In the Totem’s Shadow

On the fourth Sunday in Lent in year two of the Lectionary we encounter the very curious incident recorded in the book of Numbers  21:4-9. There’s a crisis unfolding among the Israelites. It seems that in response to their endless grumbling, God – whose patience seems to have been wearing thin -expresses his anger by sending an infestation of venomous snakes into their camp – resulting in many deaths from snakebite.

Seeing the distress and devastation, God relents – even possibly repents –  and instructs Moses to cast a serpent image in bronze and raise it up at the heart of the camp. Anyone with a snakebite has only to look up at the image to be healed and live. This story raises a key awkward question – it seems to be an infringement of the second commandment against casting graven images. But maybe it’s ok – it seems that God is allowed to contradict godself.

More helpfully, however, we might call Numbers 21:4-9 a story of spiritual homeopathy which sheds light on the processes underlying the human experience of healing.

Western, allopathic medicine effects a cure by introducing a substance that has been found to combat the condition. We are all immensely grateful for antibiotics.

Homeopathy treats conditions by introducing small amounts of the element, which in larger amounts is the cause of the condition – thus triggering the body’s defenses. Many Western medical practitioners remain skeptical of the homeopathic philosophy, yet aren’t we all deeply grateful for vaccines. Do not vaccines in contrast to antibiotics operate according to the homeopathic principle?

The toxin that kills is transformed into the agent that heals.

Numbers 21 is a story of totem power which triggers change through the power of a spiritual perception. A totem is a human-made or naturally occurring object – imbued with a spiritual significance capable of transforming perception.

The mention of a totem brings back memories for me. Christchurch, the N.Z. city in which I grew up is the logistics and personnel hub serving the US Antarctic Expedition Program. At the entrance to the base situated next to Christchurch airport stands a tall wooden totem pole – a gift from the Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest to another Pacific people on the opposite side of a common Ocean. The American First Nations peoples of the Northwest perceive in the totem pole the spiritual power of their history and identity. In the perception of the Israelites, the bronze serpent – a symbol of death – became imbued with the spiritual perception of their healing.

There’s an old saying – perception is nine-tenths of reality. Healing is a mysterious process because it’s impossible to trace the linkages between cause and effect – which seems an anathema for the scientific mind. Yet, despite the inability to map the links of cause and effect – the effect produced in homeopathic healing is nevertheless real.

The bronze serpent is imbued with a totem spiritual significance. It is no mere coincidence that the caduceus – the double or sometimes single-headed serpent coiled around the Rod of Asclepius – a totem in Greek mythology – has become the symbol of the healing profession. Healing profession – a name that reveals the older homeopathic foundations for what today has become Western Medicine’s thorough allopathic discipline.

In the third chapter of the gospel according to John – Jesus in his conversation with a prominent Pharisee called Nicodemus evokes Numbers 21: 

Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

Jesus’ mission will require him likewise to be lifted up over the world so that anyone who looks at him upon the cross will experience a transformation of death into life.

As Christians, whether we are consciously aware of it or not – we stand in the shadow of the cross. We imbue the cross with a spiritual significance – a perception that directly shapes our experience of reality. For us, the cross carries totem power.

To use a slightly different metaphor the cross becomes the lens through which our perception of the world comes into focus. Gazing on the cross means to stand in its shadow. Within its shadow, we perceive our worldview, which then dictates actions that shape and reshape the nature of our experience of reality. Remember, perception is nine-tenths of reality.

The shadow cast by the cross – brings into sharper focus the contours of our own shadow side – our hatreds, prejudices, and fears; our sorrows and loves – esp. the loves of a disordered, narcissistic, and selfish variety – all our afflictions that we try to conceal from scrutiny. Here, with greater clarity, we note the aspects of self we long to change, the aspects of self we tenaciously resist changing, and those aspects of personality we are powerless on our own to change.

Yet, none of this matters in an ultimate sense for to stand in the shadow of the cross is to be healed despite ourselves. For on the cross, God so loved the world. In other words, God changed the world through the power of self-sacrificial love.

The totem power of the cross is love. The love demonstrated on the cross is not a love that condemns but a love that challenges, and confronts; confirms, and strengthens. Love heals.

Standing in the shadow of the cross the late Irish poet John O’Donohue in his poem A Morning Offering – wrote of: minds come alive to the invisible geography that invites us to new frontiers, to break the dead shell of yesterdays, to risk being disturbed and changed.

Standing in the shadow of the cross the toxins of shame, guilt, pain, and failure become transformed through love’s action – shaping our perceptions and guiding our actions in the world.

God said to Moses, make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live. Standing in the shadow of the cross death we are challenged to change by an experience of the source of new life – or as O’Donohue so eloquently puts it: to do at last what we came here for and waste our heart on fear no more.

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Refracted Hope

It’s Friday morning and after a hectic week I finally turn my thoughts to today’s readings for the second Sunday in Lent. Bereft of helpful insights – I scratch my heard as I read that Jesus tells us – his modern-day disciples – to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him – that the cost of saving our lives lies in our willingness to risk losing them?

Nightly images numb me further into acquiescence and resignation as I watch in real time as the civilian population of Gaza is bombed into a stone age wasteland of wretchedness beyond belief.

News from Oklahoma of a young trans person’s death as a result of a bathroom incident between fellow students in a school – further evidences the unleashing of politically sanctioned persecution of trans and nonbinary persons in large parts of this country.

In States governed by legislatures no longer committed to the basic principles of representative democracy – where power is maintained through gerrymandered electorates – legislatures pursue their anti-liberal agendas – and the courts continue to hand down insane rulings that impose increasingly cruel and unusual punishments that further restrict the basic civic freedoms to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the Constitution. We’ve reached the ludicrous situation where the courts defend freedom of speech protections that allow the right to incite hatred but strictly policing student hairstyles.

I hear a voice in my head cautioning me to stop it! Stop what? Well stop funneling down the rabbit hole of rage and despair. Forty years of experience reminds me that this is no good way to begin a sermon reflection.

At the root of my despair is my rage that the world is not fair, that wrongs seem seldom righted. Everywhere I look the appearance of things leads me to conclude that despite my frequent protests to the contrary, might is often right and wealth is the primary influence on power. It’s into this slough of despond I hear Jesus speaking to Simon Peter: Get thee behind me Satan. The words of the King James Authorized Version – a translation I hardly ever read – remain indelibly imprinted on my mind as is probably true for most English-speaking Christians.

To fully appreciate the searing impact of Mark’s account of the encounter between Jesus and Simon Peter we need to go back to verse 27 of chapter 8 where Mark reports Jesus on his way to Caesarea Philippi. Along the way he asks his disciples what are people were saying about him? Reporting the general gossip – the disciples tell him: Well Rabbi, some say this, and some say that. To which Jesus asks: But you – who do you say I am? His question provokes Simon Peter to declare: We know who you are, you are the Messiah! But giving the correct answer doesn’t necessarily mean understanding what that answer means.

Today’s text picks up at verse 31 with: Then he began to teach them —. But what Jesus teaches them is not what they want to hear. Simon Peter – with his Jewish conditioned misunderstanding of messiahship confronts Jesus. Taking him aside he rebukes Jesus with what I imagine probably went like this:

What on earth are you talking about, Jesus. What nonsense are you spouting about suffering and death. You are the Messiah – the great king sent by God to get us out of this mess of Roman occupation and restore us to our status of a chosen nation. So, let’s hear no more of this defeatist nonsense about suffering and death. Can’t you see the undermining effect on our morale when you speak like this?

Jesus fixes Simon with a steely gaze and with a heart stopping authority commands: Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.

This is a hard saying. Trapped within our human perspective we look out at the appearance of things – unable to see beyond our limited perceptions to the larger picture. So much of the divine action remains hidden from our view.

Can we with any honesty speak in a community like ours about Jesus’ prediction of suffering and death? Like Simon Peter, suffering and death as the cost of discipleship are not on our agenda – no matter how darkly at times we may view events in the world around us. Unlike Peter we don’t even have the courage to protest the point. We just tune out – preferring to think the choice is ours whether to follow Jesus or not. We may choose to follow Jesus, but always on our own terms – at little cost to ourselves.

Like Simon Peter and the Disciples we want to filter Jesus’ messiahship through the prism of our own desires and fears – the things of our human priorities.

Prisms. Now here’s an interesting fact. The thing about prisms is that they don’t filter light – they refract it. White light enters as a beam to become refracted into the seven-color constituents of the spectrum. Our desires and fears – our human priorities enter the prism of Jesus’ messiahship as a tight beam of white light and emerge refracted to reveal the divine priorities in a multi-stranded, Kodachrome cone of ever-widening dispersion.

An event of ultimate significance occurred this week – shedding some light on this incident in Mark. I refer to the death in suspicious circumstances of Alexei Navalny -the courageous Russian dissident and now martyr for the democratic cause. Many of us still find it incomprehensible that he chose to return to Russia knowing the fate that awaited him. It seems that in this action, with his mind no longer focused on his own concerns – Navalny understood the cost of discipleship as inseparable from fidelity to the path of discipleship – which for him was the cause of democratic freedoms.

I am not in any way conflating Alexei Navalny with Jesus. I don’t know whether Navalny was a Christian believer or not. My point is – Navalny emulates Jesus in action. They both knew that being faithful to their cause would cost them nothing less than their life. They both wielded the most powerful weapon in the confrontation with evil – that of nonviolent resistance.

Like Pontius Pilate before him, as the representative of empire, Vladimir Putin understands well the necessity of killing the leader of a movement for nonviolent resistance. Like Pilate and countless other brutes of history before him – Putin fails to understand that non-violence is an idea that only strengthened in killing its leading proponents. As with Jesus, the concentrated white light of Alexei Navalny’s life has now been refracted through the prism of his death into a broad Kodachrome spectrum of ever widening hope. But hope comes at a cost and when the cost is paid – hope strengthens.

What will it take for us to discover what the disciples eventually came to understand – that the fruit of discipleship is inseparable from its cost?

The cost of discipleship is paid in the currency of hope’s confrontation with evil. What will discipleship cost us? This is Jesus’ 21st century discipleship question to which the life and death of Alexei Navalny reveals one possible answer.

Discipleship is unlikely to cost us our lives. But it does require our death to self – a death to our self-preoccupation – a dying to our exclusive focus on merely human things that lead us to despair and acquiescence to helplessness.

As we enter upon the journey of another Lent – a season in which we are called to face-down the temptation to acquiesce in the face of the evil that holds such sway in the world around us. Lent is a season when the white light of despair is refracted through the prism of discipleship into the broad color spectrum of faith, courage, and love – to name but three stands in the spectrum of hope. But be under no illusion – the path of discipleship is a costly one – as Navalny’s death confirms. And the encounter between Peter and Jesus in Mark 8 is where for us the journey of discipleship begins. It’s from here we reset our compass needle towards the resurrection.

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Love’s Meat

In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son, with you, I am well pleased.” Mark 1:9-15

And so, this is how it begins in Mark. In seven concise verses in his first chapter Mark covers the period from Jesus’ baptism by John to the momentous event of John’s arrest – a sequence that Matthew takes four chapters to relate. Similarly, Mark covers Jesus’ time in the wilderness in two sentences – And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angles waited on him. Admittedly, reporting in much greater detail, nevertheless Matthew’s account of Jesus in the wilderness takes him eleven long verses to relate.

Mark is not only concise but he punctuates his accounts with dramatic images. For him at Jesus baptism, the heavens are torn apart – schizomai is the Greek word he uses – meaning to rip, to tear apart in a way that cannot be put back together again. Compare this to Matthew and Luke’s milk toast image of the heavens merely opening – of clouds lazily parting.

Mark reports that at Jesus’ baptism the voice from heaven thunders you are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased. Note here God’s direct address to Jesus – you– God declares – leading later commentators to wonder is Mark inferring that it’s only Jesus who hears God’s voice? By contrast, in Matthew and Luke, the curtain of heaven gently opens and the voice from above is of God addressing the bystanders – declaring to them that this this is my Son, the Beloved in whom I am well pleased. And following the baptism Mark tells us that immediately, the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness. Just as schizomai carries the strong meaning of tearing irreparably apart so here, Mark’s use of the Greek ekballei – as in the Spirit expelled Jesus into the wilderness conveying a strongly energetic action. Compare this striking image with Matthew and Luke’s use of anechthe – meaning to lead up, to bring up – and one gets the impression of Jesus, leisurely strolling at the Spirit’s direction into the wilderness – a much more sedate movement.

And so, it is with Mark. There’s no long and colorful description of Jesus’ birth as in Matthew and Luke. With Mark, Jesus emerges from obscurity onto the scene as a fully grown man – not born into his Sonship but adopted into it at baptism.  We shouldn’t miss the implication in Mark – as with Jesus so with us – like him we too are adopted by God through baptism.

It’s customary on the first Sunday in Lent for the preacher to focus on Jesus’ time of wilderness testing – after all isn’t that what Lent is supposed to be about for us – a time of testing -facing temptation and enduring privation? Yet, my attention is drawn to Mark’s assertion that before any testing takes place God proclaims Jesus as the Beloved. Being loved – now here’s a novel way to frame a theme for Lent.

Accepting unconditional love – love without strings – is in my experience a much harder thing to bear than having to pass the tests of temptation. I know objectively, that I am loved by God because I tend to believe what I am told – esp. if the Gospels are the vehicle for conveying this truth to me. Yet, knowing is one thing – actually experiencing is quite another. Do I experience myself being loved by God? My answer is mixed and equivocal – it’s yes but mostly, no.

For instance, I know that God loves me because looking back on my life I can see the loving hand of God guiding, sustaining, and blessing me through the ups and downs. Projecting forwards on the basis of past experience I know objectively, that God will continue to love me no matter what I do.  Yet, in the present moment, I often feel very detached from the direct experience of God’s love. I know I am loved but do I feel the love? I find that my shame interferes with the enjoyment of being unconditionally loved.

The real challenge of my spiritual journey has been – and remains – to experience the reality that God loves me with an unconditional love in the present moment. This requires me to see the unconditionality of God’s love through the thick veil of my shame. My spiritual struggle is not to be good – although I always believe I can do better than I’ve done. My spiritual struggle is to allow myself to be loved despite my shame.

The question boils down to how can I allow myself to experience God’s no-strings-attached-love when I feel the way I do – mired in my secret shame? My inability to love God as much as I feel I should reveals some pretty faulty logic here which goes – if I loved God more – I could reciprocate more – then might I not feel more of God’s love. In this context reciprocity is such a ridiculous notion. But the main source of my shame lies in my fear of being loved by God. Despite my longing to feel God’s love of me, the sorry truth is shame becomes a convenient excuse for avoiding – shying away from being loved. Shame is the disguise my fear adopts.

Being the one who does the loving – no matter how imperfectly – is easier than being the one who is loved – warts and all. My shame is actually, not that I am unworthy of God’s love – but that I am afraid of it. You see, while the lover chooses to love – the beloved has no control over being loved. The real source of my shame lies not in unworthiness but in the fear of being loved unconditionally. Being loved unconditionally exposes my fear of being the one who is no longer in control.

In his poem Love III, George Herbert describes our anguished experience of shying away from being loved. In response to God’s invitation to sit down and experience love, Herbert replies: I, the unkind the ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee. Thank you, God, but no thank you! To be beloved of God is too intrusive and potentially demanding, too intimate an experience. I resonate with Herbert. Being loved exposes me to my shame – I am unworthy. But more to the point it exposes me to my vulnerability and fear of losing control. The lover chooses to love. But the beloved has no control over being loved. Between humility and humiliation – there lies the finest of lines.

We are in a continual negotiation around the shame of loving and being loved. God is no respecter of comfort zones. As the lover, God pursues us and has no intention of allowing us to set the comfort level for intimacy.

In his poem Love III, George Herbert in describing the struggle with fear and shame – our urgent need to shy away from surrendering to being loved – maps the process of surrender. Protesting his fear he cries out: I, the unkind the ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee. Yet, Love outmaneuvers him by reminding him he need have no such fear:  Love takes my hand and smiling did reply, ‘Who made the eyes but I?’

But the struggle is not yet over. For Herbert complains: Truth Lord, but I have marred them, let my shame go where it doth deserve. And here Love delivers the suckerpunch for any good believing Calvinist. Love gently reminds him: And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

Cowered and cornered, Herbert feints surrender to Love’s insistence with:  Ah, my dear, then I will serve. He feints surrender with a ruse. As with the one who loves – the one who serves paradoxically maintains control. But Love is not fooled by Herbert’s feint of humility. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat. With nowhere else to hide, Herbert surrenders – abandons all pretence of having the power of choice. Becoming the one who is served – the one who surrenders to being loved -he whispers: So I did sit and eat. 

In the end, the only choice we really have is to surrender in the face of God’s relentless pursuit to love us. I can speak about my struggle to surrender to being loved by God because I’m not alone in this. We all know that when it comes to God’s love, it is not about earning and deserving but believing and receiving. Yet, so much of our identity is predicated on being worthy – which is just a way of dressing up the fact that we are afraid to lose control. If we are deserving of God’s love, we tell ourselves, it can only be to the extent of having somehow, earned it. In our desire to reciprocate we evade the humiliation of being the undeserving party.

The truth is we are be-loved. We are all be-loved because God’s love is gifted to us without strings. Surrender to being loved is the only healthy response we can choose to make.

Lent’s call to a deeper self-reflection allows us to see more clearly into our struggle to be the ones who must surrender to love. In our resistance we want to use shame to distance ourselves from the experience of being loved by God. In the struggle to surrender to love we turn to Lent’s reminder of the disciplines of worship, prayer, and self-denial – the latter having little to do with privation and more to do with having the courage to listen beyond the cacophony of our self-preoccupations.

Mark ends his first chapter with Jesus returning from his time of preparation in the wilderness to find John has been arrested. The time he says is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe the good news! Lent reminds us that the only time is now -that there’s no time to lose!

We will be familiar with Love III as part of a series of metaphysical poems written by the 17th-century Anglican divine, George Herbert. Less familiar to some may be that in 1911, the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams took Herbert’s poems – setting them as his Five Mystical Songs within which the poem Love III is the third in sequence. 

Love (III)
George Herbert - 1593-1633
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
            Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
            From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
            If I lacked anything.
"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here":
            Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
            I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
            "Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
            Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
            "My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
            So I did sit and eat.
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Self-Transcendence

At the heart of the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountaintop lies an experience of a transcendent reality normally hidden from ordinary perception. The disciples are shown Jesus irradiated with the glory of the divine nature flowing through him.

I want us to focus less on the nature of Jesus’ experience of transcendence – after all we get the message it’s meant to convey. The event of the transfiguration of Jesus is also a profound experience for the disciples. We see them struggling with an experience of self-transcendence. One moment they are infused with a glimpse of something that literally blows their minds. For a moment they are transported beyond the boundaries of normal imagination before falling back again into their self-preoccupation – expressed in their desire to capture and hold onto the experience.

Transcendence – a reality beyond rational perception – now here’s a tricky subject for the post-modern-21st-century imagination. We are prisoners of rationality that rejects the possibilities of transcendence. We have become mired in immanence -a state of ordinary perception limited to sensory experience. We find ourselves struggling with the cognitive dissonance of no longer believing in a transcendent reality beyond ordinary perception while desperately, hungering for it. We search frantically believing mistakenly, that we will find it through our pursuit of an ever-elusive state of happiness.

Margaret Wheatley highlights our predicament in contrasting the emotional experiences of happiness with those of joy and sorrow. In writing of joy as an experience of connection, communion, presence, and grace within the immanence – the ordinariness of our daily experience – she offers what I think is the clearest contemporary definition of self-transcendent experience.

In contrasting joy and sorrow with happiness – she notes how in both moments of joy and sorrow we find the qualities of self-transcendence – an encounter with a deeper and more expansive connection, communion, presence, and grace within the immanence of the boundaries of our daily lives.

She notes that joy and sadness are both states that embrace us with an energy that take us beyond a sense of our solitary selves. Whether laughing or crying – it doesn’t matter. Faced with a birth, a wedding, an anniversary – we are captivated by joy. In the face of a death, a disaster, a tragedy of personal or epic proportions, sorrow and sadness capture us as we suffer with, console, and love one another. Joy and sorrow are both experiences of self-transcendence –experiences not to be found in our pursuit of happiness.

It’s one of life’s great paradoxes that we crave self-transcendence through our pursuit of happiness which only further estranges us from the very transcendent experiences we crave. The pursuit of happiness rather than leading us to self-transcendence entraps us in an all-consuming preoccupation with ourselves.

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor – to my mind one of the towering figures in contemporary philosophy – contrasts the year 1500 when it was impossible not to believe in God with the impossibility of such belief for many today. He charts the route of travel as the culture of the West moved from the impossibility of unbelief to the impossibility of belief.

In the long 400-year emergence of the secular Western mindset, Taylor notes the gradual transition from the age of enchantment to the age of disenchantment. By disenchantment he has in mind a state in which we experience our loss of connection to transcendent experience – that which Wheatley defines for the modern imagination as connection, communion, presence, and grace within the ordinariness of our daily lives.

When our connection to the transcendent is lost, all we are left with is our solitary selves – isolated beings center stage – as it were – a place of great loneliness and disenchantment.

Drawing on Taylor’s distinction between enchantment and disenchantment helps us to view the Biblical narratives as the product of an enchantment mindset. To the enchantment imagination, God is often frighteningly present in the physical structures of the material world. Divine power not only inhabits objects and places, but infiltrates and disturbs the relational spaces between us. The enchantment mindset understands God’s presence in spatial terms of up and down, in and out. Thus, God inhabits sacred mountaintops, fills sacred spaces.

On the mountaintop Peter, James, and John experience an epiphany of Jesus clothed in his divinity as the Christ. This is a fleeting experience, no sooner glimpsed than it is gone – forever eluding their desire to capture and contain it. Then the disciples must negotiate the even more perilous path down the mountain carrying an experience about which they cannot speak. They must carry the remembrance of what they have seen and yet, at the same time, practice a kind of forgetting.

As they were coming down the mountain Jesus ordered them, “tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead”.

It seems that spiritual peak experience is only a means to, and not an end in itself. Events on the Mount of the Transfiguration are the midpoint – a final epiphany or revealing before taking the long journey towards the culmination of Jesus’ ministry.

Unlike our ancestors we no longer look for God – or the presence of the divine – in material space-time. The acceptance by past generations, whose enchanted expectations of encountering God in material objects and places is now firmly rejected by most of us as supernaturalism. Nevertheless, we remain unsettled. The question for us today is not does a separate spiritual dimension still exist – but where and how is it accessible to our modern disenchantment minds?

Spatial references to up and down don’t any longer work in the same way for us. For us, God no longer inhabits the mountaintop. Heaven is no longer imagined as up there, or hell being down there. When Martin Luther King Jr. said he’d been to the mountaintop, no one assumed he had physically climbed a mountain. The mountaintop now becomes the metaphor for the possibility of a different order of experience, one that challenges our resignation to the absence of the spiritual in lives dominated by preoccupation with the self. We may no longer find God in and through the material world in quite the same way as our Biblical and generational ancestors did, yet, despite this – our desire for God remains.

The paradox is that while we reject enchantment as superstition and supernaturalism, no generation craves with a greater intensity a desire for self-transcendence than we do. Magical realism abounds in popular literature. Heroic superhero sagas dominate Hollywood’s works. Opioids, marketed as a solution for physical pain promise a solution to the increasing levels of spiritual pain left by the loss of transcendent experience.

In writing of joy and sorrow as experiences of connection, communion, presence, and grace within the ordinariness of our daily life – Wheatley offers what I think is the clearest contemporary definition of transcendent experience -self-transcendence that takes us beyond the limitations of our preoccupation with self and our pursuit of promised fulfilment in the achievement of personal success and happiness.

As 21st century people trapped in immanence in a world that denies transcendent reality we especially need a sense of purpose to take us beyond ourselves. Wheatley turns to the great 19th-century Bengali poet and spiritual teacher, Rabindranath Tagore who movingly wrote:

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted – and behold, service was joy.

Life dreamed as joy becomes real through service and it is in service that we are surprised by joy.

The Transfiguration story is a halfway point in Mark’s account of the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth. It marks the transition point from his preaching and teaching in the Galilean countryside to his arrival on the wider stage as he begins his eventful journey to Jerusalem.

The Visit of the Magi and the Transfiguration bookend the Christmas-Epiphany season. From here on, we move into a different phase of the spiritual journey. The landscape becomes rocky and desert-like as we journey down the mountain into the season of Lent.

Lent is the season in which we revisit and take up again the disciplines that will open us beyond mere self-preoccupation – infusing our experience of immanence – the ordinary everydayness of our lives with intimations of self-transcendence in the rediscovery of experiences of connection, communion, presence, and grace – of joy through worship, prayer, and  service.

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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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