Saturday 28 February 2015

We May Be Wrinkled and Weatherbeaten But We Are Worthy.

Mark 8:27-38 
I often hear people say that they don’t believe in God. When I hear that I wonder who the god is they do not believe in. Teenagers, in their rebellious desire for certainty, are quick to say they don’t believe in God, and instead of asking them to explain what they mean, I give them a sheet of paper and ask them to draw a picture of the god they don’t believe in. It is very revealing.
Without fail their god is a caricature of all the negative ideas about God currently loose in society. When I have looked at the picture I usually say, ‘You know, I don’t believe in that God either’, and proceed to unfold my understanding of God for them.
This is the conversation Jesus has with Peter and the disciples. As Bishop Spong suggests; Jesus ‘asked who they thought he was. They responded, ‘You are the Christ of God’, and then they proceeded to tell him what kind of Christ he had to be for their sakes.’ No wonder he said ‘Get behind me Satan.’
Caspar Green says that “For those, like Peter, who are hoping for a knight on a white horse to sweep in at the last moment and save the day, the messianic expectation is bound to end in disappointment.’ How often do we either experience that for our selves or see the consequences of such an understanding of God in the lives of others? Bitterness, anger, loss of faith, railing against God and the institutions that represent him, and more.
From personal experience I know such consequences. When tragedy struck in our own lives, I could not understand why God had not been the kind of God I had created for myself – one who rescues, saves and ensures we avoid the contrariness of being human.
Wrong ideas about God, and for the disciples and Peter about Jesus, lead to expectations that are certain to fail. Expectations such as a life with out tragedy and death, full of success and the modern day panacea called happiness, and more. Where did the expectation that life and the purpose of life is happiness? Not only should we expect happiness, it is our right to be happy. Parents want their children to be happy and do everything to help their children to avoid anything to the contrary. Yet this is a project doomed to failure.
I received a phone call in the middle of the day from the Director of Pastoral Care that the father of two of our students had collapsed with a clot in the brain. Their life went from wonderful to terrible in an instant. I sat in the hospital and watched as these 3 young people, the oldest 17 and the youngest 24, struggled with making the decision to turn off the life support system, all the while listening to the harrowing sounds of grief and loss. And I thought, no matter how much we try protect our young people and ensure their happiness, life comes along and throws a spanner in the works.
For these young people and their classmates, this was the second major tragedy in their young lives. 2 years before their best friend, a Kenyan student, went for a swim and drowned. The questions of why it happened, how could God let this happen, and more, filled the school community. The adults didn’t know what to say and all the old clichés were trotted out.
Yet these moments were the moments of greatest learning for these young people. Individually and in chapel we talked about the brutality of providence, how God does not promise an incident free life, that we learn when all we know fails us and we have to go deep inside to find a new narrative, a new story to underpin our lives. That was the evolving experience of the Jewish people all the way through the Old Testament up to, and including, the Holocaust.
New life comes wrapped up in death. Jesus tried to explain that fact to Peter and the disciple, but they didn’t want to hear it, just as our modern world doesn’t want to hear that we who are a little older are still real people. Societies fetish with youth and young people as the saviours of our world’s future misses entirely the fact that we do not come into this world fully formed. We are beings who become, grow and put down roots into our soul as we age.
Instead of relegating older people to the edge of society to make way for the young, we need to be embrace those who have discovered wisdom, nurtured the soul and lived down into the depths of their being to meet with and be comfortable with the God who sits within. Let us celebrate being who we are and sit at the centre of life and not on the edge.
Barbara Beskind always wanted tobe an inventor since the age of 10. A little while ago she spent to months honing her cv and application letter which she mailed to Ideo, a Silicon Valley company that funds new ideas. She was accepted for her dream job. Barbara is 91! I will repeat it, Barbara is 91. She says being old gives her time to sit, think and be creative as she works to solve mobility, sight and other issues facing older people. The nursing home also provides her with an ideal testing lab for her ideas. (http://bit.ly/187he6f)
Peters rebuke to Jesus is all about the expectation the society he lived in had of a Messiah. A rescuer, a revenger and a warrior who could not be defeated. It was about happiness and safety. Jesus says, bluntly, ‘Peter, stop following the false ideas you are hearing all around you and listen to me.’ The kingdom of God is not a Disney creation, it is real life and real life is dangerous, harsh and full of unhappy experiences but there is always God’s grace.’
Over the last couple of weeks I have been busy chopping and pruning trees and roses in the garden across the road. In some cases I have been brutal, cutting the plants back to the bare minimum. Yet they haven’t died in protest. Instead they have put forth new shoots and begun the journey of resurrection.
Jesus points to this as his and his follower’s future experience, and reminds them not to be side-tracked by the expectations of society. In just the same way we are to celebrate who we are, individually and as a congregation, slightly older, slightly greyer, a little bit unsteady but significantly wiser, more soulful and ok with not having answers to all our questions.
When we are comfortable with ourselves and are living our lives from the centre of life, not from where we have been parked by our prevailing culture in favour of youth, others will come and join us, to see what this Good News is all about. You see, no-one is the future of the church, young or old. We short change everyone when we refer to young people, for example, as the future of the church.
In God’s economy there is only the present. Living life to the full now is the best advertisement, and our challenge as a society and as a congregation is to find ways to celebrate both our age and our faith, despite the pressure to defer to youth. AMEN.


Going Deep!


Luke 11:30”For just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so the Son of Man will be to this generation.”

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On Sunday evening, after attending the funeral service for Bishop Barbara Darling, I grabbed a coffee and plonked myself in front of the telly, not particular as to what I watched. As it turned out, I was mesmerised by the program that was on.

It was the story of James Cameron, the Hollywood movie director who directed Titanic, Abyss and Avatar and his participation in the Rolex Deep Sea Challenge. The challenge was to go where no one else had been in a submarine, to the bottom of the ocean, some 36,000 feet.

More than 50 years ago, two men climbed into a massive, blimp-like submersible, descended about 35,800 feet (10,912 meters) to the deepest point in the ocean, and became the first people to observe the dark underworld of one of Earth’s most extreme environments. No one had been back since, until March 26, 2012, when Cameron made a record-breaking solo dive to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench in a custom-built submersible that he co-designed. Cameron reached 35, 756 feet.

While the story itself was intriguing, I was challenged by some of the comments Cameron made on his return. He was somewhat surprised there were no monsters down at the bottom of the sea. In fact the deeper you went, he said, the less life was evident and the ocean floor resembled a moonscape – bare and uninhabited.

He also commented that ‘the feeling of venturing into the trench was “peaceful, lonely, getting further away from the world you came from”. “There’s a purity,” he said. “A sense of the sacred, and a vastness of all we don’t know is felt. You feel like you dove deeper than the limits of life itself.”

In this modern world of instant gratification and entitlement we fear the unknown, seeing monsters lurking just below the surface we prefer to stay on top, becoming surface dwellers who resist the challenge to go deep. The period of Lent, like Advent, challenges us to let go of what is familiar and safe, and take the journey to the bottom of the abyss within, to that place where the limits of our ordinary life disappear and we get a sense of the sacred and the vastness of the unknown. 

Now, we would do Cameron an injustice if we said he was referring to God and the world of religion. He is firmly a scientist and a researcher, but his journey and his story could be a modern day version of the Jonah story. Jonah found himself, for very different reasons than Cameron, taking a journey into the deep, and while he was there, discovering the sacredness of life and the challenge to take that message to the neighbouring town of Nineveh.

Jonah’s journey ‘into the belly of a whale’ (a metaphor for being in a dark place) took 3 days (a short’ish period). He was lost at sea, gone missing, his life was in great turmoil due to his own stubbornness and hard held views. Yet, deep in the darkness of a world that was unlike anything he had seen, he realised the monsters were not in the sea, but in him, deep with in him and he had to make friends with them in order to begin a new life. After 3 days (a short’ ish period) he reappeared and set about such a life, not without blemish it must be said, but a life with a new awareness of the sacred.

The Gospel reading has Jesus appropriating the story of Jonah as an archetype for what was to become his story – the journey into the deep, Sheol, and the resurrection on the third day, bringing the possibility of new life for all who believe in him. 

30”For just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so the Son of Man will be to this generation.” Interestingly, Jonah’s message was one of damnation and destruction, and he was disappointed when God was compassionate and recognised the change in the people of Nineveh. Jesus reiterates that powerful message of condemnation but balances it with the compassion of God to be exemplified by his crucifixion and the journey into the deep where the monster of death is defeated, returning on the third day with the promise of new life for all. 

The Bible has many stories like Jonah’s, stories where people are placed in dark places and have to journey deep within themselves to resurrect their life and the lives of those they are responsible for. Joseph in the well, Moses and the burning bush, Jacob and the almost death of Isaac and more. People discover “A sense of the sacred, and the vastness of all we don’t know when they have ventured or been forced to dive deeper than limits of life itself.” This can happen through tragedy or misfortune or it can occur when we decide to leave the safe and familiar surface of life and dive deeper within ourselves, letting go and settling comfortably with God at the centre of our being.

Over the last few years I have had the privilege of taking teenagers (14 – 17) on 3 day silent retreats, without the distractions of computers, Ipods, Ipads and other electronic gadgetry. It was for most of them, the longest time that they had spent alone with themselves and their thoughts. It was interesting to watch. The first day was a challenge but had a sense of excitement about it as they tried to find ways to deal with silence and stillness (washing their clothes 5 times, as one did). The second day was always the toughest. Here they discovered unresolved thoughts and experiences surfacing and challenging them, often disturbingly so. The advice was to simply sit with this moment as they travelled further into the silence. If they stayed with it and rode out the monsters they would, and did, discover the sacred resurrection of themselves, renewed and re-energised, on the third day. Like Jonah and Jesus they returned to their ordinary world with a new life empowered by going deep.

 In Cameron’s journey, the going down and the coming up occurred with out power. The vessel simply sank to the bottom after the balloons holding it on the surface were jettisoned, before ballast was released and the vessel floated back to the surface. It was never meant to stay on the bottom. Very Jonah’arian in manner. On the bottom it settled and moved gently around, allowing Cameron to explore the previously unseen landscape with wonder and amazement. 

In this Lenten period, let us take the time (3 days – a short’ish period) to begin the journey to the deep within, letting go of those ordinary things that hold us to the surface, the balloons on Cameron’s submarine, and discovering a new life empowered by the resurrected Christ, whose journey to the deep makes such a life possible.