A Tough Sell for Modern Ears

Two weeks ago, as I reflected on the texts for the Second Sunday after Epiphany, I found my attention reluctantly returning to St Paul’s words in the epistle reading from 1st Corinthians 6:12-20. Today, on the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany I find my attention drawn yet again to the continuing argument Paul makes concerning freedom. The gist of his developing argument continually throws up examples in the life of the community that highlight the tension between the operation of grace and law. In chapter 8:1-13, his example concerns the hot button issue of eating meat sacrificed to idols. Context is everything – well almost. As I mentioned two weeks ago, unadulterated Paul is often a tough sell for 21st-century preachers, and listeners, alike.

The ancient Greek city of Corinth – like its modern-day counterpart – occupied a strategic position situated on the isthmus of Corinth – a narrow neck of land between the Aegean and Adriatic seas that provided a narrow land bridge connecting mainland Greece with the Peloponnese Peninsula. The significance of ancient Corinth lay in its equidistance between the two regional powers of Sparta and Athens. In counterbalancing both the political and military power of the two great rivals, Corinth played a key role within the organisation of Greek city states known as the Archean League.

Corinth controlled not only the east-west axis route between Sparta and Athens – but commanding harbors on Aegean and Adriatic sides of the isthmus is also controlled the passage of goods unloaded in one harbor and transported the short distance across the isthmus to be reloaded on ships moored in the other side – thus enabling ships to avoid the longer sea journey around the Peloponnese Peninsula.

During Rome’s conquest of the Greek city states, Corinth was destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC. It lay in ruins until a century later, when Julius Caesar began the rebuilding of Corinth as a Roman colony for the resettlement of Rome’s growing population of freed slaves originally captured in the many campaigns in the Eastern regions bordering the Mediterranean. A mixed population of Syrians, Egyptians, and of course many Jews – together with numbers of Rome’s poor transformed Corinth into an economically dynamic melting pot. With colonial status also came an infusion of Roman tax revenues – triggering a huge rebuilding program of ancient Corinth’s temples and civic buildings which had lain waste for over a century. 

It was into this bustling and cosmopolitan caldron that Paul arrived sometime around 50-51AD. Luke in Acts mentions that Paul travelled to Corinth where he was joined by Silas and Timothy. We know that Paul lodged with Aquila and his wife Priscilla, two Jewish refugees from the emperor Claudius’ expulsion of Rome’s Jews in previous decade. Like Paul they were tent makers. There was always considerable business from the need to constantly repair and weave new tents and awnings to protect the Corinthians from the effects of the hot sun. Perhaps it was noting the fevered building boom, that led Paul to fashion an image for himself in Cor:3 as a skilled master builder laying the foundations on which others will build.

As a result of Jewish hostility to Paul, he left his Jewish hosts to stay with one Titius Justus – a gentile God-fearer. God-fearer was a term the Jews used for newly converted but often still unconverted gentiles who participated in the life of the synagogue. In the face of growing Jewish resistance Paul switches his missionary focus to the gentile God fearers who because of their attraction to, and familiarity with Jewish faith and custom were already primed to respond to his preaching of the gospel. Among the God-fearers many wealthy women exercised power and influence. Paul’s letters reveal that it was often to such women that he turned for support in his fledgling communities.

During his first sojourn in Corinth, two significant events occurred. The first was his penning of two letters to the Thessalonians. The second was his arraignment before the Roman Consul, Gallio, brother of Seneca, at the instigation of Corinthian Jews on a change of blasphemy. Gallio dismissed the case because Paul was a Roman citizen and he declined to judge Paul on the basis of Jewish religious matters. Vindicated, Paul nevertheless must have felt that it was time to leave Corinth sometime in late 51 or early 52AD. Later in Ephesus, sometime between 53 and 54, Paul pens his two letters to the Corinthian church.

Reading Paul’s letters is like listening to one side of a cell phone conversation. We read his responses – but as to the questions he was posed – the text is largely silent. Yet from what Paul writes we can surmise that a number of serious divisions were emerging as a reflection of Corinth’s rowdy and permissive, cosmopolitan culture.

The Corinthian church struggled with the moral issues of the right use of sex, the right attitude toward wealth. Corinthians had a reputation for sexual permissiveness and the conspicuous display of wealth – the latter leading to the denigration of the poor within the worship and community life of the church – issues not unfamiliar to modern Christian communities – for human nature has not changed much in the passage of centuries.

The Corinthian church also struggled with the corruption of the notion of truth and the importance of shared values. Paul is concerned by the charismatic sway of some teachers who assailed their hearers with alternative truths, alternative facts, alternative values rooted in baser instincts – pouring scorn on shared values of mutual respect. Yet, he is particularly worried by the report of two developments in the Corinthian church.

Many, it seems, were becoming vulnerable to the subtle invitation of teachers giving a gnostic spin to the gospel message – inviting their hearers into the allure of secret knowledge. Paul has them in his sights when he writes that knowledge puffs up, whereas love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something is really admitting that they know nothing. It is through love in action not puffed-up claims to knowledge that we become known by God.

Others were becoming susceptible to the Judaizers who demanded gentile submission to the requirements of the law. The master builder of the gospel message – Paul was always deeply worried by others erecting the wrong kind of building upon the foundations he had labored so hard to lay.

As in chapter 6 when Paul employs sexual practice to highlight the tension between what may be lawful but not necessarily beneficial, in chapter 8 he grounds his wider development of Christian freedom in the issue of food sacrificed to idols. Not an issue for us – you might think. Yet, moving beyond the immediate 1st-century contextual details –that is – the status for Christians of the pagan temple sacrificial food offerings– can we not hear Paul addressing us today – we who live in a culture characterised by a scandalous misuse of food – from food deserts to food profligacy and waste of monumental proportions?

Remember, Paul is writing in a religious context – both pagan or Jewish – where food was an integral part of religious practice. It is here we begin to grasp the revolutionary import of his words – for Paul is doing something hitherto unimaginable. He is decoupling food from religious practice. Writing prior to the first gospel, did Paul know of Jesus teaching on the subject? In any case he affirms Jesus’ words that it’s not what goes into a person that defiles but what flows out from the heart. Paul tells his readers: Food will not bring us close to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat and no better off if we do.

At the heart of his first Corinthian letter is Paul’s development of a notion of Christian freedom that flows from the grace and not from the absence of prohibition. In chapter 6, he startled his hearers by proclaiming all things are lawful for him – but though lawful not necessarily beneficial for him or those with whom he’s in relationship. In chapter 8 he further spells out this revolutionary idea.

Christian freedom does not derive from the absence of prohibition. It flows from the acceptance of responsibility for the impact of one’s actions. The sin is not in eating the wrong food. The sin lies in the offence and confusion eating it gives to other members of the same community who being younger in faith are still struggling to internalize the break with their pagan past. The limits placed on freedom come not from the regulation of rules and laws – prohibitions – but from our acceptance of shared responsibility (shared value system) – demanding of us an assessment of the impact of our actions on others.

Christian freedom’s rule of thumb is not – have I the right to do this thing – but what will the impact be for others if I do so? Can there be no more urgent a question for our 21st-century ears. It’s the burning question in America today. Might I also suggest it’s a central question for the Sunday of the Annual Meeting – when we celebrate our community’s achievements in the previous year – and holding this question before us as we prepare to meet the challenges and grasp the opportunities ahead?

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A Prophet – A Disciple : But of What kind?

Image: Jonah and the whale

God calls us to be prophets, or in the more intimate language of the gospels, Jesus calls us to be his disciples. What is our response? What kind of prophet, what sort of disciple do we want to be and more importantly are prepared to become?

The OT reading for Epiphany 3 offers a brief extract from the book of Jonah. On its own the reading is somewhat opaque – jumping into the story almost at the end. In it we learn that Jonah is being addressed by the word of the Lord for the second time with the same request which Jonah continues to argue with God about.

The story of Jonah is well-known. This short book of four chapters is read by Jews every year on the afternoon of Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement. The drama of the morning liturgy with its solemn chant of the Kol Nidre, the prayer of atonement – is past and the expanse of the afternoon opens before the fasting penitents whose hunger and thirst only increase as the day draws on. Reading Jonah reminds them of the fruitlessness of any attempt to evade the examination of unpalatable truths of one’s life through the lens of the last 12 months.

The story of Jonah and the whale is one of the more well-known bible stories among Christians and has risen in our collective memory to the level of a universal folk fable. Wikipedia describes a fable as a literary genre – a succinct fictional story, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are given human traits, emotions and intentions to illustrate or lead to a particular moral lesson. Therefore, in the days of my childhood when we were all taught bible stories – the story of Jonah exercised a special power over children’s imaginations. We all understood implicitly that if we were not good, we too might be swallowed up by a whale. The more enquiring among us came to understand the whale as a symbol for all kinds of other rather icky things that might befall the badly behaved.  

Technically, the writer of a fable is known as a fabulist. I note that in our modern disenchanted times the term fabulist carries a derogatory implication – for a fabulist is someone who makes things up and therefore is not to be trusted. In today’s world, have we not all become the unwilling but more often unwitting victims of the fabulist’s art?

The story of Jonah is of a man who receives a request from God to speak truth to power – to call the capital of the greatest Empire the world to that date had known to repent. The gist of the story is his attempt to evade the divine request before finally being cornered into complying though a conspiracy of tempestuous elements and a creature from the fishy deep. In his attempt to escape God, Jonah son of Amittai– incidentally whose name means dove-son-of-truth – boards a ship to take him in the opposite direction from the one God wishes him to take.

Of course, there’s no escape from divine writ and Jonah’s ship becomes imperiled by a violent storm. Jonah sleeps through the storm – I mean who does that? – making the sailors even more irate at him for they blame Jonah for the storm and toss him overboard to supplicate the divine wrath. Jonah is rescued – swallowed up by a passing whale. After three days of severe indigestion the whale spews Jonah up on the shore of the land God had originally directed Jonah to travel to.  

Pissed-off doesn’t do justice to Jonah’s feelings about being thwarted by divine conspiracy and so begrudgingly he trudges off in the direction of the great city of Nineveh –and finally does as God desires of him – to speak the truth to power and bring about a change through repentance. Jonah’s mood is hardly improved when he discovers that the Ninevites not only hear him, but from the greatest to the least don sackcloth and repent – thus averting God’s lust for destruction. Mission accomplished – so you might expect Jonah to be relieved and pleased. But not a bit of it.

Nineveh is one of those place names that carries huge symbolic significance in Jewish history. The book of Jonah purports to be set in an earlier century when the Assyrian Empire and its great city of Nineveh was at its height. Nineveh’s symbolism lies in later scholars looking back on the events of the 8th-century when in  721 the Assyrian armies swept down and destroyed the Northern kingdom of Israel – wiping it not only from the map but also from the pages of history.  

Rather than its 8th-century setting, the fable of Jonah belongs in 6th-century after the return of the Exiles from Babylon. Jonah is a story addressing the exilic community as it struggled to rebuild Jerusalem where apart from the difficulties posed in the physical reconstruction the burning issue concerned intermarriage of Jews with others of more dubious mixed-race heritage.

Knowing this context helps answer the double question: why did God dispatch Jonah, an Israelite prophet – to the non-Israelite Assyrians of Nineveh- and why was Jonah so unhappy with the successful outcome of his preaching?

From the outset, Jonah questions God’s intention to show mercy to non-Israelites. In his actions he shows the extent of his opposition to the project. When finally cornered by God he complies, but with bad grace. Fully expecting the Ninevites to reject his message to repent and prove him right with God, his very success – in his own eyes – calls his credibility as a prophet into question. He seems more concerned with his wounded credibility than that thousands of lives have been saved by God’s mercy because of him. Finally unable to argue with God further he sulks and pouts – telling God if that’s the way God want things then he would rather die than live with what is for him a contradiction – that the Lord God of Israel should extend his mercy to those outside the chosen race. The book ends with God decrying Jonah’s self-centered pettiness.

The issue of intermarriage in the post-exilic community is of burning significance. In the writings of this period, we have the book of Ezra in which Jews who had intermarried with foreigners are commanded to reject their wives and mixed-race children and return to the Lord – while in the book of Jonah God’s intention to include all races within his plan for salvation could not be clearer. However, the central issue at the heart of internal post-exilic discord is less about the dilution of Jewishness – though this is undoubtedly a concern. The main issue is theological and concerns the promise of salvation. Is God’s promise of salvation a universal promise inclusive of all nations or not?

Subsequent Rabbinic interpretation of the book of Jonah has gone back and forth on the theological issue. Some Rabbis argued that Jonah shows God’s clear and unequivocal intention to invite all of humanity into the plan of salvation hitherto declared only to Israel.  Others have argued that God only saved the Ninevites so that Assyria could be the instrument to fulfil God’s plan to punish Israel for its sins by wiping it off the map and out of history. At the end of the day – through its prescribed reading on the Day of Atonement – Jewish practice firmly established the message of Jonah as a rebuke to self-centeredness – personal and racial.

Following Jewish practice – we cannot find meaning or peace without an honest examination of how we, individually and communally, participate in attitudes and actions that seek to limit the extent of God’s mercy, compassion, and generosity to my or our tribe, my or our community, mercy offered only to those like me or us.

The Lectionary in placing a reading from Jonah alongside Mark’s depiction of Jesus calling his first disciples presents us with an uncomfortable challenge. God is not only more generous and loving – more than we might care for God to be -towards others who are different from us. As God expected Jonah to be a divine agent – in the call to discipleship Jesus expects us to be agents, voices, hands, and feet in the work of proclaiming the divine call for universal inclusion. Placing the two readings side-by-side reveals another striking comparison. Jonah thought he could qualify God’s desire for mercy – and when that failed he thought he could evade God’s call. The men who drop everything in response to Jesus’ call had no preconceived notion of what they were letting themselves in for – they simply felt compelled to respond.

God calls us to be prophets, or in the more intimate language of the gospels, Jesus calls us to be his disciples. What is our response – and more crucially – what sort of prophet, what kind of disciple are we prepared to become?

Notes on Nineveh

Philip Jenkins in a 2014 feature appearing in The Christian Century notes the ancient Christian history of the Middle east has become agonizingly relevant. Cities central to that history appear in headlines in the context of fanaticism and mass destruction. The State Department’s maps of the latest atrocities coincide with the most vulnerable landscapes of Eastern Christianity. Jenkins is writing about the fall of Iraq’s second city Mosul to the forces of the ISIS caliphate.

From Apostolic times Mosul remained a great center of Eastern Christianity. The ancient Christian culture of the Middle East thrived – surviving Persian, Arab and Ottoman conquest. During the First World War the Ottomans inflicted an Armenian-style genocide on Christian Mosul – leaving the city subjected to increasing attack and infiltration by the Kurds. The most recent chapter in the history of Mosul concerns its conquest by ISIS and reconquest by the Iraqi army so that today Mosul – ancient Nineveh is a largely Kurdish city with a sizable Arab minority. The once strong Christian community has largely fled – mostly to North America – where the patriarch of the Syrian Orthodox Church now reside in Chicago.

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Nihilistic Times

Sam Wells, the Vicar of one of London’s most well-known churches, our namesake St Martin in the Fields, is acknowledged as a foremost exemplar of a strong Anglican-Episcopal preaching tradition. He views the sermon as less like listening to a lesson and more like taking a shower. You stand in the shower and rather mindlessly let the water flow over you. We are conscious of the water falling on us – inducing at best a state of what I think of as even hovering attention. As the words from on high cascade across the congregation – the task is not to concentrate too sharply but to listen for the one or two points that you are in need of hearing. The task of listening is certainly not to take it all in at once because at least at St Martins, sermons are always available in print, audio, and video formats for subsequent revisiting and in my case, the text can be previewed from 9pm the night before. So, in church or online simply listen for the points you need to hear – and believe me you will hear them.

Hope has been at the forefront of my thoughts in this dark time when the descent into strife and conflict seems to be both inevitable and non-resistible. The message of hope sounded loud and clear on Christmas Eve as we reflected on John’s Prologue which tells us that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. In the Christmas Eve sermon I suggested that not only does the darkness not overcome the light, but the darkness provides the fuel for the light to consume to burn ever brighter. As Christians our responsibility is to summon our courage as people of faith – inspirited with the Holy Spirit – ever moving towards a hope-filled future that sets the direction of travel – illuminating the path of action in the present.

As I reflected on the texts for the Second Sunday after Epiphany, I found my attention reluctantly returning to St Paul’s words in the epistle reading from 1st Corinthians 6:12-20. I say reluctantly because unadulterated Paul is often a tough sell for 21st-century preachers, and listeners, alike. Of course, the problem lies less in what Paul says – although it sometimes does – but more with the cultural filters through which we’ve come to hear him. So having decided I’d tackle Paul’s opening lines about things lawful and things beneficial, I found myself reminded of a recent review of a book chiefly addressing the primary obstacle for hope – believing in a hope in a future better than our present.

Maeve Cooke, professor of philosophy at University College Dublin, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy has written a review of Wendy Brown’s new book Nihilistic Times appearing in the recent edition of Commonweal Magazine. Wendy Brown is one of America’s foremost political theorists and the first professor of political science at the UC Berkeley. The Harvard Review of Nihilistic Times notes that Brown asks some very timely questions. How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to Truth? She proposes that the answer to such questions can be found in the current prevailing culture of nihilism.

Nihilism comes from the Latin nihil meaning nothing. Nihilism is the existential philosophy that claims that systems of meaning are illusionary. Look for God behind the elaborate curtain of organized Christianity – and you will discover that there’s no there, there. God is dead proclaimed Friedrich Nietzsche – the high priest of nihilism. If God is dead – then why not do whatever you like? And the Nazis did. And the Kremlin does. And so do other nefarious actors – much closer to home.

Max Weber’s 1918 Vocation Lectures provide the catalyst for Brown’s analysis of the current crisis of truth and values in both the university and political life. Weber identified nihilism arising through the gaps opened-up in a modernity where knowledge, values, and belief have become split off from one another – leading to a depletion in all three areas of societal life.

Cooke notes that – values are not just trivialized and weakened; they become more numerous and diverse, leading to moral chaos. Nihilism’s egocentric and instrumental relation to the world manifests today in widespread, disinhibited assertions of power and desire shorn of concern for truth, justice, or future consequences. 

Our world today is characterized by an erosion of shared values. We live in a world where our notions of truth, values, and the facts we rely upon to inform us about the world are continually contradicted by alternative truths, values, and facts. Sometimes the alternatives to the truth, values, and facts we hold are genuine if competing truth and value narratives worthy of scrutiny. However, more often today alternative becomes a euphemism for whatever some political, social, or religious pundit decides to make up to suit one transactional purpose or another.

Inspired by her reading of Weber, Brown explores the contested terrain of human freedom, human value, and the human need to embrace a higher purpose in life. Freedom is an essential element in living lives of human value, Cooke notes. She defines freedom as a practice, a mode of self-realization that has its wellspring not in the calculating ego but in “the soul.” It involves enacting a life we have chosen and living by the lights of our beliefs.

Freedom as the practice of self-realization is not found in the exercise of ego – which is always asking – what can I get out of this, what do I have to control to give me what I seek? The practice of self-realization is a practice of soul – which asks what do I long to become? Becoming open to the new- now there’s a countercultural proposition if ever there was one. The practice of soul as living according to the guidance of a set of beliefs and transpersonal values – is a hope-filled, future oriented, spiritual antidote to the current pervading climate of disillusionment flowing from the denial, and dislocation of shared systems of value.

Weber, Brown, and St Paul, it seems, understand that freedom is so much more than the mere absence of restraint (Cooke). It may seem a big jump from Weber via Brown and Cooke to St Paul. Yet, Paul too addresses the question of freedom as a lived practice of soul. In proclaiming freedom as so much more than the absence of constraint – he cries-out from the page: All things are lawful for me, but not all things are beneficial. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by any–thing. Of course, Paul’s overarching theological motif here is the tension between living under the law [of Moses] and living in the light of grace given through Christ.  

In addressing himself to the nature of freedom Paul sees on the one hand, that the law is normally an instrument of restraint on freedom- so that where the law does not prohibit – lies and assumption of unfettered freedom. On the other hand, there’s what’s beneficial – that which offers the greatest freedom from enslavement to things. His point is just because something is lawful does not mean it’s moral or ethical. Just because you are free to do something does not mean you are not enslaved by your actions which lead not to in an experience of liberation – but simply to a different kind of being unfree.

Paul offers the arena of the sexual appetites to illustrate his point – not because he was a sex hating misogynist – although in some quarters the jury’s still out on that one. Paul chooses sex because the prevailing attitudes towards male sexual practice in his 1st-century Roman world were characterized by an extreme nihilism. For a Roman man any form of sexual practice with any sexual object choice was not only without any legal restraint – but was also without moral inhibition or ethical constraint.  

Paul is reminding the Corinthians, that despite the absence of legal prohibition, theirs’ and other bodies are not to be used simply as the impulses of desire and the permissiveness of the culture allow. Their bodies belong to God – paid for at a price by Christ. Translated into our contemporary nihilistic context – Paul’s words remind us that our lives are not our own to live shorn from the values that connect us to one another. We cannot live as if our actions carry no consequence for others.

Freedom is the practice of self-realization – rooted not in the exercise of ego – what can I get out of this, what can I control to give me what I seek – but in the practice of soul – what have I the courage to become? True freedom is not simply as the absence restraint – legal or moral. The practice of soul – is living according to the guidance of a set of beliefs and transpersonal values that results in the experience of true freedom.

The practice of soul is hope-filled. It clings to the light. It does not fear the darkness – knowing that the seeming deepening of darkness is only a process of gathering fuel for the light to burn more brightly. Burn brightly when we might ask? The answer is if not now then eventually! In the meantime, hope emerges from within this struggle as our future oriented, spiritual antidote to the current pervading nihilistic climate – providing us with what Brown refers to as the missing step to take us from discontent to effective resistance.

The movement from discontent to effective resistance – from here to there – breaks our enslavement by the forces of apathy, despair, and violence. To us falls the task of fashioning a hope-filled vision of a future that empowers us in the present to reclaim a values based political empowerment for the task of societal renewal. We are engaged in the raising up of that which has been cast down and the renewal of that which has grown old. We will accomplish this through being true to a practice enacting a faith life and living by the light of our beliefs.

To be hope-filled is to live by the light of our value laden beliefs. The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not – nor ever will – overcome it.

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The Defiance of Hope

Image from Photos of Biblical Explanations Pt. 2

I wonder if you might close your eyes for a moment – and conjure an image of those last moments before and following the act of creation. In the book of Genesis, we find a description of the darkness covering the face of the deep – the only sound –the divine wind as it sweeps across the face of the void.

Our sci-fi shaped imaginations offer us images to complement the Genesis description of the darkness of the deep. Maybe an image comes to you from the opening scene from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise looking ahead into a vast and empty panorama of receding space; perhaps it’s an image from the Hubble Telescope relaying from its earth orbit images of far-flung star formations – arresting in their resplendent shapes and colors; maybe it’s the gamma ray images from the newer Webb Telescope – which from solar orbit at the second Lagrange point – a million miles away from the Earth – captures images from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang in the evolution of our own Solar System. Whatever images your imagination conjures – sit with them for a moment with eyes still closed.

Now return to the Genesis image of the darkness of the deep – the only sound being that of the divine wind sweeping across the face of the void. Suddenly, the eyes of your imagination catch a pinpoint of light flickering on at the heart of the void. Watch as this pinpoint of light expands at lightspeed to pierce the darkness of the deep – bringing forth the light of life.

You can open your eyes now.

This Christmas Eve, I deliberately chose to use the gospel reading from John’s Prologue in preference to Luke’s birth narrative. How fortunate we are to be given such a rich variety in the NT accounts of the Incarnation – the event of the Creator’s entry into the creation.

In the opening verses of his Gospel, John the Evangelist is constructing a second Genesis event. The opening verses of his first chapter are collectively known as the Prologue – because a prologue comes before the actual story begins.  Like the authors of Genesis, John uses the opening words – in the beginning – to set his scene. As in the first Genesis creation account, John tells us that in the beginning there was only the Creator from whom all life came into being – as John phrases it. But John tells us much more than this.

Now close your eyes and once more picture within the darkness the pinprick of light expanding at light’s speed to illumine the void’s deep darkness. Writing in Greek, John identifies this light as the Logos.

Open your eyes again.

Logos has a range of possible meanings, among them – to put in order, to arrange, to gather, to choose, to count, reckon, and discern, and finally, to say, to speak. In the Genesis event God does not create something from nothing. The creator creates by ordering, arranging, choosing, counting, reckoning, discerning, and finally speaking into the elements concealed within the darkness of the deep.

In English we translate John’s logos as the Word. The Word is the communicative aspect of the Creator. The Word is the Creator’s speaking into the void to arrange and structure the elements swirling in the chaos of the deep. In the moment of creation, the Logos – the Word -speaks-out the divine life into the void. Because as John further tells us, the Word is the light of the divine life at the heart of everything. And here John arrives at what is for me – his crucial point. He tells us that this light – the light of the divine life – illumines the darkness in such a way that the darkness can never – ever – overcome it! Let’s listen to John again.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of the world. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it!

John identifies Jesus as the Word. This seems at first sight a rather huge leap to contemplate. So how does he get there? Well for John it’s simple. The Word is Jesus because at a pivotal moment in human history – the Word that in the first moments of creation spoke-forth the light of the divine life into creation -in the second moment of the Incarnation, speaks-forth the divine self into a human life. For John, in Jesus, the divine Word has come to dwell. So let’s just pause here for a moment to let the impression of these words form in us.

Follow me as I want to take a short detour. In 1849, the Reverend Edmund Spears, then the Unitarian Minister in Wayland Massachusetts, wrote the words of his poem It Came Upon a Midnight Clear. The striking feature of Sears’ poem is the way he sets the birth of the Christ-Child’s in Bethlehem not in its historical setting but in the context of his own day’s issues of war and peace – for him most probably it’s the Mexican American War of 1849 he has in mind.

Sears sets the Savior’s incarnation in the harshness of the New England bleak midwinter when the world in solemn stillness lay to hear the angels’ song of peace and good will. But he notes that the angels’ song can barely be heard above the clamor of the world’s Babel sounds. And in his third stanza he packs his punch:

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.

Sears tempers his current despair at the warlike state of the nation with his Christian hope – eventually steering his poem towards the expectation of the Second Coming when the whole world will finally echo (give back) the song which presently, only the angels’ sing.

We celebrate this Christmas amidst unparalleled rancor and vitriol at home and against the background of the heart-rending images of devastation and loss of life in Ukraine and the Holy Land – to name only the two conflicts most clamoring for our Western attention. This year, Christmas celebrations in the Holy Land will be muted. Bethlehem, a town now under the siege of occupation will be dark to protest events in Gaza and the escalation of military repression and settler vigilante violence in the West Bank. This year throughout the Holy Land the liturgical observance of Christmas will be shorn of festive expression.

The irony between the 1st century setting for Jesus’ birth and today is captured in the French expression: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose -things change only to remain the same. O hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing.

Many of us can be excused if we are drawn to despair by the current course of events. At the heart of John’s Prologue lies the message we most need to hear. The most startling thing about the Incarnation is this. In the human life of Jesus – the Word the light of the divine life – enfleshed – to live among us full of grace and truth. John reminds us that it is our choice whether we recognize this as a reality – capable of shaping our lives – or not. To behold the glory of the light of the divine life shining through the radiance of a human life is a powerful life shaping, earth changing narrative of hope – we just need the courage to believe and to act in accordance with our belief. And courage is what it takes to believe in the face of everything that conspires to entrap us in the darkness of despair.

In the midst of the darkness of this world we can feel like we’ve fallen into the fathomlessness of the primordial deep where we confront all that saps us of Christian conviction and hope-filled purpose. In despair, how easily we forget that the darkness is simply the fuel that the light consumes to shine ever brighter.

In this then, lies the defiance of hope – that no matter how dark things may appear, darkness not only has no power to extinguish the light – but actually, provides the fuel for the light to burn even brighter. Take heart! The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will never, ever overcome it. Renewed by this hope we have work to do, and that work is to align ourselves with God in the restoration of the creation – so that the world may be ready to receive Christ’s coming again in glory.

How might we achieve this? By cherishing the light burning deep within each one of us – and by sharing that light with one another – collectively pooling the light – so that it may grow ever brighter and to give a good account of the hope that propels us forward.

Given the state of the world around us at this Christmas in 2023 – perhaps merry is not the word we want to use but hope-filled might be. Amen!

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It’s all in the waiting

In East Coker, the second in T.S Eliot’s Four Quartets the following lines attract and repel me in equal measure.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith,
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Try as I might, the conundrum of these words registers deep in my gut – where I intuit them sounding a warning. I dislike waiting. The unpalatable truth seems to be that some things are only made possible when we have the patience to wait for them.

The experience of waiting is for many of us today a kind of agony because we are now shaped by a culture in which waiting has been abolished. From download speeds to the endless deluge of things arriving same day- or at most, next day from Amazon our new Godfather in the sky – instantaneous getting gratifies us as our capacity for enjoyment vanishes along with our ability to give attention to anything for more than a few seconds – minutes at most. We become more impatient as our tolerance for waiting erodes. What use have we for the enigma posed by Eliot’s words in a culture where fewer and fewer things are considered worth the inconvenience of having to wait for them?

Yet, Advent is the season of waiting. We curtail its waiting as much as possible. Advent no sooner begins when Christmas overwhelms us. Every year, with Advent Sunday barely in the rear-view mirror, I’m asked by the staff – is it all right to put the Christmas trees up now? Because I’m thinking about the pressure to get things done in time for Christmas I say yes, but don’t switch on the lights until Advent 4. Of-course I realize my desire to preserve the prominence of the visuals of Advent is out of step with the culture – I mean I’ve had the Christmas tree up at home for weeks now.

Eliot used to famously – and to my mind somewhat disingenuously – deny any particular meaning to his words over and beyond the immediacy of their impact on the reader in the moment of reading. Who knows what Eliot intended with these words from East Coker – which incidentally is the name of a picturesque Somerset village? If he is to be believed, then he didn’t intend any particular meaning to be read into these lines – beyond what one critic referred to as his narcissistic gloom.

In a way Eliot has achieved his intention. Left to puzzle over the meaning – his words are still immediately impactful. I receive them deep in my gut as some kind of profound warning about the choices and the inevitable disappointments which usually accompany improbable hope; the folly of misplaced affection for things, causes, and people I love; faith misdirected as a defense against my need for unending denial.

At this point in the 21st century, what is the state of our capacity for hope? We have become increasingly fearful of the future as we see the world unraveling around us. A consequence of the erosion of our capacity for waiting is we no longer think ahead. You see the point of waiting is preparation. Increasingly addicted to short-term thinking – as a society we satisfy the needs of today with short-term patches – seemingly without concern for tomorrow. We become increasingly uneasy at any prospect of a future – preferring to live in a state of self-sustaining denial of a future that becomes more and more a source of fear.

Our capacity to imagine and to dream now seems to be limited to the preservation of the status quo – as with fingers crossed our whistling in the dark becomes deafening. As evidenced by the recent message from COP23 and our general malaise concerning the realities of climate change – our hope is reduced to staving off the eventual reckoning for at least a little bit longer. The majority in the House crows loudly about border security but shows little interest in long term immigration reform. It dilly-dallies over funding for Ukraine oblivious to the future cost of facing down a Russian juggernaut should the defense of Ukraine fail. Politics is now the game of empty posture – of impeachment enquiries without the evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors. That old line about Nero fiddling while Rome burned comes to mind.

Our aversion to waiting focuses our attention exclusively on today so that in crucial areas of our public life we are failing to invest in the future. The future is tomorrow’s problem and we thank God we won’t live to see it. Our generation of decision makers – of world shapers – has become so self-preoccupied that they – and we because we put them there – no longer care about the world our children and their children are likely to inherit.

Proverbs 29:18 is a reminder that Where the vision fails, the people perish.

For us, hope remains a word out of place. It’s a word that conjures risk in a risk averse culture. Whatever hope might be – we console ourselves it’s certainly not practical. In our society hope is a word out of place because it beckons us to dream dreams and see visions of a better tomorrow. It summons us to the audacity of shattering the projections of impoverished imagination limited by utilitarian practicality.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith,
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Whatever Eliot intended or didn’t – his words are impactful – and therefore we are justified in finding our own meaning in them. I hear them as a warning that without the patience to wait – without a tolerance for surviving a delay between wanting and getting – without a capacity to await the objects of our hopes, to with patience nurture our loves, our faith will always be misplaced. When we no longer know how to wait, we deprive ourselves of time to reflect and to prepare. We seem to have forgotten the old adage that all good things come only to those who wait for them.

In the vision of Isaiah chapter 61 we hear God inviting us to dream moving beyond the poverty of only what can be imagined within imaginations limited by a lack of courage to have faith. God is inviting us to bind-up one another’s wounds and cease from wounding one another further. God is longing for us to liberate ourselves from being captive to the short-termism of our current addiction to self-interest and self-protection. God is calling us to rebuild the ruins of our civilization, to inhabit the spaces long forsaken; reminding us that no good end can be achieved through evil action; that no peace can be ensured without its foundation in justice.

Isaiah 61 comes from the prophet – the third of that name – who is addressing the returning exiles now freed by the emancipation edict of Cyrus the Great in 539 BC. The hope embodied in Trito-Isaiah’s words is of a new society in which healing, freedom, compassion, joyful celebration, repentance, and justice will mark the end of exile.

Of course, there is always a discrepancy between hope and reality. The difficulty of the task, the scarcity of resources, the animosity of the surrounding peoples towards the returning exiles engendered a society where the rich diverted the scarce resources away from the reconstruction of the Temple and the repair of the city wall in order to build fine houses for themselves. A culture of oppression of the poor and powerless by the rich and powerful quickly reestablished itself. We read of this painful situation described by the prophet Zechariah, Nehemiah, the governor entrusted with the rebuilding project, and Ezra, the scribe responsible for implementing the religious reforms that were the fruit of the pain of exile.

The hope to which Trito-Isaiah speaks is the hope of a future of expanded inclusion for all of humanity within the promises God had hitherto only made to Israel. The purpose of this vision of future hope was not that it be realized immediately, but that it would reset the compass settings in the direction of its ultimate fulfillment in the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  It was a vision of hope that would come only through the process of waiting.

Hope is not only a dream for a future better than the past. It is that of course. But through the experience of waiting – we prepare – allowing for a future directed hope to resets our direction of travel in the present. Waiting is not a passive state of just hanging around. Waiting is a state in which we are actively engaged in a process of preparing for the future by action in the present. Our present-time action is guided and directed by the vision of that for which we hope.

Future hope comes through waiting – which is a state of actively preparing the conditions for hope’s fulfilment. But the important point here is to note that future hope guides by changing the compass settings - altering the direction of travel in the here and now. Therefore, the quality of the vision of that for which we hope matters. Misdirected hope – Eliot’s hope for the wrong thing – only sets us in a wrong direction of travel through decisions made or not made; opportunities grasped or missed in real time.

Between the realization of future hope and the present time lies the experience of waiting. Waiting is a process of preparing, reflecting and acting in the present – guided by future hope. In waiting we are already being changed by the hope we are still waiting for.

To paraphrase Eliot – true hope, real love, and effective faith come together only in the experience of waiting.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith,
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
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Wounded Expectations

Apologies there is no recording today due to my knocking the recorder off the pulpit in an impassioned action. I trust the text will suffice or you can view the sermon section on our livestream channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0bpvn6sJak

In her sermon last Sunday, Linda+ quoted Anne Lamott: Expectations are resentments waiting to happen – which is quite a statement to make in Advent – the season of expectations. She went on to describe the context into which Trito-Isaiah – or to use the language from Game of Thrones – Isaiah, the third of this name -prophesied to the Jews returning from exile in Babylon in 539 BC.

The book of Isaiah comprises 66 chapters spanning over three centuries – a timespan greatly exceeding the lifetime of the man we know as Proto-Isaiah – whose prophecies populate only the first 39 chapters dated to between 742 and 701 BC. This is a period of considerable political turmoil for Judah – esp. heightened after the catastrophe of the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians in 721. Proto-Isaiah sounds the voice of God’s warning in the face of Hezekiah’s increasingly reckless political calculations as Judah jockeys for position on the faultline between the competing Egyptian and Assyrian empires.

Are expectations simply resentments waiting to happen? Maybe. The story of Israel is a story in which the experience of hope and expectation flowing from deliverance are never enough to avert the next hubristic miscalculation!!

In 587 BC, the armies of Babylon – the successor to the Assyrian Empire – besieged and sacked Jerusalem, destroying the temple, plundering its gold and silver ornaments, creaming off the royal court and intelligentsia into captivity in Babylon – leaving the peasantry to scratch out livelihoods amidst the ruins. This is the period covered by the prophecies of Deutero-Isaiah – the second of this name in chapters 40-55. It’s his voice we hear on the second Sunday in Advent.

Deutero-Isaiah addressing the exiles proclaims: “Comfort, O comfort my people”, says your God. “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins”.

It is this Isaiah – the second of this name – who gives us the heart-wrenching poetry of the four servant songs telling of God’s hope-filled expectation in sending his chosen servant to the nations, only to be horribly abused – a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. The early Christians read the servant songs as prophecies referring to Christ – and these poems are intimately familiar to us as the mainstay texts of the libretto for Handel’s Messiah.

Linda+, last week noted that it’s estimated that fewer than 50,000 of the exiles returned after Cyrus’ emancipation edict in 538 BC. Many remained in Babylon, only trickling back over the next century or so. Even so, not everyone went home – to which the modern-day Jewish communities of Iraq and Iran bear testimony.  

You’ve heard me say time and again that human beings are storied creatures. As individuals, communities, and nations, we construct stories to explain ourselves to ourselves and the world around us. But the intriguing question is what comes first? Do our stories merely articulate an already formed identity, or is our identity constructed by the stories, and in particular, the way we tell these stories about ourselves? Even if you think that identity precedes the story that articulates it, our identity continually evolves as we explore different ways to tell our story.

A key feature of identity stories concerns their vision of home. The Babylonian Exile lasted for 60+ years and as Linda+ noted last week – that’s two generations. …a lot can happen in two generations, including a transformation in the perception of what someone calls home. 

In these days our anxiety grows concerning the potential for the wars in Ukraine and the Holy Land to escalate into regional conflagrations from which we will not escape unscathed. February 22nd, 2022, and October 7th, this year, have changed the trajectory of the international order. We are already feeling these changes esp. as the US becomes further implicated in aiding and abetting Israeli genocide in Gaza. Aiding and abetting is a legal definition encompassed by the international human rights law on genocide. Our government seems to be willing to squander the moral high ground it achieved by our unstinting support for Ukraine, for war crime complicity in Gaza.

The wars in Ukraine and the Holy Land are conflicts that center on cherished stories of identity rooted in a contested homeland. Each side to the conflict has a story of ethnic origins and national identity that justifies their claim to a contested homeland. What really matters however is – is there a capacity by each for the telling of an old story in new ways to accommodate the challenges of a changing context?

Palestinians and Israelis recite their national stories to justify their historical claim to a contested homeland. It seems that no degree of Palestinian resistance punctuated by sporadic terrorist outbursts – no amount of Israeli military backed force of occupation attempting to deny the very existence of Palestinians can move the needle of history separating two peoples with a shared claim to a contested homeland. There can be no future that is not a painful repetition of the past until the futility of the status quo is recognized by both sides – opening the way to a retelling of each national story not as a maximalist demand but as a minimalist statement – laying out the minimum fundamentals that each community requires to move forward together.

History does show that expectations are resentments waiting to happen. National stories of identity and homeland promise dreams of liberation while imposing dilemmas of ensnarement. The potential for becoming ensnared by our identity stories is great when we refuse to recognize the facts on the ground. The facts on the ground are that our foundational stories are never fixed, static, immutable, but always shifting, developing, going astray, and capable of redemption (Bernard Lonergan[1]). Our stories of identity and homeland are always in a dance with changing contexts. Our foundational stories need to be capable of evolving in response to the challenge posed by changing contexts – that is – the changing facts on the ground.  

It’s not important to know that there are three Isaiah’s of that name. It is important to notice how the book records an evolution in Jewish understanding of identity and the location of home. The essence of Israel’s foundation story as a people formed and shaped by a revelation and ongoing encounter with the living God does not change.  What we can see in the book of Isaiah is an evolution in the struggle to rewrite Israel’s identity story in response to the challenges of a changing context – even when the changed context results in a loss of a key component of identity – a homeland. The message of the book of Isaiah is that things change and the story of national identity needs to change to accommodate new facts on the ground. 721, nor 587, nor 539 BC; neither AD 70 is the last word fixing Israel’s story at a certain stage of history. Neither can 1948, nor 1967, be allowed to offer the last word – ensnaring the the identity stories for Palestinians and Israelis in an endless cycle of mortal conflict.

Open the book of Isaiah anywhere in the first 39 chapters and you will find a story of national hubris and political miscalculation. Open it between chapters 40 and 55 and you will find a profound articulation of repentance as the fruit of national suffering and humiliation resulting from loss of homeland. In chapters 55 -66 the element of repentance that had entered to national story during the exile – flowers in an increasingly inclusive and universalist message of salvation, a salvation now no longer exclusive to Israel but with implications for all of humanity.

It’s dangerous as well as painful when nations become ensnared in stories of identity that no longer serve them – that are no longer capable of responding to changing context – that is, the facts on the ground. Ensnarement ensures a future of intercommunal violence as the only sure trajectory. It is with considerable humility that we dare speak about other nations ensnarement in identity stories that no longer serve them at a time when America is struggling with a similar dilemma.

I read a byline on the BBC’s webpage of an organization called Road to Recovery. It is an organization of Israelis who transport mostly children from the occupied West Bank through the many checkpoints separating the two peoples so that the children can receive medical treatment in Israeli hospitals. Yael Noy, one of the founders of this organization and a woman originating from the area of Southern Israel attacked by Hamas on October 7th moved me when she said: I’m fighting to stay moral when both sides are in such terrible pain. I’m fighting to be the same person as I was before. On October 7th I could hardly breath, my heart was broken, and I said I’ll never help people in Gaza again. But after a few days I realized I couldn’t let the atrocities change me.

The power in our stories of identity and homeland lie in our capacity to imagine them taking us into a future different from our past – and like Yael Noy to retell our stories accordingly. Expectations will always involve the possibility of disappointment. But the pain of disappointment won’t kill us whereas the anger of resentment just might.

[1] Quoted by Lagita Ryliskyte in Why the Cross, page17

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Contending Images of Kingship

The first chapter of Genesis God states – Let us make humanity, male and female in our own image.  All well and good. But if we are made in the image of an unseen God, then we can only come to learn something about God through taking a good hard look at ourselves. The tricky question then is, which image of humanity is God reflected in? Maybe all of them?

Like a double-edged sword, the mirroring of divine and human images cuts both ways. We can deduce that God is loving, relational, and collaborative because we also possess these qualities. Yet, we can equally imagine God as jealous, angry with a propensity for violence in pursuit of the ends of power and control because these are also very typical human characteristics. The Bible’s presentation of shifting and changing images of God -may in the end simply be the projections of our own conflicting images of ourselves.

The final Sunday before the start of a liturgical year on Advent Sunday is dedicated to Christ as King – begging the question – what kind of king, what kind of kingship is being imaged here?

Pantocrator is one popular image of Christ as King – omnipotent ruler of all of creation – often pictured on the concave half dome typical of many Orthodox churches. We see Christ as Pantocrator in St Martin’s great West window which is by no mistake a war memorial window. As Pantocrator, Christ is robed in the trappings of political power, the paramount operative in the zero-sum-equation of dominion through domination.

Christus Rex is another traditional image of Christ – an image depicted in the St Martin Chapel reredos. Here Christ is robed not as king but as high priest whose resurrection life springs forward from the cross – which is now firmly behind him in the background.  Both Pantocrator and Christus Rex images sit in uneasy tension with the other enduring image of Christ reigning not from a throne or a gilded cross but dying, nailed to a tree.

The final Sunday of the year is a celebration of the end time as depicted in 1 Corinthians 15 – when the Father will place all things in subjection under his Son who as dutiful Son will complete the Father’s restoration of the divine dream for all of creation.

Our images of power vie with the our images of vulnerability. We project humanity’s competing characteristics into the blank space that is the unseen God. If we are fashioned in the image of an unseen creator, then we can only come to learn something about God through taking a good hard look at ourselves. Thus the tricky question remains, which of our many conflicting self-images do we want Christ as king to reflect?

Interesting is an interesting word! What an interesting historical moment we are living through. Our culture rocks and reels as the tectonic plates shift unpredictably. Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that counteracting forces always come in pairs – as the pendulum of history swings between the order and chaos – between continuity and disruption – each vying for dominance. The theological thrust for designating the final Sunday in the liturgical year to the kingship of Christ crystalizes the waring tensions within us – counteracting forces finding expression in competing images of God.

In 1925 Pope Pius XI proclaimed the feast of Christ the King as an assertion of the Catholic Church’s protest to the rise of fascist and communist authoritarianism. He chose the images of strength in asserting the equally authoritarian power of the Church as the only center of allegiance for Roman Catholics. At a considerable cost to liberty and freedom of thought within the Church, he marshaled the Catholic legions for battle against forces in direct competition with the power of the Church.

The historical context for the origins of the commemoration of Christ the King today sounds a tone that is both timely yet also problematic as once again we are being called to face down a new resurgence of authoritarian forces. Pius XI drew on an old story of one authoritarian system asserting itself against competing, equally authoritarian rivals – strength against strength. For those of us who do not subscribe to the notion of an authoritarian church or even an authoritarian state, Christ the King is a very necessary reminder of the dangers in mistaking power for strength and vulnerability for weakness.

Human beings have rich imaginations – but left to our own devices – as it were- our imaginations tend to recycle familiar image patterns. Consequently, we only tend to recognise what we are already preconditioned to look for.  In the pursuit of the deeper search for the spiritual or soul-filled connection we so long for – the challenge is to allow the boundaries of our imaginations to become more permeable – less strictly policed by our conventional selves – allowing something new to break-in.

An example of the in-breaking of new insight might be that instead of the all too familiar counteracting pairing of strength with vulnerability, continuity with disruption as polar alternatives- we imagine new possibilities in a collaborative pairing of strength through vulnerability – with the forces of disruption seen not as destructive of continuity but as the timely reshaping and revitalizing of continuity over the long term.

We are storied beings – meaning we are only ever the stories we tell about ourselves. Stories are one of the most effective ways through which the unfamiliar breaks-in to disrupt the familiar patterns of recycled imagination. New spiritual insight breaks-in through the medium of stories that change through shock or surprise. Parables are disruptive stories – which like the needle on an old vinyl record jumps tracks as it hits a scratch in the record’s surface – disrupting the familiar melody and jolting us suddenly into a new one.

Matthew’s Jesus parable of the Sheep and the Goats allows new spiritual insight to break-in – disrupting our usual imaginings of Jesus’ kingship. In this parable Jesus presents kingship as service, strength through the embrace of vulnerability – the in-breaking of compassion disrupting the more familiar continuity of hardness of heart.

Matthew presents a picture of the end time when the Son of Man will come in his glory to sit upon his throne. But this is not Jesus clothed in worldly power. What breaks-into our imaginations through this story are the responsibilities of kingship being those of service, empathy, and a concern for the least important, the least powerful, the least able among us. Justice is the hallmark of this image of kingship in which Jesus echoes the prophet Ezekiel in our first lesson who speaks of God as shepherd of the flock seeking out the lost, bringing back the strayed, binding up the injured, strengthening the weak, and feeding them with justice.

We embrace the image of Christ the King because at the heart of the gospels stands the iconic image of Jesus’ royalty, not as one lifted high above us decked in robes of kingly power, but as one who stoops to reach down to join us in the one nailed to a tree. Christ’s kingship – breaks open the strength, or vulnerability, continuity, or disruption polarities with a new and revolutionary image of strength displayed in vulnerability, of disruption as necessary for long term continuity.

At its base the cross was wedged into place by three huge stones hammered into the ground. These are the stones of strength through service, strength in vulnerability, and strength as the fruit of justice. 

Christ’s kingship extends over us to discomfort our search for easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships – so that we may live more deeply from less fearful hearts. Christ’s kingship extends over us to bless us with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of the helpless – so that we may work tirelessly in the cause for freedom and peace with justice. Christ’s kingship extends over us to bless us with tears shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war – so that we may reach out our hand to comfort them by standing together in their pain. Christ’s kingship extends over us to bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a difference in this world – so that we can do what others claim cannot be done. Amen (My paraphrasing of an anonymous Franciscan blessing)

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The Kingdom of Heaven will be as if —

Taken at face value the Parable of the Talents raises several interesting lines of inquiry. Interpretations of the parable’s meaning over time have varied. On the face of it the message seems to commend and reward trustworthiness and punish laziness, with the subtheme of productiveness or lack of running underneath. Jesus makes a somewhat surprising statement at the end of the parable.

Like many of his statements the meaning is enigmatic – it could be this or it might be that. Is Jesus commending the dynamics of the market economy where investment fuels new development with a healthy profit return for the investor? Yet, his final statement for to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have noting, even what they have will be taken away could simply be read as a statement of fact that this seems to be the way things are – leaving us to draw our own moral value conclusions.

Whatever conclusion we draw from this parable it presents us with a baffling question concerning Jesus’ apparent endorsement of lending with interest. I’ll return to this in due course.

For a community of people whose financial security is closely linked to the performance of the stock market – in a parish which in addition to the normal finance committee has a very specialized investment committee whose only task is to manage our stock portfolio – how do we hear this parable and who among the stewards do we identify with? Where do our sympathies lie?

Most of us struggle to hold a fiscal conservatism – at least when it comes to the management of our own money – in an uneasy tension within a more broadly socially liberal worldview. The fiscal conservative in us hears Jesus commending wise investment in the capital markets. For us this is not only a social good in that it sponsors innovation and development but also returns a healthy dividend on our investment. In this respect we fall very much in the camp of the master’s first two stewards. But what do we make of the third steward’s resistance to participating in this system? This parable captures our dilemma – it reassures our fiscal conservative values while challenging us to examine our blind subservience to an economic status quo that promotes inequality – as in- those who have, are given even more.

Taking a deeper dive into this story we find the Parable of the Talents is much more than a story about two stewards who in the successful management of their master’s affairs are amply rewarded for the virtues of trustworthiness and the skills of their financial acumen. The third steward in this story introduces a critical element in his view of his master as a harsh and unjust man. This disturbs the otherwise congratulatory tone pointing up the injustice of one who reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he has not scattered seed. Why, thinks this steward should I collude with this system that bears abundant fruit to a very few at the expense of the many.

We might be tempted to dismiss the third steward as a man with a grievance until we find the master himself, concurring with his steward’s assessment. The master says to this steward, if you knew that I am a man who reaps where I did not sow and gathers where I did not scatter, then you should have been even more diligent with my property for fear of the consequences of my wrath.

The master then takes the talent from the third steward and gives it to the steward who’s shown the greatest financial acumen. Of course, this being a Matthew kingdom story – a feature of which is punishment for those who don’t match up – we aren’t surprised to find the third steward punished by being thrown into outer darkness, where there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth. Let’s think of the first two stewards as fiscally conservative and the third steward a social liberal – challenging the system of inequality. But here’s the kicker. Jesus’ final judgment says for to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have noting, even what they have will be taken away. Is this Jesus justifying the master’s actions? Or is he implying something else here?

The central paradox in this parable centers around Jesus appearing to put aside the prohibition against usury by commending interest bearing investments.

Charging interest on a loan was strictly condemned in Jewish law. The Torah allowed the practice only when the loan was made to non-Jews. The Prophets prohibited the practice outright no matter the circumstance. Therefore, it seems unlikely that Jesus, himself standing in the strict line of the Prophets would have so openly endorsed the practice.

The Church continued the prohibition against usury, prohibiting it outright. Yet, that the Torah allowed Jews to lend to foreigners at interest provided the Church with a very convenient workaround. Neither Christians nor Jews could lend at interest within their communities, but Jews could lend to Christians to meet the growing need for Christian princes and merchants to access additional sources of finance above and beyond what could be raised by taxation. Thus, everyone arrived at a workaround of the usury prohibition – everyone a winner. Deprived of the legal rights of land ownership lending at interest was for the Jews their primary means of wealth generation. A situation that paved the way for the Jews to become the lenders of choice in Medieval Europe – a development with unintended consequences.

The prohibition against usury is an ancient example of social liberalism. Social liberalism believes in the necessity for regulation of economic activity in the interest of preserving social stability. As we know from our own time when for the last 50 years a deregulation of economic activity has resulted in profound loss of trust in traditional civic institutions and the democratic system. The paradox is that those most propelled by grievances against a system that has eroded prosperity and entrenched inequality prefer politicians who fan the heat of their grievances while doing nothing to tackle the underlying root causes of grievance.

For to all who have, more will be given, and they will have abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken seems to be Jesus’ recognition of the facts on the ground in the 1st-century. He would have witnessed the growing number of small landowners and tenant farmers forced off the land by agricultural reforms. Exposed to ballooning debt, left them in the end with less than they began with leading to indentured service -effectively slavery- as their only course of action.

Indentured service is today a practice widespread in countries with poor or no social regulation of market capitalism. As in Jesus day, from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away is the regrettable reality for many.  In the poorer districts of our own cities those living on the economic margins – driven by necessity and hampered by poor creditworthiness to take out payday loans at astonishingly high rates of compound interest lead many into ballooning debt. From those who have nothing, even what they have is taken away – becomes a reality of everyday life for so many in our society.

The circumventions of the prohibition against usury whereby the Jews became the lenders of choice to Christian princes and merchants had unforeseen consequences that only fed the flames of antisemitism – the misdirected expression of populist resentment in search of a scapegoat. Lying just beneath the surface of collective consciousness lies the primal fear of the other in our midst. Contemporary economic resentment and social grievance once again finds expression in breathing new life into old antisemitic tropes – reviving an old scapegoat to magic away our problems. The situation in Israel-Palestine is only throwing gasoline onto homegrown antisemitic embers already smoldering into flame.

At such a time it is our Christian responsibility to express our solidarity with our Jewish friends and neighbors – and we’ll have an opportunity to do so this coming Tuesday at the annual interfaith Thanksgiving Service at Temple-Beth-EL.

Who do we identify with in the parable of the talents? Do we easily see ourselves in the responses of the first two stewards whose actions of prudent risk-taking strike us as familiar, playing the equivalent of the ancient world’s stock market? Can we also see ourselves in relation to the third steward who challenges the socio-economic assumptions that result in one person – to use the agrarian images of the text itself – reaping where they have not sown and gathering where they have not scattered with impunity – afforded by their power of economic privilege but enabled by our systemic collusion? I suspect few of us have the courage to follow the example of the third steward, as much as we might applaud his stand.

If we believe this is a sacred text capable of speaking directly to us as a community, what do we hear in it that either commends or disturbs us? For the kingdom of heaven will be a paradoxical place where seeing things as they really are means not accepting that this is the way things have to be.

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Being Prepared- Question Mark?

Picture: William Blake, The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins 1800

Of the three synoptic gospels – so called because they follow a broad outline or synopsis of Jesus life – Matthew’s is the most Old Testament in feel with its frequent dichotomies of inclusion and exclusion, praise and judgement. Matthew’s depiction of Jesus lacks the urgent and accessible humanity of Mark’s presentation and comes nowhere near to the pastoral and social sensitivity of Luke’s portrayal. Matthew’s Jesus is modelled on the image of a new Moses. Jesus is more elevated and detached – more guru like – a figure above the fray at whose feet the disciples gather to be inaugurated into the Kingdom of God.

Today we are presented by the Lectionary with the parable of the wise and foolish virgins. Already the English translation of the female wedding attendants as virgins sets a particular patriarchal tone – as in virgins are better than non-virgins because they are virginal – meaning unsullied. A better rendering might be bridesmaids – which immediately carries a more neutral – less morally colored inference. The other thing to note is that this parable is unique to Matthew and is one of his Parables of the Kingdom.

Matthew is fond of using the wedding as the metaphor for the kingdom of God. At first sight we can see what he’s getting at. Like a wedding – the kingdom is a place of celebration and merriment. But Matthew’s wedding metaphor carries a starker inclusion -exclusion message. Weddings are celebrations only for those who are invited – or those who accept the invitation. Matthew’s parables of the kingdom all end with a warning – usually of severe punishment for those who are excluded or exclude themselves from the kingdom. Images of outer darkness with much wailing and gnashing of teeth abound. Thus themes of inclusion and exclusion lie close to the heart of Matthew’s kingdom parables.  Reading back into the historical context in which he’s writing, themes of inclusion and exclusion attest to a central struggle between two new movements in Jewish religious life. From the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD – Rabbinic Judaism and the Early Church – both fresh and vital shoots – struggled to emerge from under the ashes of temple-centered Jewish religious life.

Matthew’s tones of harsh punishment for those excluded – echo the struggle to define tribal identity. In tribal societies – like that of ancient Israel – and Matthew’s contested context in the final decades of the 1st-century AD – everyone inside the tribe are friends and those outside it are foe. We should not be surprised to find today similar themes afflicting much of contemporary white, rightwing, evangelical messaging – which has regressed to a tribal identity. For this reason alone, Matthew’s message of judgement often jars upon those of us with a more contemporary, progressive, Christian ear.

At the end of the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids Matthew sternly warns: Keep awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour”.

Of course, no one knows what the future will hold. We develop a tendency to anticipate events based on what we already know about life. Sometimes experience is an accurate guide, yet more often it’s misleading. Facing the uncertainties of the future armed only with a partial – often misremembered recollection of the past – only makes us even more anxious.

We alleviate our anxiety with the illusion of being prepared, and consequently we live a good portion of our lives caught up in a process of attempting to anticipate all eventualities – inducing in us a perpetual and neurotic wakefulness.  No wonder many of us no longer sleep well. The problem with anticipation of an assumed dangerous future is that it encourages risk aversion in life. Life lived circumscribed by past experience may ofer the illusion of a predictable future but it’s a very, very unsatisfying experience!

In our society we reserve our harshest judgments for those who fail the Boy Scout test to be prepared!  How easily the phrases: well, it’s his own fault, or, she has no one to blame but herself, or, its time they really took responsibility for themselves trip lightly off our tongues. To such persons regardless of gender do we not think: oh, what a foolish virgin you’ve been! You see being found unprepared is an American sin.

Matthew’s parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids has three themes worth closer inspection.

The first is the stereotypical treatment of women. There would have been quite a number of invited wedding guests – men as well as women – so why does Matthew focus his treatment on a group of women? He seems to be playing upon the stereotyping of women into two groups – to put into modern parlance the sensible housewife or foolish, if not downright dangerous, women driver.

Motifs of virtue and shame are woven throughout this parable. We are not strangers to this denigration of women – today a prevalent theme underpinning conservative (mostly male) hostility to women owning control of their own bodies as compared with so called virtuous women who accept male expectations for both the control as well as the exploitation of their bodies.

Secondly, Matthew presents a group of people who have no sense of solidarity or a commitment to support and aid one another. Instead, the wise bridesmaids, gloat over their sisters’ foolish lack of preparedness. Likewise motivated by our fears of scarcity we exclaim – of course I want to share my surplus with you, but I can’t because – who knows what the future may bring – I might need all of it.

The lamp oil is a symbol for scarcity –reinforcing our prevalent scarcity worldview in which there is only so much to go around.  In a culture of scarcity, you keep what you have by not sharing it with others. Within a worldview that sees resources as limited, the pie is only so big – people of necessity are divided into the haves and the have-nots. At St. Martin’s like the wise bridesmaids there is no mistaking that we are among the haves when the world is viewed from the perspective of scarcity.

This past year we’ve put the resources of our successful capital campaign to good use – by which I mean uses over and beyond the perpetual drain on resources that maintaining this historic church requires of us. This past year we’ve been especially mindful of our responsibility to share what we have with others who can benefit from our support. I happen to believe that through being generous we become the net beneficiaries of our own generosity. Generous action reminds us of our ultimate dependency upon divine providence. Unlike the wise bridesmaids we discover again and again that only when our giving flows generously from our commitment to one another do we encounter the depths of our gratitude for God’s gracious providential love towards us.

In a season of stewardship renewal, we are well reminded that money is like water. Water sustains life only when it is allowed to flow freely. When dammed up it becomes stagnant – poisoning the ground around it.

Weddings are one metaphor of the kingdom. Baptism is another. In a moment we will welcome a new member through baptism into the fellowship of the kingdom of God as embodied in our St. Martin’s community. Baptism reminds us that preparedness and self-sufficiency do not qualify us for entry to the kingdom. Willingness to respond to the invitation of grace is all that is required. Will not Christ welcome us his church and bride – regardless of our state of un-preparedness? For whom can be prepared for such a life changing encounter.

Matthew’s injunction to stay awake is an odd conclusion. This isn’t a parable about staying awake – after all, all the bridesmaids fell asleep. Matthew’s gripe is that half of them were found unprepared for the grooms return. In this there is an aspersion of something shameful. What is their shame? It’s the shame of failing to be self-sufficient. We all know that failure to be self-sufficient is the real American sin. A sin to us – but not to Jesus.

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Martin: Man for Our Time

Imagine we’ve come to the movies to watch the latest new Marvel epic suitably named AD 406. The curtain rises on the year 406 when in an unusually severe winter in which the Rhine has frozen solid, we watch in that peculiar ecstasy of pure horror the battle-hardened barbarian hordes stream across the frozen river into the civilized world of Roman Gaul.

The Rhine River forming a natural barrier dividing Latin and Germanic cultures has a long history that stretches down well into the 20th-century. The Rhine, winding in many places through its steep-sided valley formed a natural barrier – a boundary between civilization and the wilderness of the barbarian lands. Barbarian – a name the Graeco-Romans gave to all who lived beyond the geographic and cultural reach of their civilization. The barbarians represented the epitome of the psychological other. We need no further evidence today of how the psychological other functions to embody the terror of difference within individual and collective consciousness.

Vandal is a word that has made its way into the English language as the very symbol of destructive otherness. In his book on Martin of Tours, Christopher Donaldson describes how the Vandals, Alans, and Suevi, swarmed into Roman Gaul in complete disregard for their own loss of life. It was estimated that at least 20,000 Vandals alone lost their lives in the river crossing. Yet they still pressed on – forced by the relentless pressure of mouths to be fed and need for land. The great horde swept on into Roman Europe and North Africa leaving behind them a trail of devastation and confusion. In what had been the civilized and fertile countryside of Roman Gaul the only vestiges that remained were the giant buildings, aqueducts, and monuments of Roman civilization – things that a wattle and daub society had neither use nor imagination for.

On the South Bank of the River Loire, at a place called Marmoutier about 3 miles downstream from the city of Tours, there was a large grassy plain lying between the river and a line of forbidding grey cliffs rising for 100 feet or so. With trees clinging precariously to their face, the cliffs were honeycombed with caves, for all the world giving much the same appearance as the holes of sand-martin nests in the side of a disused quarry. And in the year AD 393 all the caves were inhabited and the grassy plain below was covered with the rough wooden shacks of a great camp of spiritual refugees, numbering in all some 2,000 men – a smaller group of women having formed their own community within the walls of the neighboring city of Tours. Working from  contemporary eye witness sources, Donaldson tells us that the whole concourse was wrapped in a deep silence from morning until evening, punctuated only by the occasional singing of psalms or hymns, and the low voices of those who were reading the scriptures aloud.

The reason for this great gathering of men, many of them the sons of the Roman Gaul nobility, lay not only in the general urge to withdraw from the responsibilities of public service in a time of civic institutional breakdown, but also in the attraction of the unconventional personality of Martin, the holy man and Bishop of Tours. His appearance at the age of 77 belied the extraordinary depth and range of his character. For underneath the deliberately unkempt hair, the pallid emaciated features, and the rough surge slave’s robe in which he was dressed, lay a personality that at one moment recalls for us the image of a Mahatma Gandhi, quickly morphing into that of a visionary William Blake, before yet again emerging into a man forged by his years of discipline in the Roman Army – a military man of commanding presence.

Martin was born in AD 316 into a high-ranking, but non aristocratic Roman military family in what is now modern-day Hungary. His father was a military tribune in the Imperial Guard – then stationed on that other great river frontier separating the civilized and barbarian worlds – the river Danube. His parents were staunch pagans opposed to the growing influence of Christianity – and so they named their son Martin after Mars the god of farm and battle, in the hope he would grow up to become a champion for the restoration of the old order.

In AD 312, with the proclamation of Constantine as the new emperor, the last great period of intense persecution of Christians under the emperor Diocletian ended. Following Constantine’s conversion to Christ – a mere four years before Martin’s birth in 316 – the Church had begun its rapid expansion. Although already an extensive and growing influence, the most significant result of Constantine’s conversion was the incorporation of the bishops into the Roman Civil Service with the rank and more importantly for many, the stipend of a magistrate.

Yet, despite the new imperial patronage, a deeper and simpler reason lay behind Christianity’s rapid growth. Christianity offered to ordinary men and women fed up with the status quo an explanation and philosophy for living that was satisfying. Unlike enforced imperial obligation the Church offered a supportive and voluntary style of community life with an educational system based on the scriptures that met people’s intellectual and emotional needs. Despite strong parental hostility, Martin could not avoid being attracted from around the age of ten to this magnetic vision of a new way of being human with its practice of a more satisfying way of life.

To cut a long story short, by the time Martin reached the age of 15, his father – increasingly fearful for his son’s development into Roman manhood, arranged for him to be press-ganged (kidnapped) into the army. Martin was to spend the next 25 years of his life in conscripted military service. Army service did succeed in making a man of Martin – but not in the way his father may have envisioned.

Martin was far from being just another plebeian conscript. He enjoyed the privileges of being a Tribunes’ son. Interestingly, Martin found his way into the Army medical corp. As a medical officer, he would have been responsible not only for the surgical treatment of soldiers in the field but for their social and emotional welfare within garrison life. Thus, Martin found a strong synchronicity between this care for his men and his developing sense of what it meant to live as a Christian. For he showed an unusual compassion for the poor whom he would have encountered hanging around the edges of his garrison town of Amiens. This sensitivity – in another military officer decried as weakness – would have found acceptance or at least toleration among his peers as an attitude characteristic of a healer.

Martin’s concern for the poor is captured in the famous incident of his encounter with a beggar at the city gates – poetically depicted in our great St Martin window. In the window we see Martin cutting his cloak in half and placing one half around the beggar’s shoulders. Incidentally a soldier’s cloak was a garment of joint ownership. The half he gave to the beggar would have been the half he owned. The half he retained was army property – and not his to give away. That night he had a vision of Christ, clothed in half his cloak saying for as you have done unto the least – you have done unto me.

Martin died in AD 397 – a mere 9 years before the catastrophic collapse of the Roman Legions along the Rhine wall in 406. While he didn’t live to see this catastrophe, he nevertheless lived in the preceding decades during which anyone with any foresight might have foreseen this eventuality. For during the preceding decades leading to the curtain rise on the 5th-century, sensitive and intelligent people had known that the end of the centuries of stable government and cultural achievement was fast approaching. The signs were all around them.

Inflation had been steadily mounting for a century or more and had become so out of control that many were beginning to return once more to the simpler system of barter. Ordinary people knew that the wealthy were seeking every possible way of avoiding taxes and turning their backs on the virtues and responsibilities of public service which had become an increasingly unsavory and dangerous occupation. From time to time the army would attempt to raise up a new emperor – someone whose value had been proved in the field – to take control of the empire and make Rome great again. But things had gone too far for such simple solutions. In the Western half of the Empire the problems lay deeper than a return to the efficient management of the economy and the revival of a spirit of public service. Rather it was a complex exhaustion of morale in the inner minds and spirits of men and women throughout the West – where many increasingly feared that the civilization of Rome had run its course.

Donaldson notes that if there was any hope for the future of Western Civilization, it was hard to see it lying in the hands of the governing classes. Rather the future had come to rest in a group of men and women who had completely withdrawn from the civilized world – men and women who were quite careless of whether it sank or swam.

Martin is a transitional figure spanning the inflection point at the turn of the 4th & 5th-centuries. He remained hugely influential across the whole of Western Europe as far north as Scotland. When Augustine arrived at Canterbury 200 years late he found the ruins of a Roman Christian church dedicated to St Martin. St Martin’s Canterbury still stand today dwarfed alongside the great Cathedral. A mystic revered by the Druids for his love of nature in preference for the highly urban life of most Christian bishops. A pastor and a healer of souls who attracted the brightest and the best of a generation disillusioned by the degeneration of civic society. A reluctant and yet more than able administrator bishop – under whose leadership a disciplined structure of administration developed relatively free of the growing corruption afflicting the more worldly among his fellow bishops – increasingly corrupted by their magistrate’s privileges and state stipend.

Martin as a transitional figure is an avatar for us today. For we also are living at a similar inflection point to that of the late 4th and early 5th centuries – a time when the post-Enlightenment spirit of progress, order and the global peace – the product of Pax Americana -seems increasingly spent. Like the men and women of the age into which Martin was born, disillusionment and loss of hope mark the pervading zeitgeist of our age.

Yet there’s a key distinction between the inflection point of the 4th-5th centuries from that of the 20th-21st. As the 5th-century unfolded – despite the devastations brought about by the first wave of barbarian incursions and the collapse of the Pax Romana – invasion also brought an infusion of energy and vitality – forging a new spirit in Western Civilization – a spirit now channeled and guided by the growing institutions of a vital and energetic Christian Church. For Martin and his church stood at the beginning of something new – whereas we and our Church today feel increasingly as if we stand at the end of something old.

I believe that the jury’s still out on the accuracy of such a premonition, real though the experience maybe. As we navigate our way forward in a time of civic challenge at home and challenges to peace and democracy abroad, we might pay closer attention to the movement of the Spirit of the God of unchangeable and yet also everchanging power. God who empowers the work of restoring the world through the raising up of things which have been cast down and inviting us to collaborate in the renewal of things that have grown old.

Embroiled in this process as we are – of finding the confidence as Christians to entrust ourselves to the hope that is within us as we navigate our way forward in challenging times – we could ask for no better guide than Martin, our patron – whose spirit is infusing those who bear his name to become increasingly molded into his likeness.

What is that likeness we might ask? It’s the likeness of a man of courageous hope, deep humility before the divine mystery, a man of resolute faith infused with the gentleness of gratitude. We can only pray and work hard to ensure that gratitude is our well spring – gushing forth through lives marked by Martin’s spirit of compassionate generosity.

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