Repentance as a Response to Randomness

Luke 13:1-9

Today’s Gospel brings us three disturbing images and a deep sense of the fear and dread felt by the religious faithful who had gathered around Jesus.

The first involved the leaders of a group of Galileans who had been at a feast in Jerusalem and may have been involved in some insurrection against the Roman government, whom Pilate had killed right in the temple courts where the sacrifices were going on. Jesus comments on the incident, but not as the reporters had expected. Instead of denouncing Pilate he turned it into a parable for their own conduct in the uncertain times they were living in.

 

In the second, Jesus also refers to the collapse of a tower at Siloam where many people died simply because a construction accident occurred.

 

The third involves a fig tree, which has not born fruit and deserves to be cut down. The gardener, who pleads for it to have just one more year to prove that it can be fruitful or else it will be forcibly removed from the vineyard, saves it.

 

The fear and dread felt by those around Jesus, and who are reflecting the concerns of the wider community, is simply the big question of the seeming randomness of life. How does bad things happen to ostensibly good people? In trying to come to grips with this disturbing question, they suppose that those involved have sinned, are sinners, have been responsible for breaking God’s law in some way.

 

Gary M. Simpson suggest that like them, "We moderns (and post-moderns) are also adept at externalising. In addition, our contemporary affection for the adequacy of causal explanations escalates our use of diversionary tactics." We need a reason a cause for the bad things that happen to us. We need a diagnosis, a pre-existing genetic fault, a pin-pointed experience, an identified causal agent to explain why we do or experience bad things. We seek labels and become victims to our reasonable reasons for who we are and why we behave the way we do.  No less than the people of Jesus’ time, we are imprisoned by sin – the motivation resulting in our bad behaviour or outcomes.

 

There must be a reason for this situation to have occurred, and if we can identify that reason we can reassure ourselves that we have nothing to fear. For those around Jesus that was sin. “It was undoubtedly their fault, and we know we have not sinned and therefore we are ok.” And then they look to Jesus for confirmation and get a rebuke, unless you repent

 

Matt Skinner suggests that "Repentance becomes less interesting when people mistake it to mean moral uprightness, expressions of regret, or a "180-degree turnaround." Rather, here and many other places in the Bible, it refers to a changed mind, to a new way of seeing things, to being persuaded to adopt a different perspective."

 

In another article he adds, "The word translated as 'repent' is, at its root, about thinking and perception. It refers to a wholesale change in how a person understands something. It implies an utter reconfiguration of your perspective on reality and meaning, including (in the New Testament) a reorientation of yourself toward God."

 

Now this ups the ante. It is no longer about the little things we do, we feel guilty and regret over. It is not about running a red light, having a naughty thought or saying a bad word! It’s not about secretly wanting to throttle your partner or hire someone to shoot your most hated relative! It is about shifting the focus from self as the centre of the world, the place of entitlement, from being assured of immunity from bad things happening.

 

It is a recognition that life plays out according to randomness we do not control, and we may assume God does not control. Why? Because nowhere in this discussion does Luke put in the mouth of Jesus a defence of the Divine. Jesus does not attempt to absolve God of the responsibility for these things happening. He seems to accept that life will play out the way it will and that we are to simply be in awe of its mystery. Awe not fear.

 

Awe or praise should bring from us a complete reorientation of ourselves to God. No longer do we see ourselves as being deserving of God’s good will, expecting God to always make life easy and safe for us just like we are entitled to for we worship God, on a Sunday.

 

Over the last week or so I have read and heard a great deal of doom and gloom regarding the future of the church. I have heard speakers struggle to find ways to give hope numbers attending church will rise, speaking about mission and evangelism as if there was some magic formula by which people would return to the finding reasons to our form of church.

 

The truth is simple; the church as we knew it no longer exists, and neither does the world in which that church existed. Jesus says we need a new orientation of ourselves to God if we are to be ready to deal with the interruptions to our comfortable worldview.

 

How does that happen for us today?

• Stop saying that people are no longer interested in faith just because they are not here. It simply isn’t true. They are interested in faith and the church but have lost faith with the image of the church they are presented with in the media or have experienced in the past.

• Stop expecting people to be like us, to like the things we do, our worship and style of faith. They will bring with them their own interests, likes and dislikes and we will be enriched and enlivened if we make space for them in our place.

• Stop saying that is the way we do it here. That may be nice for the small number who are here, but is it appropriate for those who would like to be here but find the way we always have done it confronting and out of touch? 

Anglican Theologian Stephen Pickard suggests three reorientations the church is to undertake. It is to be Fresh, Local and Organic. Mark Davis Jr calls this subterranean, having its roots deeply embedded in place and time.

• Fresh does not mean contemporary or even guitars and drums. It means that when we come to worship, however we express it be it through church, social justice, ecumenism and more, with fresh eyes each time. Full of awe and wonder at the possibilities abounding for us. It is not to be routine, ritualistic or pedestrian. When you come to worship do so knowing you worship the creator of the world who is available regardless of the circumstances.

• Local implies a response to people, place and time where you live. It does not matter what others are doing in other places, it only matters how we live and relate to those around, how we experience the shared challenges of living in Glen Iris/Ashburton. Our church cannot be, as it has been for many years, a remnant from the past, or as the church in Australia has been, an out post of the Church of England. Find the local problems and issues, find ways to help address them and then it is possible, just possible people will join you.

• Organic means it grows down and up out of the whole community. Organic growth is slow, requires hard-work tilling the soil and clearing the weeds and needs a constant presence. We cannot impose ideas, pre-packaged formulas or what we believe to be the solutions. They will grow if we are patient. 

Angela Reed suggests that "In this season of Lent, the church has an opportunity to seek restoration and renewal through the discipline of confession and heartfelt repentance." Confession of existing in isolation and repentance in orientating it self to be fresh, local and organic.

 

On that note I invite you to join us in the local coffee shop in the courtyard, meet the locals, get involved in the fresh engagement with the schools, explore your expression of faith with others and be in awe as God works organically amongst us. Amen.

 

  

Is Mindfulness The Same As Contemplation and Silence?

Luke 4

Modern science, medicine and management have discovered mindfulness, the utilitarian recruitment of, in particular, eastern meditation and philosophy. It is sold to us as a means to relieve stress, discover balance, be present in the now and be more productive at work, a better parent or partner, or whatever you choose really. I have even heard military people trumpet its value for improving soldiers ability in the field (read their ability to kill others.)

I will not deny mindfulness has its benefits but it is not meditation and contemplation. Unlike mindfulness as we are 'sold' it, meditation and contemplation does not necessarily lead to less stress, more balance, a comfortable place in the world or more production or being a better parent. Contemplation and meditation is an encounter with the deep, the unimaginable, the unknowable and the unnameable. They bring us out of our duality (this and that) into a confronting unity with that which we cannot name.

 

Contemplation and meditation are disturbing, or should be if we detach ourselves from our devices of denial and avoidance. They should raise in us questions about who we are, what we are doing, the why in what we do, the truth in what we do or are asked to do, and to bring us to the possibility of not doing what we have been expected to do.

 

In my chat with the youngsters (and others) in the first session of a 3 day silent retreat, I warn them, amongst other things, that there is every possibility they will be disturbed by thoughts they thought they had dealt with, nightmares will awake them sweating and trembling and they will encounter feelings and emotions they have thought long since discarded. It is interesting in discussion to discover, after the first day, most think I am talking twaddle and comment how wonderful it is. Sometime during the second or perhaps third day they come up to me and say you were right, and recount an experience they had overnight or that came upon them during the day. As we work through these experiences, they discover something of the incredible depth unearthed by silence and stillness.

 

Jesus goes into the desert, not as a tourist to marvel at what he would see there, but as a means to a deep encounter with himself. The desert is the wild place, the place where we encounter ourselves, our motivations, our hidden self for the very first time. We have in our gospel today the description of three such experiences for Jesus, perhaps the culmination of all the thoughts, emotions, and fears he encountered over the forty days.

 

I can only imagine how difficult 40 days of silence alone with your self would be like. Having done a number of 6+ days in silence and knowing how challenging that can be, 40 days would dig very deep into the deepest recesses of your soul and, for Jesus, dredge and unlearn all he had learnt as a Jewish boy growing up in a devout family in an ordinary neighbourhood of Nazareth.

 

The key to this experience for Jesus is the understanding that a human being is one, a unit, an indivisible unit which can not be separated into its parts and maintain its integrity. The dictionary definition of indivisibility is something that is “not divisible; not separable into parts; incapable of being divided”.

 

Our modern world seeks to divide and separate us as human beings. This is done by roles (work, family etc.), materialism (haves and have nots), progress (first world, third world), gender, race, psychological profiling and more. We are divided by what is right and what is legal, what we know and what we don’t know, what we need and what we want. When we finish dividing ourselves up there is little left that we can call a person.

 

Thomas Merton, in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, writes: “There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit one-self to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralises our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

 

Jesus in the wilderness answers the devils ‘If then….’ with a single word – indivisibility. I am indivisible from that which is found at my centre – God. God is my beginning and my end. I can find no meaning or purpose in life if I become disconnected from God. If I divide myself into a God person and an ego driven self then I cease to be a fully alive person, and become just another one of the mob of individuals, thinking they are independent but moving en masse in the same direction as every body else.

 

We can not reduce this story to individual temptations. It is greater than that. This is about the sin the of not seeing our essential nature, that we are one with God in our creation and our being and to divide ourselves up in search of earthly and material wealth, success and fame leaves us depleted.

 

We can not reduce this story to a one of ‘the Devil made me do it”, or in this case, ‘the devil nearly made me do it.’ It happens when we divide ourselves off from God and turn God into another object to be possessed and used. Jesus encounters the possible of becoming separated from God, not from an external encounter but as a result of meditation and contemplation uncovering the hidden depths of his psyche. Silence and solitude disturb and tempt us to self medicate by moving us to avoid the gnawing that never ceases.

 

Jesus doesn’t and sets the pattern for himself, his disciples and for us.

 

Mindfulness is part of the happiness project. Contemplation and meditation is part of a revolutionary disturbance focussed on becoming fully human and fully alive. It is about restoring the unity and indivisibility we sacrifice when we seek happiness at all costs. Jesus was aware of the present, conscious of those he was with, only because he remained one with that which empowered him from before he was born.

 

A challenge for us this Lent could be to take the time to contemplate our inner self and to reconnect with God, the ground of our being; to be brave enough to look at those ideas, emotions, decisions which have caused us to become divided and to take steps, gently and carefully, to remain connected and whole, God’s person in a challenging world. 

The Mystical Love Of God

1 Corinthians 13

I have new glasses. One doesn't know how blind one is until one gets new glasses.  Things are sharper, clearer, fuller in colour and shape. I notice things I had previously missed. It is easy to go through life with limited sight and think that is all there is.

 

Paul is often described as a lawyer, a writer who focuses on the actions involved in being a disciple of Christ, a moral theologian more interested in the law than in the spiritual essence of our faith. Nothing is further from the truth.

 

Paul is a mystical theologian charged with connecting the mystical with the practical, but never by diminishing the mystery or power of love. His encounter with Christ was a mystical disruption so powerful it rendered him blind, a metaphor for his realisation that the truth he had followed and enforced was a truth without sight, without the mystical power of love, of God who is nothing but love. The generosity of God can only be described as unconditional love, and by definition the one who is generous is love.

 

1Cor 13 is used to reinforce the qualities of creaturely love. We read it at weddings, at funerals, baptisms and almost any event when Psalm 23 is also read. We have reduced this passage to the banal, the pedestrian hope for something more than lust, greed, manipulation and violence. Somehow we have taken the truth out of this passage and dumbed it down to mean little more than a recipe for relationships.

 

It is not.

 

In this passage Paul is speaking of God. Love is God, God is love. God generously gives us life, maintains it, remains engaged and never leaves us. Why? because we enter this world having exited the Godhead where silence is love, to live in the noise of the ordinary as words of love. We are birthed in the waters of love as Gods word spoken into the world and an oasis of love remains at our centre, no matter how hard we attempt to obliterate it through our ego driven existence. We return to the Godhead, not simply when we die, but in each step i we take to let go of all we gather to ourselves as our identity.

 

It is right to think of this passage at all the key life moments for we are to become God, to become love incarnate in the physical world in which we live. It is not right to reduce this passage to the lowest common understanding. God was incarnate in Jesus and Jesus was love in relationship to his world, his place, his culture and the people he encountered. God is no less incarnate in us and we are to strive for being as selfless love in our world, our place, our culture, and amongst the people we encounter.

 

Meister Eckhart calls us to an "action without doing", a being that is empty of the need to do, allowing God who is closer to us than we are ourselves, to flow through us into the world. Like Paul, he pleads for us to get ourselves out of the way of the hesed, or unfailing love who is God, and allow love to flow in and out of us freely and without restrictions. Eckhart reminds us that God becoming incarnate does not diminish the Godhead. Jesus is all of God in the world yet the Godhead remains as it was, is and always will be, one and complete.

 

This passage calls for us to lower the barriers of self and to let go of those possessions (psychological, spiritual and physical) that we hold onto as evidence of our existence, giving us the illusion of autonomy. It asks us to detach from everything and attach to no thing, the only thing that matters, to God who is love.

 

A man, maybe a woman, was walking along the edge of a very high cliff admiring the view. Suddenly the edge gave way and they plunged earthward at a great pace. Somewhere in the midst of this they cry out, 'God, save me!' And they were a brought to an abrupt stop by a branch from a withered old tree sticking out from the cliff that catches in their belt. They are left gently bouncing up and down. When they get their breath back, they realise they are only half way down, or is it half way up? Not knowing what to do, they ask God for help again. Back comes a deep heavenly voice, 'let go of the branch!' They look up, they look down and then cry out, 'Is there any body else up there?'

 

Paul asks us to do the same in this passage, to let go, just as he had to of, all that makes sense of our life and to trust in the dark void, the mystery of love. We are to let go of the stuff the world convinces us we need, approval of others, possessions to define us, degrees to make us more worthwhile, emotions and actions we are addicted to. If we are to deconstruct the system which allows 60plus people to have the wealth of 3.7billion we are to let go of our addiction to what they are selling, the illusion of happiness through wealth, power and violence. 

 

If we are to deconstruct the system that diagnoses and labels people with illnesses only curable by big pharma drugs we have to let go of our need to find a reason for our sadness, disappointment and disillusionment with our lives. There is a great video doing the rounds on the web in which people are urged to ask their doctor about the curative qualities of nature as a possible cure for their illnesses. In a similar way Paul is prescribing detachment as the means to discover abundance.

 

He says when we let go and attach ourselves to nothing it won't look the way it is, you won't be able to discern the length, the breadth, the depth, the beauty and the subtleties of God who is love, you will only have a sketchy understanding, a hazy picture with lots of snow and distortion, you will only have a dim understanding but it is enough. It will be a scary place, just as it was for the person caught half way down the cliff, asked to let go of the only thing apparently giving them hope.

 

Paul's promise, God's promise is that as we do, we come home, we return to where we were before we were born. We re-enter the unity of the Godhead and 'then We will know fully, even as We have been fully known.' This is not just a promise for after we leave this mortal coil, but for our life upon it. It is for Eckhart the experience of the virgin where virgin means someone who is detached from images, ideas, worldly illusions.

 

It is the essence of the incarnation where with Paul we can say 'it is no longer I that lives, but Christ, God's spoken word, who lives in me.'

 

You may say this is beyond us and it is, but what is beyond us is in us, for we only have our being in the generous love who is God and therefore there is no beyond. For we can finish with the great affirmation Paul leaves us with, "And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love." Amen