Since Trinity Sunday, the Lectionary Gospel focus has been on Matthew’s rendition of Jesus’ teaching concerning the experience of discipleship. I have already commented on the way Matthew presents Jesus as a very Moses-like figure https://relationalrealities.com/2014/06/21/facing-up-to-matthew-10-after-a-bewildering-week.

In his condemnation of the Galilean towns where his message has not been received, Jesus’ tone is reminiscent of God’s tone of voice, as we hear it in the Torah, or the first five books of the Old Testament. This tone is an expression of the Jewish nature of Matthew’s Christian community, and their pain having recently been expelled from the synagogue.

The Gospel

The word Gospel means good news. What is the good news? The good news  is that through the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God has entered into the experience of being fully human. God becoming human means that the community of the Trinity has now expanded to include us. So, the good news is that after Jesus everything has changed. Now that, we might say, is a big claim!

As we receive[1] the Gospel Sunday-by-Sunday, we are accepting God’s invitation to enter into a conversation about the nature of our common life. This is an invitation to make the good news a reality in our shared common life, and only then, by extension, in our individual lives. One Christian is no Christian, said the Early Church Father, Tertullian. We receive the good news as a community of the baptized. In the Anglican Tradition of the Episcopal Church, worship is the principal occasion in which we, as a community receive the good news  of the Gospel, which is our acceptance of God’s invitation to become changed.

Doing theology

We are all familiar with the phrase: let’s do the math. Doing the math is to work something through to a conclusion. So, what does it mean when Christianity claims that in Jesus, God changed everything? Let’s do the theology.

It’s a difficult question because at the level of the obvious, it appears to us that the world before and after Jesus has remained largely, unchanged. Let me list only a few obvious points:

• Roman domination continued, and in time was simply replaced by countless other regimes of domination down to our own time. A society built on the principles of the unequal distribution of power, fuelled by the institution of slavery continued. Subsequently, societies, left to their own inevitable trajectories have continued to systemically enshrine the inequalities and resulting abuses of power.
• The Temple as an institution of spiritual domination was simply in time replaced by the Church, which came to behave in the same way.
• Today, we can be excused for feeling that human beings seem to be as selfish and bad as ever they were in olden times.

Christians claim that after Jesus everything has changed, the old order is ended and the new order has arrived. What we mean by this is that in Jesus, God has moved human consciousness through a threshold[2] shift. Put simply and concisely, after Christ, however badly we behave, we know better! 

Growing into the fullness of the promise

As the Christian Community, God invites us to become changed through allowing ourselves to grow into the fuller expression of what it means to be human. An oft repeated mantra of mine is:

To be human is to be most like God. To be Christian is to know, that to be human is to be most like God. 

Yet, Paul, in Romans 7:15-25 highlights our human experience of internal conflict. Here, Paul distinguishes between an experience of the spirit and one of the flesh. Interpreting him, rather than translating his words, I understand Paul to be talking about the tensions between will and desire. I don’t read this passage as Paul’s puritan-struggle with the demon flesh- i.e. sexual impulses. The contrast between Paul’s use of the terms spirit and flesh refers more to the tension between intention and gratification.

We have all heard the phrase act of will –a phrase, which for me brings to mind the exhortations of the Anglo-Catholic Manuals of Devotion, much beloved by me in my youth. To perform an act of will  is to consciously intend something at a point in time when you have no certainty of how to achieve what you intend. An act of will  is like firing an arrow into the middle distance. We note where the arrow falls and this becomes the marker towards which we then, begin to journey. Our intention is clear. Yet, on our journey towards the place marked by the arrow’s fall, i.e. the fulfillment of our intention, we are tempted to take detours or short cuts. The detours are the action of desire upon our intention.

Psychologically, our desires reflect the multilayered nature of our sense of self – of who we are. Our identity is not comprised from a single sense of self, but from a complex interplay of aspects of self, each with conflicting desires. There is a noble desire that fuels our intention. However, there are lesser desires, seeking gratification. When we achieve gratification, we often feel short-changed because the imagined fruits of gratification have promised more than they can deliver. Of the less than satisfactory consequences of our satiated desires we protest: but this is not what I intended. And indeed it was not, which leads us to join with Paul in crying: who will rescue us from this body of death? 

Liberation into the mind of Christ

We are redeemed from our human desire to be gratified (liberated from the flesh as Paul would put it) by the death and resurrection of Christ. I hear Paul saying that the old self still echoes in our minds, but because in Christ everything has changed, even though we may not always be able to resist the siren call of the old voices we now, know better. The significance of this knowledge is not negated by our failure to walk a straight path of our intension. Rather it is validated trhough our perseverance when we pick ourselves up and return to the path of our intention, guided by the mind of Christ. Failure is a necessary part of the process through which we hopefully, become a little wiser than we were.

Where do we find this mind of Christ? The mind of Christ is found through our participation in the life of the community of the baptized. We express and become empowered by the mind of Christ when we become, and act as the community of the baptized.

Receiving the Gospel

I am a newcomer to participation in the community of the baptized at St Martin’s, Wayland Square. Being new, I bring fresh eyes and what I see is a deep commitment by many to the building-up of our common life in Christ. Yet, I also see an experience of commitment that leads to exhaustion.

Someone said to me the other day: at St Martin’s if you volunteer to do something, then, everyone else leaves you to it. I didn’t hear this person saying: its great, no one gets in your way, but: you are abandoned to carry the load alone. While this is clearly not the whole truth, it is nevertheless an element of experience that we need to explore.

After condemning the towns through which he has passed for refusing the invitation to become changed by the good news of God, Jesus offers words of consolation. These words are burned into the memories of older Episcopalians as the Comfortable Words. These words were spoken by the priest following the pronouncement of the absolution of sins in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer:

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Looking to the future

It’s summer and many are away, yet I trust that you will commend one another to read the sermon blog here at relationalrealities.com or on the St Martin’s FaceBook page  https://www.facebook.com/stmartinsprovidence?ref=hl.

A repetitive theme of my teaching and spiritual leadership will be to emphasize our need to move from a traditional Church culture of membership to a new culture of discipleship.

The difference between the two is graphically expressed by Jesus’ in the comfortable words from Matthew 11:25-30: Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Membership emphasizes responsibility, which eventually becomes a heavy burden that saps the spirit, because membership emphasizes our individuality. Contrastingly, discipleship emphasizes an engagement with our passion, fed through participation in community, and is a response to Jesus’ invitation to: Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

[1]Receive is the proper verb here, not read or hear, although both of these actions are involved. We receive the Gospel because having read and heard, we take it to heart in the hope that in doing so our lives may be shaped by it.

[2] The notion of a threshold change is usually applied to material things, such as when water freezes to become ice, or boils to become steam. It’s the same substance but changes its form. Human consciousness although hardwired biologically, nevertheless evolves in the direction of higher levels of apprehension and at certain key moments in history bursts onto a new level functioning.

The text

In Matthew 10:40-42 we have a continuation of teaching on discipleship. However, the tone shifts dramatically from last week’s gospel verses which focused on the likelihood of having to negotiate serious conflict when we tread the road as disciples of Jesus –read further at Facing up to Matthew https://relationalrealities.com/

Verses 40-42 focus on the action of welcoming and the object – as it were – of welcoming, i.e. prophet, righteous person, and-or little ones. In these three designations we have a full spectrum of persons who might be likely to visit with us. I would suggest that we define these categories of: prophet – a person mature in faith, the righteous – a good person, and little ones –  someone unsure, possibly vulnerable, likely doubting, yet searching for that which they know they are in need of. While we can see in Matthew’s categories an identification of types of person, I would further suggest that we find all three identifications coexisting simultaneously within ourselves.

The context

Matthew weaves together in a particular way what were most probably, a series of remembered sayings of Jesus. In other words, it is unlikely that Matthew is reporting a verbatim of Jesus’ teaching, as in this is what Jesus actually said on one single occasion. He is taking snippets of what his community remembers of the disparate Jesus sayings and weaves them together into a particular message for his community. So we can discern that the dynamics of welcome were as much an issue for the Matthean community as they are for the community of St Martin, on the East Side of Providence.

Yet, Matthew’s context differs from ours in a rather significant aspect. Whereas, we will be thinking of persons who arrive through our doors as individuals,  because we live in a society that constructs identity as something coterminous with each of us as individuals, i.e. I am me, and you are you, and in that lies the difference between us. In Matthew’s community, like that of any community in the Mediterranean world of the 1^st century, personal identity is a relational concept denoting a connection with, and representation of a wider group or community. To welcome an individual is to welcome a whole group of persons to which the individual belongs. In this context the welcome of strangers served the interests of fostering wider social ensuring some degree of harmony between different social groups, and disparate communities.

Our context – receiving the text

Translating this text into our own context brings to mind two aphorisms – pithy sayings that carry a generalized truth. The first is the Garrison Keeler comment about the attitude Lutherans towards visitors:

As you leave church don’t bother to introduce yourself. If we want to know who you are we will look in the visitors book.

The second aphorism applies closer to home. Referring to the sign that hangs outside every Episcopal Church,[1]:

The Episcopal Church welcomes you! In our minds this reads: The Episcopal Church welcomes you as long as you are like us!! 

Having enjoyed a good laugh at our own expense, the fact is that it is not helpful to generalize about Churches, and Episcopal Churches, in particular. Because the degree to which any church is, or is not welcoming is a reflection of the internal dynamics within that community.

In my first week in the parish, I met with the Vestry. It is my custom to reverse the normal vestry agenda priorities so that discussion of finance and more routine, recurring matters is placed as the last item on the agenda. I do this because I have learned that to place routine matters that don’t change much from month to month at the top of the agenda priority is the best way to inhibit the vestry’s collective creativity and thoughtfulness.

At the meeting two weeks ago we began with a form of Bible study known as divine reading or lectio divina, through which the Holy Spirit invited us into a more expansive frame of mind. I then invited the Vestry to brainstorm four major priorities to be worked-on over the next 12 months. You will be able to see from posting of the minutes what the Vestry came-up with. However, one priority is especially interesting, and one member coined this priority as inreach.

We came to understand this to mean that the most fruitful way of welcoming others is through reaching into s deep self-examination as a community. We do so in a spirit of appreciative enquiry, and curiosity. As we begin to practice inreach we are going to make important discoveries about who and what we are, and are not. I guess some discoveries will be reassuring, and others disconcerting.

Coming into St Martin’s I continue to reflect long and hard on why the aphorism about the Episcopal Church’s welcome seems to strike a chord of recognition in all of us. My experience of arrival has been characterized by a profuse and generously exuberant welcome.  I arrive, somewhat in the guise of Matthew’s prophet. The expectation attaching to the incoming Rector is that he or she is bringing something of what is needed by the community to continue into the next stage of its journey. Yet, how do we imagine the experience of the visitor or the stranger who comes through our doors?

Episcopal parishes have a general dynamic of reserve. Unlike some other Christian traditions we are not known for falling upon the neck of the visitor [2]. Yet, at St Martin’s I suspect it would be a mistake to interpret such reserve and restraint as a sign of being unwelcoming. St Martin’s, clearly is a missional parish. By this I mean it’s a community that is vitally interested in the state of the world around it. There is a long and strong tradition of outreach and social concern. St Martin’s, well understands that it has responsibilities to the wider Church and society.

Like many Episcopal parishes, St Martin’s is a community where the righteous – in the Matthean sense of good people imbued with a sense of humanitarian concern, readily find a welcome and a home. I also suspect that St Martin’s is a community where prophets – as in the spiritually mature, because they are able to persevere until they pass through the glass wall[3], also find a welcome and a home.

The question in my mind is how do we think the little ones – as in the vulnerable fare? Vulnerability comes in different guises. There are those socially marginalized, whose material needs are their uppermost concern. There are those who are socially ostracized through disturbance in mental and emotional health. There are the lonely and the sorrowful. There are those who experience themselves as the objects of discrimination. There are the skeptical, yet spiritually- seeking.

For the skeptical, yet spiritually-seeking some restraint and reserve may well be appreciated allowing them to find their way, at their own pace, into community relationship. Educational formation is going to be important for these persons. Our polite, middle class, emotionally restrained culture will probably make us an intimidating place for the socially vulnerable, and maybe the lonely. Our theological tolerance and progressive engagement in the service of the expectations of the Kingdom will make us a welcome place for those differently marginalized through discrimination. Our compassion and social concern will help us to embrace those variously disturbed, so long as they are not too disturbing.

Yet, the truth remains that we are a difficult tradition to penetrate. One reason for this is our theological and liturgical complexity. It is a steep learning curve to find your way around the Book of Common Prayer and into the concept of a community defined by its worship and not mutual agreement . Yet for those who can resist the urge for instant gratification, the BCP opens a portal to a world of deep spiritual, liturgical, and emotional tones and resonances that are most longed- for in our modern world. We are not the community for those whose response to the challenges of the modern world is to seek clear, unequivocal, true or false answers. Yet, for those who can tolerate living in the tension of interpreting the rich tradition of our Christian past for the purpose of creatively invigorating our Christian living in a 21^st century world, we are exactly the right community.

As your new Rector, I want to invite us all into a process of inreach. Curiosity is one of the primary motivations necessary for the spiritual life. With curiosity and appreciative enquiry, let us explore ourselves as a community, celebrating our strengths, yet not shying away from our weaknesses.

In conclusion

Matthew 10:40-42 leaves me with two abiding insight.

1. If each one of us can become more aware that in us the spiritual maturity of the prophet, the commitment to right action of the righteous, and the vulnerabilities and uncertainties of the little ones – all require our self-reflection.Recognising that to varying degrees, all three are part of our identity allows us the flexibility to orient ourselves to what is most needed, not only by the visitors that come through our doors, but by our neighbors and co-workers, and the stranger we encounter by chance in the street.  The fruit of our process of inreach will be effective and welcoming outreach. The task is to recognize in others what we know about our own familiar needs, and to let this self-knowledge orient us in relation to them.
2. Ultimately, we welcome not the individual, but we welcome Christ, through whose image we recognise ourselves made in the image of God. When we recognize ourselves as made in the image of God, then we cannot miss seeing that same God-image in the faces of the visitor and the stranger. I believe it is the cultivation of our own spiritual resources that makes the difference between benign indifference and welcome.

[1] St Martin’s has two at either end of Orchard Avenue

[2] A reference to Acts 20:37 where the brothers and sisters embraced Paul, falling upon his neck and kissed him.

[3] By the glass wall I mean that experience of persevering with a new community until suddenly one day you find you have moved from the outside to the inside.

It’s been a somewhat chaotic and bewildering week, this first week in a new parish. I am someone who needs the external environment to be ordered and aesthetically sympathetic. So moving into a new office and trying to order the office space while simultaneously beginning to respond to what seems a myriad of priorities, has taken its toll. However, how can it not be so? I would not have it any other way! For in the midst of the challenges and competing demands, I have also experienced a deep communal empathy and goodwill supporting me.

In a new situation it’s hard to identify what are immediate priorities and what can be left on the back burner for a while. Harder still is to distinguish between the priorities of the external environment and those habitual anxieties that are always a part of who Mark Sutherland is when facing new situations and the yet-to-become-known. Yet, again, I have found a warm and tolerant, if watchful, welcome from others,  both parishioners and particularly my wardens and the small staff team at the nerve centre of the parish’s day-to-day functioning.

***

So, as I now sit to put my mind to the task of the upcoming sermon for this Sunday I am very conscious of the fact that it takes time to learn the frequency of communication with a new community. The old frequency that worked so well in my last post at Trinity Cathedral, Phoenix, does not seem quite right for St Martin’s, Providence.

My intention was to rise early on this Saturday morning and get to grips with another of those astonishingly provocative gospel passages, which Matthew seems to specialize in. I have setup for myself as small working space, literally under the eaves of our early 1800’s house, which a designer friend of mine back in Phoenix described as rustic colonial. It’s a small room in the attic, which a previous owner had furnished in the style of a grandchildrens overspill play-sleeping space.

So, I sit in my dolls house-like space and my first encounter is not with the profundity of my response to Matthew 10:24-39, but a tussle with the cordless keyboard that won’t sync with my laptop. After calming down a bit, I begin to reflect on the process of synchronizing. And my mind returns to the process so uppermost for us at St Martin’s, i.e. making our way through a time of transition into our new future together.

What is transition? The best definition I can come up with at the moment is an analogy between the cordless keyboard – PC synchronization and our situation of transition at St Martin’s. Transition is an anxious process as we engage in the process of waiting and watching to see if our broadcast frequencies will be mutually recognized, registered and synchronized so to enable us to continue to move forward into the new phase of what God is dreaming us into becoming.

***

The Evangelist Matthew offers us the most Moses-like image of Jesus. Matthew’s Jesus is authoritatively commanding and exacting – a Jesus who does not beat about the bush and with true Yankee pragmatism just comes out and tells his disciples not to expect a smoother road than the one on which he is travelling.

This is provocative because we tend to fall into a frame of mind that says that because Jesus did the hard stuff then we can expect a smoother, less painful ride.

Matthew’s Moses-like Jesus is no accident. Matthew and his community were in that painful transition following their expulsion from the synagogues. The image I have is of the Jewish followers of Jesus moving to less salubrious premises and opening the first storefront churches, literally across the road from the synagogues. Of-course they don’t cease to be Jewish, and they bring with them their Jewish theology of Jesus as the new Moses who had come not to abolish, but to complete the Law. Locating Matthew and his community within their religio-political context, helps explain Matthew’s Moses-like image of Jesus and his provocative tone, so reminiscent in places of the exacting tone of the Torah’s[1] teaching.

Matthew writes for a community that is struggling against powerful discrimination, if not persecution. In this context there is little expectation of a cushy ride and the Christians of Matthew’s community had their own unique experience of the cost of discipleship. A cost they paid in the day-to-day experience of contesting the centers of power around them, and clearly from today’s gospel text, between them.

***

Each Sunday, the lections we hear proclaimed comprise the conversation God is seeking to have with us as a community. To better hear this invitation to conversation we have to adjust for context. Matthew’s context is not our context, though the themes governing human societies across the ages are depressingly repetitive.

The purpose of the preacher in the liturgical assembly is to offer a response to God’s invitation to conversation from the community side of the line. This involves a sometimes complex, twofold process. The preacher attempts to translate between the original context in which a piece of scripture arises and the contemporary community setting. Yet, at the same time the preacher, while translating from one historical context to another needs to allow the timelessness of God’s conversation to be heard within his or her own community.

What we are listening for is the original voice of Jesus in the context of his ministry of preaching the expectations of the Kingdom of God around 30AD. Jesus’ voice is communicated to us through the filter of Matthew and his community’s interpretation of that voice around 80AD. Yet, rather than dilute Jesus’ message, Matthew’s witness clarifies it further, making it more accessible to us as we translate it out of his context into ours in 2014AD.

***

I am attempting to fulfill the purpose of being the preacher while still being new to many aspects of my community’s context and experience. Going-back to my earlier analogy with electronic synchronization, I am feeling my way towards the best frequency that will sync my words with my new community’s experience – a process of hit and miss taking time and requiring patience on both our parts.

I don’ t feel I am able to address the St Martin’s community in anything other than the most generally applicable of terms. I engage with Matthew’s context and the way he witnesses to the earlier context of Jesus. Then i try to translate out of Matthew’s context into that of the community of St Martin in Providence RI, l attempt to identify and translate the core timeless elements of God’s communication with us through the teaching of Jesus recorded in Matthew 10:24-39.

In translation this is what I read :

• There is a right order in relationships, which is often inverted in the world. We are not better than God. It’s enough for us to be like God, but not to allow our own sense of self to supplant God’s place in our world nor allow our lives to trespass apon the lives of others.
• Conflict is everywhere and we cannot expect to be insulated from it. Yet, the danger never derives not from the negotiation of conflict. It comes from the fear and consequent avoidance of conflict. This is what makes us retreat and hide.
• It is fear itself that colors our picture of the world. Our need for courageous engagement in the world no matter how difficult and painful this can be, must not give way to an attitude of hiding and keeping our heads down.
• We have to continually expose the lies and subterfuges that we rely upon to make a convenient accommodation with abuses of power and systems of injustice. Our easy accommodation with violence masking abuses of power, systems of injustice, and scapegoating only unconsciously reinforces our sense that there is much to be afraid of. Giving-in to fear makes us even more fearful. Examples of the way we do this lie in our inability to get a grip on the abuse of guns for violent ends, in the steady and continued rise in drug addiction at home, fueling the grip of violent criminality and the evils of corruption south of the border in Mexico. Other examples lie in the way we as the most privileged nation on earth maintain our economic advantages.
• Social systems structure our relationships with one another along the lines of class, race, gender, sexual identity, and family. In each of these spheres there is a hierarchy for the exercise power that gives to some more power and to others, less. The rich have more power than the poor, whites have more power than blacks – and here I stress that black and white are concepts that sometimes have little to do with race or skin color. Class is the real determinant of privilege. Men have more power than women, husbands than wives, parents than children. A patriarchal view of heterosexuality is privileged to the specific disadvantage of homosexual and transgendered persons.

Jesus promises to shine the light of truth into our everyday lives exposing the way we collude with one another in the maintenance of social relations that mask the disparities in privilege and the exercise of power. We should not be lulled by Jesus’ identification of violence with possible death. By lulled I mean, that thinking which says because our lives are not in danger this text does not apply to us. Every moment of every day many people’s lives are in danger of death through myriad forms of violence . Unless we protest we cannot escape being implicated in the maintenance of a society that preserves a sorry status quo.

***

With time I trust that my incorporation into the life of the St Martin’s community will afford me more insight into the particularities of the conversation God seeks with us.

Jesus tells us that the path of discipleship is not a path that avoids exposure. Exposure leads to division and conflict, sometimes in the spaces where our most intimate human relationship are lived-out

The most significant part of Jesus’ teaching  lies in his exhortation for us to firstly:

• To live without fear, or more accurately to refuse to let our fear limit our courage for living.

And secondly:

• To let ourselves become found through the privileging our relationship with God. His means to give up our perpetual assertions of self-interest and potency. We do this best when we are able to let our concern for our neighbor come before our own self-interest.

For those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

[1] The Torah or the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures comprise the Law and traditionally have been ascribed to the authorship of Moses.

Opening thoughts and reflections on friendship

Since the announcement of my appointment as the 12th Rector of St Martin’s Providence, these last weeks have been filled with the experience of saying good-bye. This particular experience of saying goodbye is a very bittersweet one. It’s hard for human beings to say goodbye, which is why some of us long for nothing better than to just disappear in the quiet of the night – as it were.

Saying good-bye is hard because as I have experienced these last weeks, among the many, many expressions of love, affection, gratitude, good will, and good luck, there has been sadness in the face of a sense of impending loss. I have had to remind myself on numerous occasions over the last weeks that there is no greater testimony to the quality of human relationship than the experience of sadness at the moment of departure.

In John 14:1-14, the Gospel for Easter 5, we are given a continuation of Jesus’ very extended and prolonged good-byes to his disciples – known appropriately as the Farewell Discourses. John gives Jesus four long chapters for his good-byes, whereas on my last Sunday at Trinity Cathedral the sermon slot allows me an interval counted-out in mere minutes.

The culmination in Jesus’ long farewell comes in chapter 15:12 when Jesus tells his disciples to love one another as he has loved them. Yet, for me, the punch line comes in verse 15 when Jesus declares that his disciples are no longer his servants, but his friends. We are called to be Jesus’ friends and this is made concrete through the way we become friends with one another.

Arresting images

I am arrested by the first image that the writer of 1^st Peter offers us in the Epistle for the 5^th Sunday in Eastertide:

Like the newborn infants you are, you must crave for pure spiritual milk, so that you may thrive upon it to your soul’s health…[1] 

The writer of 1^st Peter here is drawing upon the primary image for the connection of one human being to another – that of infant at the mother’s breast. Through it he offers us a vision of what is involved in being a Christian community of friends.

There is a very particular school of psychoanalysis known as the British School of Object Relations Theory. Object Relations Theory departs from the classical Freudian School in seeing the primary impulse of human nature, not as seeking gratification, but object relating. Object relating is the psychological term for human connection, fulfilled in relationships.

1^st Peter can be read in a classical Freudian way where the focus is on the newborn’s desire to be gratified by the spiritual milk. After all we all desire to be fed, to have our hunger satiated, to experience the gratification of being full. Yet an Object Relations reading focuses our attention beyond our need to be fed to our desire for connection. The infant does not treat the mother’s breast only as an on-demand feeding machine. The breast becomes the first object for relationship. Relationship is further mediated through the loving gaze of the mother in whose face the infant learns to recognize its own reflection. The infant discovers itself to exist as it glimpses a reflection of itself in the mother’s, eyes, the mother’s smile, her voice, and her touch.

Object Relations Theory and Christianity, at least on this point, seem to me to share a profound understanding of human nature. The Christian understanding of human fulfillment is friendship with God. As Jesus tells his disciples friendship with God is reflected and experienced through friendship with one another. As 1^st Peter suggests, the roots of our capacity for friendship are found in the earliest experience of encountering another.

It is no coincidence that both 1^st Peter and the Object Relations School identify the roots of human friendship to lie in the encounter between infant and mother. Through having tasted the spiritual milk, our desire is to come and find rest within the loving gaze of God is nurtured. In the face of Jesus we glimpse ourselves made in the image of God. This is an image of relationality. God has revealed God self as a community of relationships. So to catch a glimpse of our own nature reflected back to us through verbal gaze of Jesus who calls us friends, we are nurtured into relationship with God through the quality of spiritual friendship binding us together as a Christian community.

The writer of 1^st Peter now offers us a second arresting image:

So come to him, our living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight …[2] 

After I was ordained a deacon in 1985 and then priest the following year, I began a journey of surprising discovery about myself. Very quickly, I discovered that it was as if neon sign above my head flashed: if you struggle with an experience of estrangement, speak to me. I found this rather bewildering because I was the only one it seemed who could not see the sign.

Through the experience of others being drawn into conversation with me about what troubled them most I found myself compelled to seek in psychotherapy the training and skills I felt I had not been equipped with in the seminary. More significantly, I now understand that entering into psychotherapy training was also a way I could give myself permission to enter into begin my own self exploration in therapy.

Here, I learned that the one thing that troubles human beings most is a sense of marginalization, the experience of estrangement or rejection. Through beginning to notice this in others I was led to reflect on my own experience of living life on the periphery with the feeling of never really fitting-in. Marginalization or that sense of estrangement was a very confusing experience for me, because, the source of my feelings of marginalization were not immediately obvious to anyone else.

I learned that all of us have, not one identity, but several intersecting and often, conflicting identities. For instance, I was male, which is no mean signifier in patriarchal society. In addition to being male, I was a white, educated male, and as such equipped to make the most of the opportunity afforded me, and to successfully negotiate the dynamics of an unequal society in pursuit of my own self-interest. Yet, hidden within, or maybe not so hidden as I thought, the source of a profound sense of marginalization lay in knowing a truth of which I was ashamed. I was gay.

If we first discover ourselves through catching our reflection in the face of another, what happens when we are unable to find any externalized reflection of the most feared and painful parts of our self?

Over 18 years of ministry at the sharp end of mental health, I worked through my own sense of being marginal by ministering to others whose experience of marginalization seemed more obvious and more serious than my own. Human sexual identity and human emotional and psychological wellbeing are both fearful regions of our individual and collective experience. We all experience the nature of conflicting sexual desire. We all experience a continual assault upon the stability of our mental and emotional wellbeing. What do we do with these fears? We project our fears into those who evoke in us our deepest dreads – for how often have we felt there but for the grace of God, go I.

A farewell discourse

During these last four and half years, my ministry at Trinity Cathedral has reconfirmed that we often come together as spiritual friends through a shared experience of estrangement. Knowing my own experience as I do enables me to recognize the familiar tones of another’s struggle. My own experience sensitizes me to know what to look for in others. When I see the signs of fear and confusion in another’s eyes, I allow myself to become known to them.

Becoming known is not about sharing everything about me. It is not about inappropriate levels of self-disclosure. Becoming known is about signaling my availability to walk with another the path that leads out of the place of fear. In so doing I am signaling that this is a path I have trod before and can be trusted to be their guide along this way.

For me availability is the key to ministry. It’s the availability of the mother in giving herself over to the needs of her infant. Similarly, it is also the availability of the priest to likewise mirror for the community and its individual members God’s invitation into spiritual friendship.

God’s always communicates with us within the constraints of temperament. For some of us the invitation to spiritual friendship leads to a direct and somewhat mystical experience of God. For most of us God’s invitation to spiritual friendship will be chiefly known through our ability to be available for spiritual friendship with one another.

Through all the varied aspects of ministry, my chief concern is always to mirror the love of God. It would be a mistake for you to assume that I do this always from a place of confident strength. It would be a mistake to assume that I mirror from my abundant experience of the love of God. Most of the time I mirror from a place, not of abundance, but from a place of my own longing. In reflecting the love of God to others, my hope is that I may catch a glimpse of its return to me in the faces of others.

Mirroring is a process of seeing and becoming seen. Being able to see into another’s struggle is no help to them unless you offer a reciprocal experience of becoming seen by them. The mutuality of human connection lies in the ability of two people to make an impact on one another. There is no relationship without mutual recognition.

Over these last weeks, so many of you have taken considerable trouble to tell me how much my ministry has meant for you. Many of you have spoken about the experience of my recognizing and meeting you at a place of need and of my journeying with you through experiences of doubt and fear. My parting charge to you is to go and do likewise with one another.

The writer of 1^st Peter reminds us that God calls us all to spiritual friendship not in spite of, but because of our experience of fear and estrangement wherever the sources of those feeling might lie. In the Christian community we are called to like living stones, let ourselves be built into a spiritual house, for we are no less than a royal priesthood claimed by God as his own.

[1] 1^st Peter 2:2

[2] 1^st Peter 2:4

Random Thoughts

Some of you have already reported to me that this year, Holy Week and Easter at St Martin’s had special quality. No doubt this has much to do with Fr Bill+, whose reputation for liturgical sensitivity is well earned. I also want to say how appreciative I am Bill+, for your generous invitation to me to be the preacher today.

Today is known as Low Sunday. It seems no one really knows anymore why the Sunday after Easter bears this enigmatic descriptor. At least Low Sunday is marginally better than Quasimodogeniti, which was the name for this Sunday in the old Latin Rite, deriving from the opening words of the introit As newborn babes, desire the rational milk without guile. There is a suggestion that the name derives from an early custom of the newly baptized, having worn their baptismal albs all week, today enjoying a much-needed change of clothes.

This Sunday is also known as Doubting Thomas Sunday. In churches up and down the land preachers will be addressing the imagined polarization of doubt and faith. Thomas, depending on your theology emerges as a personification of the evils or the virtues of doubting. Episcopalians tend towards Thomas as a kind of everyman, a personification of the virtue of doubt. For us the seeds of faith are sown in the fields of doubt.

Psychologically, I have always felt that the name Low reflects a very necessary ebbing of energy following the energetic highs of Holy Week and Easter. The Sunday after Easter has always been for me a time for some well-earned and very needed recuperation. Except that this year, Low Sunday is the occasion for meeting a new congregation – not a time for me to luxuriate in lethargy. 

Conversing with the Text

Part I   When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the [Temple authorities and their henchmen]… .[1]

So this is how it begins. The disciples of Jesus – dis-spirited – hiding themselves away – utterly exhausted and confounded by the events of the last week – exhausted beyond imagining – but the worst kind of exhaustion – the kind that also is accompanied by an agitated state of heightened anxiety. So this is how it all begins. Yet, it wasn’t meant to be this way!

Until Thursday night when it became clear to them that events were taking an unexpected turn for the worst – until then they had felt on the crest of something so huge. For months they had had this sense of growing momentum, of expectation that the world as they knew it was about to dramatically change. After all, were they not the Messiah’s inner circle?

For months now, Jesus had been showing them that he meant business. Ever since they had left Galilee it had been one amazing event after another. There was even that strange event with the woman at the well, in Samaria of all places. Then there was the amazing confrontation with the Pharisees over Jesus’ healing of the man blind from birth, which had both frightened them, and yet convinced them that Jesus, was unstoppable. Then only a week ago had Jesus not demonstrated his messiah-ship beyond doubt by raising Lazarus from the dead? Jesus was definitely the one who was about to spear-head a volte face, a turn-about-face, not only in their personal fortunes, but the fortunes of the whole Jewish nation. Jesus the Messiah – the promised-one – about which the prophets had spoken – the one who had finally come to set things right.

How had it come to this? If only Jesus had somehow not overplayed his hand with the Temple Priests. If only he had taken the way out that the governor had been trying to offer him. If only he had not confronted the authorities, a confrontation that had so terrified them and scattered in all directions. Even Peter, whom they all looked up to, their rock, had denied the Lord in the end, just as Jesus had said he would.

But what were they to do? Jesus had pushed it too far! He had miscalculated and this had cost them all dearly. First the death – that shameful death that now stigmatized all of them -the stigma of their leader’s death by crucifixion – as if Jesus was a criminal. Oh the shame of it all – shame as well as- as well as the loss, the grief, and of course their own guilt.

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The resurrection was a complex experience for the disciples. It’s easy to relate to their experience of bewildering loss and disillusionment. We can even relate to their fear of being persecuted by the forces that put Jesus to death. I think it’s harder though, for us to recognize the effects of shame and guilt in play within them at the end of Easter Day. There is the guilt of having failed Jesus, denying and deserting him at his eleventh hour.

Yet, I imagine it’s the shame that is most crippling. The disciples were ashamed of the way Jesus had died. How could the Messiah have been put to death on a cross? Even more problematic, how could someone who died such a publically, shameful death, be resurrected?

The disciples had seen Jesus die. They had witnessed his burial and now the worrying mystery of the tomb being empty simply adds to their sense of terror and confusion. It’s true that Mary Magdalene had reported her enigmatic experience of the risen Christ earlier in the day. Yet how can the men credit with any authority the witness of a mere woman?

The disciples behave as human beings behave in the face of overwhelming, and conflicting emotion. Secluded behind doors of wood and walls of plaster they seek that feeling of safety amidst a hostile, external world. Yet, the doors of wood and walls of plaster are emblematic of the impenetrable walls and doors within their minds. These, they have erected to shield themselves from the tsunami of conflicting emotion. Within them feelings of grief, fear, disillusionment, guilt, and shame vie for self-accusatory, ascendancy.

Part II    Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ He showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 

Locked away within the turmoil of conflicting emotions the disciples are not mentally ready to recognize Jesus. The old adage – the mind recognizes only what it is already looking for – applies here. They don’t expect to encounter Jesus because for them, he is dead. They don’t recognize him when he appears in their midst until he evokes a connection between his present transformed appearance and the wounds of his crucifixion. All the post resurrection appearances in both Luke and John operate on this pattern, either Jesus shows them his wounds or he breaks bread with them, only then do the disciples know him.

What we call memory results when chains of associations become linked together, build-up from the isolated impressions stored away in our minds. These linkages in the chain of associations that build memories become broken as a result of overwhelming emotion such as grief or shame, which can only be processed with time. What we can see in the post-resurrection appearances is Jesus repairing the associational links in the disciple’s memories, broken by the trauma they experienced on Good Friday. Through action – i.e. breaking bread, or showing his wounds, Jesus reconnects the broken links of associational impressions in the disciples minds. The result – they recognize him as he now appears – seemingly miraculously before them – connecting the post resurrection Jesus with the Jesus they remember.

Then they rejoice! Can you feel their sense of, ‘phew! Jesus isn’t rejecting us for our failures as disciples and friends, after-all.’ It is so crucial that we note here that Jesus does not seek out new and better disciples. He returns to those who have failed him. He breathes new life into them and sends them out to forgive sins.

Part III    Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’

We are so familiar with Luke’s version of the descent of the Holy Spirit on Day of Pentecost that we tend to skate-over John’s less dramatic version of this event. Here in the locked room, Jesus forgives the disciples for their human limitations. He then, breathes the gift of the Holy Spirit into them empowering them to now go-out into the world to forgive sins.

Christians often, terribly misunderstand this passage. Jesus is not sending the disciples out to judge others. He is not commissioning them, as the Church has so often seen itself, as the arbiters between right and wrong. Jesus is not sending them out to judge the world. He is sending them out to extend their experience of having been forgiven by inviting others into the experience of forgiveness. 

Receiving this Text

Accepting forgiveness can be a complex process. Perhaps Jesus has this in mind when he tells the disciples that some sins will be retained. Human beings and human communities have a tendency to resist forgiveness. We cling to past hurts and grievances, refusing to forgive or be forgiven. Such retention of past sin harms us and harms our communities, impeding the creation of more creative associational links , i.e. more hopeful memories that are able to support new and better choices.

What we hear in this text is God’s invitation to know ourselves to be truly forgiven. When we so come to know ourselves, then how can we not invite others into that same experience, especially because as miserable failures, we human beings are only too aware of the harm that results when sin is retained.

John’s account of Jesus’ appearing to the disciples at the end of the first Easter Day helps us to frame a question about the future. I would like to suggest the over-riding question for us is and will continue to be: what kind of community are we dreaming of becoming? As your rector-elect, I seek only to frame the question. Together, we as the community of St Martin’s will begin to answer that question as we journey into the future.

However, what I feel I can do is to remind us of who we are. We are the heirs to the historic tradition of catholic and apostolic Christianity, physically situated on Orchard Avenue, in Wayland Park, in Providence, RI. More particularly, our historic catholic inheritance comes to us through the distinctive channel of over a thousand years of Anglican Tradition. This is a tradition of Christianity that understands that the function of being the Church is to exist for those who are not yet its members, and for those who may never come to see themselves as members of the Church. Our task is to witness to the presence of God, active in the world around us. We are to be what the Celts knew of as a thin place through which, the expectations of Kingdom of God permeate into the world around.

Like many Christian communities today facing the fearful uncertainties of a future yet to become known to us, we experience the temptation to retreat into a fearful self- preoccupation, like the disciples at the end of the first Easter Day. We are the Church. Our purpose is to attest to God’s work in the world. Each of us must be an extension of our community, reaching-out to others with whom we live and work and enjoy social connections in order to invite them into the community of the forgiven.

The importance of the right word

In his blog Listening Hermit, Peter Woods describing himself as a helpless digger into etymological meanings draws our attention to John’s use of the Greek word kleiso meaning closed, as in the doors were locked. He describes rolling the word around in his mouth as he tries to work out what the word associates-to, in his mind. Finally, it comes to him. Klesio is related to another more familiar Greek word, ecclesia. Where Klesio means closed, ecclesia means not closed.

It is important to note that ecclesia comes to be the word the first Christians adopted to refer to themselves as a community. The first Christians had come to see themselves as an open society, a society with open doors. This development, so soon after the death of Jesus sharply contrasts with John’s description of the disciples on the Day of Resurrection and following weeks. Jesus, at the end of Easter Day finds his disciples not only cowering behind closed doors, but locked away within closed minds.

At St Martin’s we are the Church – the Ecclesia – a community with open doors – a community of the forgiven extending God’s invitation of forgiveness into the world part of which involves the healing of our broken memories. This is the message of the resurrection. Let this Easter message give shape and content to our over-riding question: what kind of community are we dreaming of becoming? In some ways it’s less important to know the answer and more important to keep asking the question. Because its only when we ask such a question that we begin to participate with God in God’s dreaming us into becoming.

[1] It is regrettable that the English translators have not taken more care in giving the impression that John is hostile to all Jews. An anachronism describes the tendency to read back into history phenomena arising in later period. We need to understand that John, himself a Jew, leader in a completely Jewish Christian community is not suggesting that the disciples were afraid of Jews in general, but afraid of a specific group – the Temple religious authorities, who have already bribed the soldiers at the tomb to say that the disciples had stolen the body of Jesus. The fear John locates in the disciples is a fear of a persecutory religious authority structure that oppressed all classes of Jews. A tension with religious authority continues to be a live issue for John and his community. For while he writes after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD and it power structures, new tensions have emerged between the Christians and the synagogue authorities of his day. This is a doctrinal tension. For the Rabbis following the destruction of the Temple, John’s Christian Community is a dangerous heretical movement that threatens their attempts to reestablish Jewish religious cohesion around the synagogue and the practice of the Law. The Christians pose a danger for the Rabbinic Movement because many while, secretly worshipping in the church on first day of the week, continue to attend the synagogue on the Sabbath. It’s these overlapping boundaries of allegiance that pose the doctrinal tension. This doctrinal tension is quite different from the later emergence of the racial tension associated with anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is our issue not John’s. We have to deal with our guilt at the criminal complicity of the Church in the crime of anti-Semitism, and not read it back into the Gospels. For John and the other Christian writers the issue is their struggle with Jewish religious authority, it is not a hatred of all Jews