himself as the bread of life is God’s invitation for us to trust, rather than fear. If we truly begin to hear this then we discover that satisfaction results when we can give up the illusion that what we need is to be satiated. Freed from the illusion of living in a world of scarcity we begin to discover that there is not only enough for all, but what we are promised by God will be sufficient for us.

In commenting on last week’s Gospel (Mark 6:1-13)  I noted how faced by the impoverished imaginations of his family and their neighbors Jesus came up against a real limitation on what he was able to do. Mark tells us that Jesus could do no deed of power there.

I refer you back to my pervious blog entry The Familiar: a Barrier to our Imagining. Mark begins Jesus’ ministry with his baptism by John. He draws this first phase to a close with the sending out of the disciples to become participants with Jesus in his ministry. He follows this with the beheading of  John. Why does Mark place the beheading of John here? Well, there seems to me an implication that ministry of necessity will involve encounters with power and the powerful. Like John, Jesus and his disciples go on to discover that such encounters can prove fatal.

If you are like me this is a very uncomfortable realization. I have spent a lifetime perfecting the skills that  have helped me avoid becoming the object of abuse by the powerful. Nan is a friend of mine. Like me, we both spent many years working within the British National Health Service. Now, you don’t work in the NHS and avoid seeing the daily exercise and abuse of political power. She once asked her CEO the question: “what would be your resigning issue?” He replied ” I hope I am skillful enough never to find myself in such a situation”. The CEO’s answer captures the assumption that resigning issues can be avoided through adroit skill. A very modern attitude we might think, or is it?

Nan’s question and the CEO’s response reminds me of the popular English tavern song  The Vicar of Bray. You may know of it but if you don’t you can find the words and tune at: http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/song-midis/Vicar_of_Bray.htm

The song tells the story of a Vicar of  St Michael’s Bray, a small town in the Royal County of Berkshire just upstream from Windsor Castle. The song chronicles his boasting about the way he has kept his benefice despite the sudden rip-tide like shifts in the of political currents that characterized the period from around 1660 when Charles II returns after the death of Cromwell to the accession of the German, George I in 1714. This is a man who has no compunction is changing his political allegiances to suit the tenor of the times. Like Nan’s CEO, we surreptitiously admire his skillfulness while more consciously disapproving of all flip-floppers.

So how do you and I sit with the experience of power? I know that I instinctively abhor the naked display of power. Power is not an aphrodisiac for me. Or do I delude myself? Well maybe you all are about to find out as I assume the mantle of the Dean in-between?

My uneasy relationship to the exercise of power lies in my life-long fear of being a victim of its abuse. What typifies the experience of victimhood is a psychological helplessness in the face of the abusive use of power. Like all of us who carry this fear, I am passionate about justice. What will make me incandescent with rage is to witness the abuse of power, particularly within the varied contexts of  interpersonal relationship. My politics arise out of an instinctive aversion to the comfortable abuses of power enshrined within patriarchal society. My political world view is not the hollow posturing of liberal correctness. My politics are deeply rooted in my personal fears. The political is always personal. If you want to understand my political world view the you only have to remember that as gay man, patriarchy desires to kill me.

One of the ways I have successfully protected myself is by maintaining a stance as the outsider. For example, my experience as an adult has been shaped by my 30 years living in England. Yet, I never once felt disadvantaged by the operation of the class system. The English class system is a complex and subtle system of signals that locates each person in a particular relationship to the sources of power in that society. I protected myself as an outsider. I was after all a New Zealander. Someone from a new world egalitarian society, to whom the classifications of the English class system did not apply.

Yet, you may have noticed that unless you look and listen very closely for the residual signs of the NZ flattening of my vowels I pass perfectly as a pucker Brit. The skill of being an outsider is the ability to maintain a psychological sense of separateness while appearing to pass camouflaged as one of the crowd. So for me outsiderness is a skillful defense. Yet, it is this very defense that perpetuates in me a sense of being vulnerable to the abusive exercise of power. Hiding and protecting myself only increases my fear. The path to freeing myself from fear of the abuse of power is to own my own power.

Life forces us to fashion complex psychological defenses against the fear of being abused by power. For me its maintaining the fantasy of the outsider, which is a fantasy that I am not part of my host societies power relations and therefore cannot be abused by them. For others I notice  the primary defense is their craving of power and their desire to grab as much of it as possible. This orientation to power is just as much rooted in fear. For those of us who have more of the Vicar of Bray in us than we might be comfortable admitting to, we adopt the defenses of the flip-flopper in our attempt to protect ourselves through ingratiation.

My main point here is that because we all live in complex webs of power relations the apparent success of our very defenses also perpetuates our state of fear in relation to power. That fear prevents us living-out  Christian values. Jesus shows time and again that to live the values of the Gospel leaves us no choice but to challenge the abuse of power. We don’t even have to go out of our way to protest a challenge. Being women and men living from our Christian core, informed by the actions of Jesus in the Gospel is enough to be a challenge to the abuse of power. Yet, its only by living the values of the Gospel that  we have the courage to own our own power.

The abuse of power is endemic to the very structures of human society. It operates in families, in the work place. We have recently seen its operation in the corruption of College sports. It operates powerfully in our churches, in government, and of course in relations between nations.

There are many different ways to challenge power. We often carry models designed to limit our belief that we can challenge the abuse of power. We have the model of John the Baptist which is a kind of head-on crash and burn approach seemingly favored by prophets. If this is what we think it means to challenge power then we are unlikely to imagine ourselves doing this.

Personally, I favor a quieter approach which recognizes that there may be nothing I can do about the central abuses of power in society. So I take the courage to own my own power through taking-up my position on the margins of power, working quietly to subvert abuse through identifying with and supporting the abused, themselves.  My many years of ministry among those with disturbed mental and emotional health is the way I have used my outsiderness a gay man to identify with those who are differently disadvantaged by social rejection.

Mark uses the beheading of John the Baptist at this point in his gospel to present us with a painful truth about the exercise of power. Mark is not inviting us to become prophetic firebrands who immolate ourselves through headlong confrontation in the manner of John the Baptist. He is inviting us to understand Jesus’ deeper challenge to power. This challenge lies in accepting God’s invitation to change and thereby inviting others to change. The nature of this change is to become liberated from fear by the greater power of love. This is an invitation that will be accepted by some and resisted by others to the point of violence. Following Jesus may cost us our lives though in our present social context probably not physically, but in some other manner, which in the words of T.S. Eliot will cost us nothing short of everything (Little Gidding).

Don’t run. Stay present. Remain committed. Tell the truth in love. And stand for what is right. Ideally one should have a great deal of courage and strength but not boast or make a big show of it. Then in times of need one should rise to the occasion and fight bravely for what is right (HH. the Dalai Llama)

Servants No-longer but Friends Part 1.