The Implanted Word of Truth

James 1:17-27

¹⁷Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. ¹⁸In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.

¹⁹You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; ²⁰for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness. ²¹Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls. ²²But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. 

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A question I have often asked students to ponder is: Just because it is legal is it the right thing to do? Businesses and organisations spend much time checking their practices against the written law to ensure that what they are about to do is legal, is it covered by law and, therefore, are they covered by the law from responsibility for the outcome of their actions.

Unfortunately this often comes unstuck at some point when people begin to realise the gap between what the lawyers say and what their common sense response is. This is not right.  Over the years we have seen this work out in terms of the Church and child abuse, governments and refugees, big business and such as mining and employee relations and more. We all can recall such stories and wonder at how this can happen.

The next question to students was ‘Just because you can do want you desire to, should you?’ This moves the question a little furher inward, away from the surface protection of the law and the outward justification for our actions.

Mark in his Gospel and James in the epistle reading remind us strongly that we can not rely on the law. In their settings, the law and he strict adherence to the words of the law was deemed to be sufficient for a good or righteous life. By simply endorsing the law verbally and in superficial practice ensured you were obeying the Torah as spoken by the religious leaders.

Jesus in Mark’s Gospel addresses the law which required people to follow an elaborate cleansing and table practice before eating, stipulating clearly what was appropriate – clean or unclean. Jesus says bluntly, what a load of old cobblers, don’t you blokes know anything? Food is just fuel for the engine and passes through and out when used up. It doesn’t make you unclean.  It is what sits within you and is used to justify your words and actions that determines whether you are good or righteous and that is much more than a finely scripted law with all it’s accompanying fine print.

James reminds us that God (James 1:18) “gave us birth by the word of truth”. This often interpreted as referring to the Good News that came in the form of Jesus and became known after his death and resurrection. The New Testament as the word. Is it? In the prologue to Johns Gospel we hear, ‘In the beginning was the word’, and if we understand the word to refer to the Christ then the word of truth is spirit and has always been available to us. JesustheChrist, and we should always connect the man Jesus with the eternal Christ or anointed one, is the spirit in human terms and we hold the potential to emulate him because the spirit, the Christ is within.

Here we begin to read below the literal words and touch the potential within. Muslim scholar, Louis Massignon, who inspired Merton in the use of the phrase "le point vierge", had written about how Mansur al-Hallaj (858-922) perceived the mysticism of the heart. According to this Suffi, when the heart is fully uncovered, what remains is the latent personality, the implicit consciousness called the sirr. For Hallaj and Massignon, the innermost secret heart (as-sirr) is "the virgin."  This most intimate centre of the heart is called a mystery, in which the creature meets his Creator. Al-Hallaj says, "Our hearts, in their secrecy, are a virgin alone, where no dreamer’s dream penetrates - the heart where the presence of the Lord penetrates, there to be conceived." [1] Here is where the word of truth is to be found, not in the words interpreted on the surface, but the journey into the deep, to that place where both self and Spirit are one.

James continues by saying (James 1: 21b) ‘welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.’ What is the implanted word? It is the implanted Christ who has been present from the beginning in all created things. It does not come from an external reading but an internal journey. An external reading reads as if it is reading a legal document, analysing and interpreting the written word in such a way that it gives credence to our existence, our way of believing.

The implanted word, the reality of JesustheChrist, awaits our listening heart as we separate ourselves from our ego self and begin to take on the nature and form of the Christ. It is then that the seed planted deep within begins to flourish and live in such a way that our external actions and words can be described, as Paul said, ‘it is no longer I that live, but Christ that lives within me.’

To arrive at such an understanding we must embark on a journey that is fraught with danger, challenges and the ever-present temptation to fall back into our ego selves. The temptations of Jesus after his Baptism reveals how subtle and constant those temptations are and we can only overcome them by meeting the Christ within naked and helpless, ready to relinquish the power over our lives to the implanted word of truth.

It is only then that we can (James 1:22)

‘be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.’ We kid ourselves if we only adhere to the formulas and the creeds that pass for rational belief. Formulas and creeds are but scaffolding by which we are to journey into the experienced truth. Dogma or right belief will not save us, only praxis or right practice will when we jettison the safety of the formulas and creeds, and open ourselves up to terrifying possibilities of a life lived solely in Christ.

We started with the question if it’s legal does it mean it is right and we can answer no because the law suffices only to cover up our failure to live from the centre. We also asked ‘Just because you can do want you desire to, should you?’ And we can also answer no if that desire is based on your ego self.

We are called by both Jesus and James to take the time to reflect on what we say and do and to ascertain its source. We are called to listen deeply to the implanted word, that virgin place within us and to let go of our practices and words born of culture, tradition and bias which do not resonate with the eternal Christ.

We can do this through meditative reading of the Bible and other spiritual texts, by reflective journaling and writing, by taking time out to do nothing but listen, by beginning spiritual practices such as morning prayer, silent retreats and others activities that get you in touch with the word within.

It will involve us moving past the literal in terms of our reading of the world and the Bible and to seek the presence of the spirit in all. When we begin to see more than what meets the inner senses we will begin to see more than what meets the outer senses. Our vision of ourselves and our world will change.

Jesus and James pose the challenge. Are we up for it?

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[1] http://www.thomasmertonsociety.org/erlinda.htm

Open Door

Shush! Church

Reading the Bible - Fact or Myth?

Ephesians 6:10-20

How do we read the Bible? A silly question you may ask, but an important one if we are to find the truth that sits beneath the surface in this book of books. Do we read it literally from the translation we have in front of us? Is it the word of God that holds true at all times and in all places? Is it a book of fact verified and proven to accurate in all ways? Or is it something more or different altogether?

 

Reading the Bible literally is like looking at a painting and only seeing the picture sitting on the surface of the canvas. We see only what we see. If we only see the picture and don’t strive to se the meaning hidden in the picture, something of the perspective of the artist, their culture and philosophy, we will only ever see a painting we either like or don’t like, judged only on what is visible.

 

The Bible is more than literal words. It is more than what we read. We now know much in the Bible no longer holds true as verifiable fact or history. It is an amalgamation of events and history brought together to tell a story.

 

The Bible is a book of poetry, a lyrical book of metaphor and mythology, not myth as fairytale, but myth in it’s classical sense. It points to meaning without describing that meaning directly. It hints at the mystery of life and calls us to get in touch with what dwells below the surface. 

 

The Bible calls us back to mythology and symbolism, something we in the western world have discarded. We no longer engage with meaning making myth and it comes at a cost. Humans need poetry and myth to make meaning of their lives. When we ignore such it reappears in negative forms – mental health issues, violence, abuse etc. We spiritualise, medicalise, rationalise and ignore dreams, visions, insight and intuition. Our literal response is to normalise behaviour, thought and action so that we produce a flat one-dimensional world of proven fact and experience. Anything outside this is does not exist.

 

The Bible requires much more of us. It requires us to dive deep into its poetic style u to discover more. It requires us to dive deep in side ourselves to hear what the spirit is saying and to engage with the very forces ebbing and flowing in us, forceswe describe as good and evil, darkness and light, positive negative. It requires us to be open to a sphere of experience not visible in a literal world.

 

It also requires us to understand much of the writers purpose, who they are writing to and what they needed to hear. Paul and John write to the Ephesians, not to give them a book of practical advice as we read it – read you Bible, pray, live a moral life and accept Jesus as Lord – but to encourage them, telling them  the struggles they face aren’t personal and these struggles are shared with others.

 

Susan Hylen writes of this passage:

"While modern Christians are likely to have a view of heaven as a paradise in which no evil dwells, the writer of Ephesians is drawing on a different set of cultural assumptions, one in which a struggle between cosmic forces occurs within the heavenly realm. Christians, who already reign with Christ in some sense, are obligated to participate in this struggle."

Paul is writing from prison to a church of new followers struggling to find their way. John writes to the same group of people in his Gospel, people facing persecution from within and without the church. They have been betrayed and abandoned by friends and family, neighbours and social acquaintances because of their new found faith in Jesus the Christ.

 

What started out as a great epiphany, a moment of great joy was now fast becoming a nightmare. What they expected, a life of joy and the coming of the kingdom of God appeared further away than ever. It was hard, painful, and full of threat. They could die for their faith or at least be cut off from their Jewish heritage. Everything they knew no longer applied and they were cast out of the synagogue and society, as they knew it.  They were alone.

 

Paul writes some words of comfort and support: (vs10-13)

 

He recognises the difficulties they are facing for their faith. He understands the struggle it is for them to remain faithful as young Christians, wondering whether they got it totally wrong. Where is God? Where is this Jesusthe Christ? Where is the solidarity and support they thought would be there? What has happened to my friends and families? Is it really worth it to be a follower of JesustheChrist or should we just abandon it and go back to where we were?

 

Paul offers encouragement:

First, this is not just about you. This is an eternal battle, an eternal ebb & flow that continues in the heavens. It finds its form in the world in the shape of the  secular and religious leaders who are persecuting you for your beliefs, ostensibly for different reasons, but in fact because you challenge their power. Heaven is not a place where you can eat as much fairy floss as you like without getting cavities! It is a place where you continue to engage in the eternal battle.

 

In our modern world we think in terms of self. We perceive events and actions in terms of how they impact on or find their way out of ourselves. Paul reminds us, and the Ephesians, this is not the case. The world holds much more variety and mystery that that. It engages us in a story which is both uniquely ours and uniquely eternal and universal. We are engaged, not as the centre of the action, but as one of the many players in the eternal story.

 

Paul is encouraging them to stay engaged because they are an integral part of the biggest story possible and their struggles and difficulties with the powers active in the world has meaning and purpose. It has solidarity and belonging. It has the imprimatur of faith, hope and compassion found in faith in JesustheChrist.

 

Secondly, Paul intimates that this is not just the experience of new followers but all followers. He reminds them that he is in prison for his faith, and will probably die as a result. When John writes to the same church he holds up the example of Peter who had already been martyred for his faith.

 

Thirdly Paul is suggesting that they don’t have to be perfect. They will fail, slip, make mistakes, struggle with loyalty and get it wrong. But they are to do everything possible to maintain their faith right up to and including that terrible day, the day when their faith will be ultimately tested by the Romans or the religious leaders, the powers at work in this world. The suggestions made calls them into a deeper relationship with their faith where they will begin to understand another realm at work – the spirit realm and it is not to be feared.

 

We live in the Spirit.  Jesus was the embodiment of the spirit alive in the world – or at least that was how the man Jesus was seen. He was true, righteous, prophetic, and open to hear God in the world. He was filled with the Spirit, as we are, if we but understand that our real life is spirit not physical.

 

Reading the Bible requires us to delve below the surface of what we read, to understand it as mythology, the world of the Spirit. Like the Ephesians we are to avoid simply looking at what is happening in front of us or to us as the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Our lives are lived across the material and spiritual worlds and our experience has meaning in both realms. Once we let go of the literal we begin to grapple with the forces at work within and without, the ebb flow of spirituality sapping and energising us at the same time.

Gordon Graham in a reflection upon understanding art applicable to our understanding of Bible as poetry and myth, suggests that while art, and for us the Bible, speaks of a particular event or circumstance, they also speak to the general - the universal. The Bible collects characters and events and put them together to tell a story and even though those characters and events may never have happened as it is told. Art, which the Bible most certainly is poetically, 'may be imaginary through and through, but it can still enable us to look more sensitively at people, circumstances and relationships in our own experience. the question to be asked is not, 'Does this effectively capture the scene portrayed?' But 'does this make us see this sort of event or circumstance or group of people differently?"

 

It is challenging but it is the essence of our life. Amen. 

Innovate: Reimagining Reconciliation

This last week I found myself confronted by my aboriginality.

A friend who had recently returned from a trip through outback Australia commented on the Aboriginal people seeming to be doing nothing productive, just sitting around listless and bored. 

Later I read a headline describing a NSW town as having the worst ice epidemic in the state, while it was careful to say it affected both black and white, the picture accompanying the story was of a black man.

I read of a number of towns in WA trialling the cashless welfare card, and I was confronted by the impact that will have on an already marginalised and oppressed people.

Finally, I have been disturbed by the racial vilification of Adam Goodes and the violence underpinning much of the commentary in both mainstream and social media.

Perhaps we see these problems from the wrong place. Focussing on the visible and presenting issues, we are missing the real tragedy at play here. These incidents are metaphors for the destruction of the primal spiritual essence of our people and symbolise the battle for the soul of our nation. Our people are suffering from the cumulative effect of internalised oppression giving rise to the situation we see in front of us. It will take imagination, humility and a drastic rethinking of our own lives and the way we find value and meaning in and for ourselves and others before we will be able to reach out to those we continue to oppress.

I grew up in a town renown for its violence against local tribes. Visiting the library, reading newspaper cuttings and letters from the mid 1880’s to the early 1920’s, I realised the steps taken by my family to hide my grandmothers’ heritage was a strategy deemed necessary for survival.

My grandfather made my Uncle promise to keep my grandmothers indigenous heritage hidden. No one in my family speaks of it; her background is shrouded in mystery. There is only a mother who registered the birth some time later in a different town. No father is mentioned. She had the name of the family she was left with when the small aboriginal community from which Jimmy and Joey Governor, aboriginal men who killed 9 people during a fourteen week rampage in 1900, and who inspired the book and movie “The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith” came, were forcibly moved out west at the request of the white community. 

While it was our family secret, it wasn’t a secret to the locals. I grew up known as ‘Young Darkie’ or ‘Young Blackfella’; my best friend, when angry, called me the son of a drunken bush black; another friends’ father told a group of classmates they could be friends with me but to remember where I came from. Bullying at school was a never-ending story for me.

My father lived in exile, caught between a world he knew and a world he never knew, growing more bitter and angry as the years went on. He acted out his violence through alcohol, directing it at anyone nearby, particularly his family and I as his eldest son. He was never able to reconcile within himself these two worlds even when he stopped drinking. It was bigger than him and his family. It was the internalised oppression of a people and country from which he was exiled.

In many ways our country and our church mirror the difficulties faced by my father. We are stuck somewhere in the middle, a little too white to be able to include the black or anyone who is different, a little too involved in the tragedies which have and still occur to be able to step away and see the situation for what it is, and, apparently, unable to reconcile within ourselves the diverse pieces of our shared history to make a stand.

My relationship with the Anglican church changed when, after a particularly violent evening at home I went  to the local rectory seeking assistance to stop the violence. Bundled into the Parish car, I was dropped back outside the house, left to deal with the situation myself. I was 15 at the time.

Paul writes:   

‘If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.’

Having been reconciled through Christ we have dominion over the past, the present and the future. This dominion, wrought for us through Christ, is one of empowerment. We are empowered to be the difference. This is not power and control in secular or Old Testament terms, but the giving away of power and control so others can fulfil their potential. We are to live out the compassion of empowerment portrayed by Jesus in the Gospels.

Reconciliation begins with the gift of God through Christ and continues as we begin to reconcile within ourselves our own and our cultures past actions. Only then can we reach out our open hands to others.  Thomas Merton suggests this is hard work, writing, “Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all………. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. . In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.”

Having entered into the kingdom of God have become companions of empowerment, and, by virtue of our relationship with Christ, we are empowered to empower through relationship. Broken free from the ideologies, practices, laws and restrictions of colonialism, secular or religious, we are called upon to set others free. It is not a choice we can or cannot make, it is imperative on each individual, institution and government who act under the devolved authority of God to do so.

Shawn Copeland, the womanist Afro-American theologian, reminds us: “If my sister and brother is not at the table, we are not the flesh of Christ. If my sister’s mark of sexuality must be obscured, if my brother’s mark of race must be disguised, if my sister’s mark of culture must be oppressed, then we are not the flesh of Christ. It is through and in Christ’s flesh that the “other” is my sister, is my brother; indeed, the other is me……….” We who have been reconciled and are at last empowered to live a fully alive Christ life and have dominion over our lives are the ones who are to co-work with God to complete this act of union.

Today we formalise the Diocesan Reconciliation Action Plan, putting into words our desire to make a difference. We are called to Innovate, not in terms of programs or protest, but in terms of people. To engage with indigenous people as autonomous individuals fully capable of living their lives, to understand the pain deeper than skin colour and stereotypes, and make a start to reimagine the primal spiritual need of all.

Let us put right what our colonial ancestors made wrong, by holding out our hands in reconciliation and working together. Here’s mine.