Christified

John 1:29-42

^29”The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”

 

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Have you ever had the experience when something you have said comes back to you completely misunderstood and is interpreted, so impossibly disconnected from its original context and intention, it seems it took place in a completely different universe? The tragedy is such an event can ultimately come to define you, what you believe and how you live, taking on a life of its own.

 

Working in a school, I saw many bad decisions made by young people fittingly described as permanently defining moments if they were allowed to take on such an aura. Peer pressure, the need to belong, the first burst of passion or an encounter with alcohol or drugs suddenly took on a life of its own, becoming permanently attached to the young person involved. Yet life moves, times change and people mature, becoming somebody completely different to the one you remember. They are no longer the same or living in the same context or environment. Their world has changed and so have they. They have out grown the experience once synonymous with them and find new ways to be defined and understood.

 

Merton suggests the only person who is inconsistent is the one who is always the same, who remains connected to ideas, thoughts, philosophies and practices which worked once upon a time and have now taken on the rigour of known truth never to be challenged or changed.

 

David Bohm, the physicist and philosopher, speaks of creativity as being the passion to find the new in the experiences of life and to exalt those above the known and the accepted. He and others affirm this as the practice of all creatives - artists, musicians, mystics, scientists and theologians.

 

For theologians and mystics - you and I – we risk becoming solidified believers. Maybe a better term is petrified believers. We remain connected to a way of seeing our faith and our Christ, locking us in the past, not allowing us to expand with the evolving universe. Running the risk of being at odds with orthodox understanding of our faith, I would suggest we need to let go of images which worked when they were written and begin to explore new ideas appropriate to our 21^st century understanding of the universe and the laws of creation as seen in the urge for wholeness and creation.

 

John and the other New Testament writers were writing in a very different world to the one we live in. The understanding of the universe as a static creation in which the earth was the centre of all that existed, where God was above the sky in a place called heaven and our existence on this planet was temporary and transitory until we made the transfer to heaven or hell. Such a world view no longer exists or can be supported and neither does a world in which the understanding of the need of a sacrificial lamb dying a violent death so we can live free of sin can be.

 

John, the Jewish mystic, uses an image from the Old Testament, a ritual of symbolically addressing and confronting ones’ alienation from God and of making amends for simply being an ordinary human being. It was a ritualistic act all participated in and allowed reconciliation between God and the community. It was not a personal act but one done in and on behalf of the community. If we read "‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” literally, it seems to infer that God sent Jesus for just one purpose; to die to become the basis for substitutionary atonement or the idea Jesus was sent to die to set us personally free from sin.

 

If we consider ourselves Trinitarian, this idea raises a number of questions in terms of the relationships within that iconic symbol of unity and diversity. If we consider God as pro-life and essentially committed to the ongoing creation of the universe, does it not seem a rather brutal approach to take to deal with a relationship issue? Is there not something amiss if the only reason we celebrate the incarnation as understood in Jesus is that Jesus is our get out of jail card and we never have to face the music for our own falling short of the mark because of the violent death God prepared for him?  Or is there something else at work here in John’s comment and in the thinking of John the gospel writer?

 

If we take the hymn to Christ at the beginning of his Gospel seriously then there is surely something else alluded to here. Jesus is present at the beginning of all things and is the empowering present in the ongoing journey of creation as seen in the evolutionary process. Jesus is the ultimate in created consciousness and therefore the ultimate image of the creator. The incarnation is testament to the relationship God has with creation in that he becomes fully participant in the process to wholeness.

 

As one commentator suggests: The Jewish disciples of Jesus understood the identification of Jesus, the symbolic Yom Kippur sacrifice, as a symbol of the human yearning to be at one with God. It was their way of saying that the death of Jesus was not a tragedy, but was a free and complete act of human self-giving. In offering his life without the need to protect, defend or preserve his selfhood, they were saying that in the death of Jesus they had caught a glimpse of who and what God is. They had experienced in Jesus life fully lived, loving extravagantly, as having given them the courage to be fully themselves, fully human.

The death of Jesus was therefore originally interpreted as an act of ultimate self-giving that greatly enhanced life.

A God of sacrificial atonement seems out of sync with 21^st century cosmology and scientific knowledge. Now it is appropriate to  understand the death of Jesus as the fulfilment of an individuals commitment to the process of evolution – one dies so another or a species may flourish and become something completely knew. Jesus embodies the creative intent toward an ever burgeoning, ever blossoming world – he lives the ultimate example of created consciousness so that others may do likewise through love in action – the Spirit. The Spirit is released to empower you and I through a mystical experience of Christ for ourselves.

 

As Jesus grows and becomes the Christ, leaving behind his ego self and his personal individual identity, it is so we may experience the possibility of doing the same. He is the Lamb of God in the sense he is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of becoming. He deals with sin, the dislocation from oneness via the ego self, in that anyone who has a real experience of the Christ will become Christified and do likewise.

 

And perhaps here is the reason we wish only to see Jesus as the means to our personal redemption. To accept the task to become Christified – like Christ – will entail us moving away from our personal egos and taking the journey to complete kenosis or self emptying as Christ did, so others and humanity may evolve into Christ.

 

It is a costly act. It will cost materially, physically, psychological, emotionally and spiritually. You will see things differently and from a new place and find yourself marginalised and locked out of normal society. You will not be accepted now, nor will your words and actions be seen to be appropriate. They may, as they did for Jesus, be deemed so after the tragedy and they may then empower others to do the same.

 

The challenge for the church, you and I, is to leave behind a set of symbols appropriate for another age and begin to search for the Lamb of God in a strangely different world than the one John was writing in, and the one in which much of the definitive theology was done in, such as the middle ages. We now understand the world differently on a day-to-day basis and must risk disconnecting our theology from a world view that is no more, rediscovering the Lamb of God in an expanding universe. To not do so, spells the end for faith. 

Baptism of The Christ

Baptism of Christ. Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River by John. Davezelenka

Matthew 3:13-17

 

Today we celebrate the baptism of Jesus, the iconic story of incarnation, subservience and mysticism, often reduced to the role of a theological statement about the identity of Jesus. We pay little to the relationships between Jesus and John, Jesus and the created world, and Jesus and spiritual experience by using it to prove Jesus is divine and already righteous without the need of John’s baptism.

 

Yet this is an incredible story, told in all 3 synoptic gospels, each with their own twist but consistent in the central truths portrayed. John is baptising on the banks of the Jordan. It is a baptism for transformation and change, a baptism not of ritual but of experience. He is challenging those who come to be transformed by the experience and to go away and transform the world in which they live. Yes the word sin appears, but it is not the trivial definition we use of personal sin today, but an understanding of the disconnection from our one-ness in creation and our need to rediscover our co-independence in our movement in relational wholeness empowered by love. His is a baptism of community for an evolving creation destined to find its beginning and completion in Christ.

 

John is correct, Jesus has no personal need for such baptism, but he does have a representational need to do so. He comes to John, his cousin and mentor, as a student comes to a teacher. This is about participating in the experience and become a participant in the journey to wholeness which is a journey to himself. The great Christian mystics such as Merton, Bede Griffiths, Teilhard de Chardin and others, along with the seminal mystics from other faiths and spiritual practices, all speak of the journey to wholeness as the journey to self. They all, in their various understandings, equate the inner journey of discovering your true self as the experiencing of the Christ at the most intimate and personal level. Merton write that the only journey a human takes is the inner journey.

 

Karl Rahner, a modern Catholic mystic, writes: “In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all.”  Jesus and John both agree with Rahner, without a deep and undeniable experience of God there is no way of being for Christ in the world.  This is not necessarily an emotionally charged moment of bells and whistles, it is often the breaking open of ones self perception in such a way one becomes a completely new being, unrecognisable from the one who existed before, especially and most importantly, by ones self.

 

In the baptism of Jesus this is exactly what happens. Here we have a young man recognising his need of John’s tutelage and baptism and coming in obedience to John’s call. For many this may fly in the face of what we think about this story. Jesus is not just following a divine script. He is a created being, a thinking man, making a considered decision to be baptised by John.

 

It is an act rooted in a personal relationship with John and completed in the created world. Both points are very important. Jesus is an ordinary person, engaging with others and the created environment who experiences a mystical awareness of his true self in the midst of both. Jesus does not have his mystical experience, his awakening to his true self, in isolation from others or the world. It occurs in the midst of an act of obedience, surrounded by others engaged in the same, on the banks of a shallow and narrow river on the edge of the desert.

 

What happens next is, apparently, witnessed by others, but most specifically experienced and reflected on by Jesus, not just in the desert where he went after this occurs, but in his discussions and teachings with those who followed him. This event dislodged Jesus from his ego self and set him on a deep spiritual path he invites all of us to participate in – through journey through him to him.

 

Jesus is the fulfilment of creation and brings with him into our world both the way and the end. In his baptism he understands this truth. He participates in an act representative of the evolving understanding of the spirituality John brings and is connected to the source of all creation (God) by the power to bring us to evolved fulfilment (the Spirit). God speaks, the Spirit hovers of the waters, just as in the first creation myth. God speaks similar words to those attributed to him then, ‘and God saw it was good’. Here he says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

 

An interesting comment in itself as Jesus has yet to do anything, his ministry has not begun, there have been no acts of power, words of wonder or miracles of healing. It seems the ordinary human being Jesus is deemed to be sufficient by God and the simple act of responding to John’s call has opened the gates of heaven and placed Jesus in a new relationship with God.

 

Is this just an experience only Jesus can have? Do we read this story and listen to this sermon and go, ‘Nah, couldn’t happen to me. I’m not good enough. Only Jesus who was God’s son could have this experience.” We have been fooled by the idea that because we understand Jesus was both divine and human and somehow that excludes us from emulating such experiences. The truth is that this should be the normative experience for those on the spiritual journey. It is not the experience only of Buddha, Dalai Lama or Jesus or Mother Teresa or Rumi or any of the other spiritual pilgrims, it is the experience we all are destined for if we participate in the acts of being human and open to the possibility of such experiences.

 

I suspect Jesus was unaware of what was about to happen to him when he came to John, despite the prophetic words of John and Jesus's response. I suspect Jesus was still coming to grips with the guidance John had been giving him and simply wanted to do what was necessary. His baptism dislocated him from his self-understanding in such a way that he heads into the desert to make sense of it all. What happens there is the continuation of his evolution into the Christ and the path that would take him to complete self-denial and love on the Cross.

 

Yes, this an iconic story of incarnation, subservience and mysticism, but not one reserved for Jesus and out of reach for you and I. It is available for us if we participate in the journey to relational wholeness in the created world out of love for God and others. This experience will set us on the Way to the Way, it will bring us, through the experience of Jesus to ultimate fulfilment in Christ. It will occur when we become open to the possibility, diligent in our worship and practice, inside and outside liturgy, and when we come just as we are, just as Jesus did. Amen 

What Do We Do With The Baby Born Today?

What do we do with this baby born today? Do we celebrate his birth as we celebrate any other birth and rejoice in the safe arrival of another child? Do we use this day to remember a story from so long ago it’s seems little more than a fairy tale to be enjoyed without needing to find anything else there? Do we use this birth as an excuse for consumer excess, the saviour of struggling corporate bottom lines and the over consumption of food, alcohol and gimmickry?

  

What do we do with this baby born today?

 

It depends upon whom we see in the story.

 

If we simply see the boy Jesus, just another human child, we run the risk of making an idol out of a normal person, exalting Jesus to a place in our world he, as a middle eastern, child had no desire to occupy. Idolatry has no place in our lives and particular no place in our Christian faith.

 

This child is special.

 

In the letter to the Hebrews we read:

Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.

There is something else happening in this story, something very important we often miss. The child born this day is the very self-expression of God, not just a reflection or image but the creative essence of God let loose in the world. Here is the one on whom the world depends for its very existence and on whom we depend for our own self-expression. Here is the one sitting at the centre of all creation. Every single element and being evolved and evolving has at its very centre the creative urge for more, for life and for wholeness empowered by relationship and love.

Here is the One who empowers us and who we are empowered to become. In this material world God spoke a word in human form as a dependent child on whom we all depend. Humanity does not stand-alone. Trees, birds’ animals and fishes are not independent beings any more than we are. We are interdependently connected to each other in the ever-expanding universe because of the Word spoken into the world this day.

Jesus is the beginning and the end of our very existence. As the Christ he sits at the centre of all creation and is the goal of evolution – we are moving through relationship toward wholeness empowered by love. We need each other just as we need love in relationship to become united in our diversity.

What do we then do with this child born today?

 

We are to live out our oneness with each other and the natural world we live in, sharing the creative spark, the creative Word God spoke in the beginning and re-spoke this day some 2000+ years ago. We are to recognise our dependence on each other as we continue to evolve and move toward the wholeness that is the Christ, the Word spoken today.

Diverse and particular, self aware and independent we may be, but that is not all we are. We need each other and we need to begin to live as if this is the case. We can no longer demonise, destroy, punish or persecute others or the natural world as if they and it are objects to be used for our benefit. Sharing the essence of God in our very being with them, the violence we do to them is violence done to ourselves. And we pay the price in a segregated and fearful world.

It seems when ever you turn on the television or your social media feed there is violence repeated over and over again. It is time we took back our world and began to live out our interconnectedness and dependence on one another; the coming of the Word of God spoken into a violent world asks us to step up and to live in a relationship respect, justice and love. Our wholeness spiritually, psychologically and physically depends upon it.

What do we do with the baby born today?

We strive to live out the gift of creative wholeness with our partners, our children and our extended families; with those whom we share our neighbourhoods, train trips and offices with; with those who do not look like us, believe like us, live like us; with those who are afraid, lonely, lost and on the edge of our society; that’s what we do.

Our task is to join with every other human being and creature alive on this planet to strive for the goal of wholeness as expressed in the Creative Word of God born this day. We are to avoid being possessed by the need for things and others as possessions; to avoid the rush for self-fulfilment at the cost of the well being of others, and to avoid turning the baby born today into an idol of all that is wrong with our world.

Today we sit with this baby and begin to imagine the possibilities if we could just let him into our lives and stoke the spark already there into a burning for wholeness. 

The Way of Kindness

Luke 18:1-8

 

Over the last few months I have noticed the power of  moral outrage to distract humanity from the larger questions facing society. Footy grand finals hype, Pauline Hanson’s outrageous statements, the Buddgy 9’s outrageous behaviour in Malaysia, the theft of Kim Kardashians ring and the outrageous words of Donald Trump, have all been effective in shifting the focus of humanity, you and I, from the big issues needing to be seriously addressed. We are entranced by the stupidity we hear and fail to focus on what really matters – the big issues.

 

The problem may be the size of the big issues. They seem intractable, out of the scope of our responsibility, beyond our personal experience. These are questions we know exist – the genocide of the relentless bombing of Alleppo by all sides including Australia, the limitless killing of citizens in the Phillipines, the continuing imbalance in wealth and opportunity that favours certain classes in society and the unnecessary detaining of children and others in refugees camps and detention centres. And that’s not all. Here at home we have the question of how we engage with the sovereign nations who were here before western occupation, marriage equality, unemployment, homelessness and more.

 

Our reading of the gospel story today often stays firmly in one place. We read it as teaching us about persistence in prayer, how we are to be faithful and continuing to pray for what we need until we are heard by God. 

 

William Loader  observes:

“... it is missing the mark if we treat the passage as a general teaching about intercessory prayer. It is primarily about the yearning for change. It was very appropriate that the story told of a poor widow. She represents a behaviour, but she also represents the poverty and vulnerability which is the point of the parable’s message. The story has been shaped in the cruelty of exploitation and the arbitrary abuse of power. It belongs in the world which Jesus is addressing. Jesus is reading the signs in the wounds of the people. The contours of their devastation shape the structures of his thought, because this is where he belongs and these are the people whose cries he hears.”

 

Reading this as a treatise on prayer ignores the social context in which Jesus sets this story. Here we have a marginalised woman, a widow who has no man to look after her and still needs to find accommodation and sustenance. She knocks on her neighbours door. If she is marginalised she probably has no home and is living rough. It is hardly likely that she has a house and lives next door to a wealthy and titled person such as a judge. In our terms she is a beggar knocking on doors looking for help.

 

Jesus has the judge first ignore the pleas for help and only out of this persons annoying behaviour does he finally throw a loaf or two her way. There was no compassion, no sense of duty, no understanding of the plight of the widow. It was simply throwing crumbs to the dogs to shut them up.

 

This passage of scripture shows how we ignore the real issues and deal only with the presenting problem – annoying woman who needs justice. Much of our responses to the pressing needs in society take this form. Charity hand outs, welfare doled out as if we are being used, unfair restrictions on the provision of employment support or accommodation for refugees or assistance for the disabled or the granting of recognition for the first nations people in our constitution instead of negotiating a treaty with the sovereign nations we live amongst.

 

The judge is confronted by the social ills of society. He is confronted in this story as one who is part of the problem but one who has the capacity to solve the problem. Poverty is not, and still is not, a private issue. It is systemic and finds its source in the ego self who sees entitlement and aloofness as a right. The much vaunted failure of Donald Trump to pay taxes and others assertion that we all should strive to pay as little tax as possible are only possible because we have a system which encourages and allows such actions.

 

Jesus is challenging those listening to address the plight of the poorest of the poor, to do more than the paltry efforts of the judge. The image of the judge brings to the front of mind one who is responsible for dispensing justice, yet the best he can do isa response out desperation to get her off his back. Perhaps this raises the question: can the system actually reform itself or are those within the system so entangled that they are unable to step back and see what is needed?

  

Is the widow the only source of hope in this story? The actions of the poor are needed to wake up those in power. The voice of the poor must be heard and to do so one must never give up proclaiming God’s preference for the poor. We have no choice but join with those on the outside to find a way to reform what is broken. It is the mission Jesus took for himself at the beginning of his ministry from Isaiah and it is the foundation of the great commission -  “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28)

 

This is not about personal salvation but about the institution of the Way of Jesus and the way of Jesus is the way of kindness – justice – compassion.  We as disciples of the Way are to join hands and voices with the poor and advocate for change. We are to reflect on how complicit we are in this system and what we can do to live more justly the way of Christ in our daily living. We are challenged to avoid the sensational distractions and return again and again to the issues needing resolution. We are to ask why this is so and to avoid the easy answers of those who want to maintain the status quo. We are to join hands with those of different faiths, ideologies and political allegiances who are working to institute kindness – justice – compassion (or the Way of Christ) in the world. The Spirit of Christ is already at work in places and people, philosophies and ideologies , faiths and practices different from ours yet committed to the way of Christ in word and deed.

 

This is a troublesome parable, no wonder the authorities finally got sick of Jesus and dispensed with him. Drawing people away from the bread and circuses and reorienting them on the real issues is disturbing, to say the least.

 

The Way of Christ remains a troubling practice but one we have no option but to follow. Amen. 

One Mob

Colossians 3:1-11

People have asked me how was my trip to Alice Springs? Did I like it? Was it a good experience? I am not sure how to answer. And when some words begin to form, I find them slipping away, not really wanting to be put out there for others to hear.

You see, I had heard a lot about the Centre, the desert, the people and the Aboriginal problem and it was different to what I saw. I watched tourists and  people on pilgrimages, seeking something from the country and the people in order to save themselves from them selves. I witnessed the harsh beauty of the landscape painted in red rock and carved on the faces of the people who lived there. When I am asked what was it like, I am not sure what people want me to say.

I listened to people wax romantically about the wisdom in the country, the dreaming and the ancient people who still live there, and find myself conflicted and challenged. I watched people worship this wisdom seeking absolution for the guilt of the past and fear that what they find will do little to change they way we, black and white, live with each other here.

The 7.30 report story on children in detention has created a stir but while the images are new, the story is not. This has been going on in our country for, the day the first white boat people arrived, was there at the day of Federation, experienced during my youth and I can share many a story from my years working on the streets of Kings Cross, Fortitude Valley in Brisbane and a range of prisons I visited as a Salvation Army Chaplain. No amount of commissions, inquiries or reports will change what is so deeply entrenched in the Australian psyche.

Stan Grant in an emotional powerful speech this week at the University of Sydney, a must read for everyone, makes it plain that bigotry and racism lies at the core of our country and without the honesty of such as a truth and reconciliation commission, as in South Africa, can we even begin to turn this around.

M K Turner, an Arrenta woman from Alice Springs speaks of Uteryea or the line or vein which runs through country and through people. Like  a vein it carries the essence describing the character and truth of country and people. It is in us and runs through us on and out to others, it defines and claims us and remains with us always. It changes brings us into relationship with others.

Paul in Colossians brings us solidly back to a similar truth. It is no longer about us but about the life of Christ that lives with in us. And because of this we are different to before.

David A. Sanchez writes: "I am inclined to read this Biblical passage as a response by the author to a community that was struggling with shifting ethnic, social, and cultural demographics where one group attempted to conserve and validate a perceived privileged position based on what they recognized to be normative, entrenched, and original." And so do I. Paul is attempting to bring about a cultural change that is already completed. By this I mean, when we encounter the resurrected Christ we are changed, now but not yet. It is now because it is the gift that occurs in the moment; it is not yet because it requires us to clothe ourselves in the life and example of Christ in the journey of relationships and experiences from now to forever. The fullness of that change only becomes real as we give life to it in our lived relationships. 

And here is where it gets complicated, a word that came up continually in Alice – what about….. the answer always was, it’s complicated. It’s complicated being a Christian because it is hard to stay with the countercultural expectations of living Christ's life in the world. It is so easy to move from inclusive love to hate, compassion to anger, generosity to scarcity and greed, and more. Paul is talking to a group of people who are needing to engage with a new world, a new way of being, with the inclusion in the community of people who are different, who they do not necessarily want there. They are struggling at the hardest place, the interaction between individuals, in the most difficult of places to do that, the church. 

It is here our expectations are at their highest. We expect those who are like us to behave in a certain way, to be the epitome of everything a Christian is meant to be. And they aren’t we react badly. We are let down, disappointed and may even use it as an excuse to leave. Yet we are shocked when others see us in a similar way. Paul cheekily finishes this passage with: “In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” even the one who is different, difficult, who hurt you, who let you down, who is not you. A constant theme coming from the indigenous speakers was we are one. 

Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr, a Daly river woman writes: “Life is very hard for many of my people. Good and bad things came with the years of contact - and with the years following. People often absorbed the bad things and not the good. It was easier to do the bad things than to try a bit harder to achieve what we really hoped for… There are deep springs within each of us. Within this deep spring, which is the very Spirit of God, is a sound. The sound of Deep calling to Deep. The sound is the word of God - Jesus.” 

How much we need that word in our country now! The word Jesus dwelling deep within creation and creatures, country and people to reconcile firstly ourselves to ourselves, and then to others. Paul is right. Blame and guilt does little and only works if we recognise others as not us and abled to be manipulated and mistreated. We are one, we are connected, and we belong to each other. The uteryea runs through us and when we sit together in dadirri we discover the truth deep down flowing like a river – we are the same, we belong in this place, in this country as one mob. 

Without this word Jesus; fear, hate, anger and violence will continue to be the language we speak to each other and the resultant destruction of culture and country, the legacy we leave behind. Paul reminds us it is up to us, “you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.”

Without a fully reflective engagement with this word Jesus so that our veneer of respectability is torn open and our deepest prejudices and ideologies, our sin, is extinguished from our daily living in the light of this word Jesus then we will continue as we were before we encountered Him. No one can absolve us from Paul's injunction. It is our vocation, my vocation, your vocation and it begins today. Let's do it.      

  

You Are Enough

Luke 10:38-42Colossians 1:15-23 

Researcher Rene Brown writes, “Life-paralysis refers to all the opportunities we miss because we’re too afraid to put anything out in the world that could be imperfect. It’s also all of the dreams that we don’t follow because of our deep fear of failing, making mistakes and disappointing others.”

 

One of the characteristics of modern humanity is the expectation to be perfect, perfect in how we look, in our work, even in our hobbies and our worship. To exercise we buy the best fit wear, have our fitness tracker attached to our arms and ears and our water bottle, colour coordinated with our outfit, all visible for others to see.

 

Students at school fail to try because they are afraid their best is not good enough, that they might get it wrong and therefore fail. They fall back to what they know and stay stuck, not achieving their full potential because they are fearful that they are not enough.

 

Churches remain stuck in the past in a very similar way. The corporate secular world has embraced new ideas of corporate governance, of marketing and promotion, of technology and media, but the church remains attached to a governance system best suited to small collections of people in the sunny English countryside. We are afraid to change because we are afraid that our enough will not be enough, that we simply can’t possibly apply such ideas to the work of the church.

 

The result? We keep polishing the brass, putting the flowers in the same place and singing the same songs. We continue to focus on detail, on the minutiae, in parish councils, synods and parish meetings. We have forgotten the big picture or are, in fact, scared of the big picture because we do not believe our enough is enough to make the steps into the real world.

 

The writer to the Colossians reminds us bluntly whom we belong to.  In the hymn we read in verses 15-20 make it very clear.

“¹⁵ He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation;¹⁶ for in^[a] him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. ¹⁷ He himself is before all things, and in^[b] him all things hold together. ¹⁸ He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. ¹⁹ For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,²⁰ and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”

 

It would take many sermons to unpack the power and might of this Christological hymn, suffice to say, this is the Jesus we have given our allegiance to- the image of the invisible God, the first of all creation and the source of all that is and will be created, the power which holds all things, including you and the church together. He creates, animates and redeems all of creation.

 

He is indeed awe-some, the indescribable abyss which blinds us and our focus on the minutiae and opens us up to the immense possibility of creation at its essential beginning. Jesus the Creator holds within and is held within the source of all being, God. By his very act of obedience and redemption we are gathered within and hold within ourselves the power of all being. We are not powerless. We are not imperfect. We are one with all things and with the initial source of all things.

 

We have within us the potential to bring the power and presence of God into our world. We are able to rise above the detail which so occupies us and to move mountains, change paradigms, shift cultures without fear of failure.

 

In the Gospel Jesus reminds Martha of this very truth. Get out of the kitchen Martha, you are enough, you have done enough. What you have done is enough. Fussing about in search of perfection gets in the way of the good things available to you.  See Mary, she is sitting here soaking in the goodness that comes a relationship with me. Your relationship is no less real than hers, except you are preoccupied with the little stuff and that prevents you from getting the big stuff.

 

A training principal of mine once said, “If it’s worth doing it is worth doing badly’, implying tat if you wait until you can do it well you may never in fact do it. In the words of Voltaire, (In his writings, a wise Italian says that the best is the enemy of good.) "Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without." (Confucius)

 

The writer of the letter Colossians pens a powerful antidote for our fear about the future of our church and of ourselves. Maturity for the church and us is to hold fast to the truth of who Jesus is who has redeemed, given birth to the church and lives within you and I. Maturity is the ability to translate this hymn, this Christological mission statement, into our lives and our practice.

 

We are not to become a church of occupation, fighting grimly to hold our ground in a rapidly changing world, but are to be a church of invasion, ever moving out from where we are into the world confident in the Christ who knows us and lives within us, the church. The church has become a place of hibernation, of drawing in, in the hope that somehow we will survive.

  

The best defence is always attack, not violently but in a gentle moving out into the world in full confidence. St Oswald’s will not survive if we try to hang onto what we had or have. We will only survive if we begin to look out, then move out and engage, finding new ways to make the word (the life of Christ) fully known in the world. This is the living out of the grand portrait Paul pens for us, experience the reality of Christ alive in ways that are different to those we have experienced and want to remain with.

 

Martha is challenged to get out from behind the familiar and become open to the vulnerability a relationship with Christ brings.  We are to step out from behind the safe walls of the church and our Sunday practice and become open to the vulnerability of relationship with the world in the reality of Christ.

 

What a difference we would experience if we were able to live out of Pauls hymn to Christ! Our enough will be enough in his awesome presence and we will indeed go into the entire world and make disciples of all we meet. 

Haggai Sophia - Holy Wisdom

Proverbs 1:20-21

²⁰Wisdom cries out in the street;

in the squares she raises her voice.

 ²¹At the busiest corner she cries out;

at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:

 

 

 

Wisdom is a woman. Her name is Haggia Sophia, “Holy Wisdom” and the Book of Proverbs tells her story this way:

 

Yahweh created me when his purpose first unfolded,

before the oldest of his works.

From everlasting I was firmly set,

from the beginning, before earth came into being,

The deep was not, when I was born,

there were no springs to gush with water.

Before the mountains were settled,

before the hills, I came to birth;

before he made the earth, the countryside

or the first grains of the world’s dust.

When he fixed the heavens firm, I was there,

when he drew a ring on the surface of the deep,

when he thickened the clouds above,

when he fixed fast the springs of the deep,

when he assigned the sea its boundaries

—and the waters will not invade the shore—

when he laid down the foundations of the earth,

I was by his side, a master craftsman,

delighting him day after day,

ever at play in his presence,

at play everywhere in his world,

delighting to be with the sons and daughters of the human race.

 

Where have heard this before? The prologue to John’s Gospel draws a comparison between Jesus who was there at the beginning and Wisdom. John asserts that Jesus is the wisdom of God. In Jesus is the perfect presence of the feminine and the masculine, the coming together of creation and redemption in one earthly being. In a masculine and patriarchal society this seems to us to be nothing more than an oddity. God is and has been for the western mind a masculine figure, a king, warrior, a father. Rarely if ever do we think seriously about God, Jesus, the Spirit in wisdom terms, and even rarer still, in feminine terms.

 

Yet Matthew Fox writes: “Sophia or Wisdom has often been presented as a minor figure in Jewish theology.  However, a serious look at the Hebrew Scriptures reveals that “there is more material on Sophia in the Hebrew Scriptures than there is about almost any other figure.  Only God (under various titles), Job, Moses, and David are treated in more depth.”  There is more written about Sophia than about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Solomon, Isaiah, Sarah, Miriam, Adam, or Noah.  But we do not know her.  Sophia, who stands taller than any of them, is ignored.”

 

In New Testament terms the feminine is reduced to bit parts, Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha, the unnamed women in the Gospel stories, the women who supported Paul, but again rarely in a primary role. The exception of course is Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptiser and Mary the mother of Jesus. Whoever Mary was she was very unlikely to have been the perfect women we have become to see. As we noted a couple of weeks ago, the nomenclature virgin referred more to how she engaged with her understanding of God and what was happening to her at her centre (le point vierge), the capacity and wisdom to see God at work at a difficult time in her life – pregnant and unwed but betrothed.

 

As civilisations and the jewish experience as an example moved away from a reliance on on the land and sort to distance itself from the fertility Gods, often feminine as the feminine is responsible for birthing all things, society became masculine, an imposed order from above not a birthed order from below. In the New Testament church the role of the feminine was usurped by that of the masculine and remained that way until the middle ages. At this time a renewal began, empowering women to regain visibility and recognition, although their writings and pronouncements were often masculine in form, as they had to be if they were to read.

 

Two of such women were Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich. For Hildegard of Bingen, Wisdom (Sapientia in Latin) is present in God from all eternity. She is God's bride and the means through which all created things are brought forth. She gives life energy or "greening" power to all things. She mediates between the transcendent divine and creation, sustaining all things, She is manifest in all human sciences, as well as in the revelatory and redeeming knowledge of God. She is incarnate as Christ through Mary's virginal womb, and she continues to speak through the teachers of the church. She is manifest finally in the redeemed people of God as Mother Church.

 

For Julian of Norwich, Wisdom is identified with Christ, the second person of the Trinity. She is the one through whom we are created naturally and recreated spiritually. "Thus Jesus Christ who does good against evil is our very Mother, We have our being of him, where every ground of motherhood begins, with all the sweet keeping of love that endlessly follows. As truly as God is our Father so truly is God our Mother" ("Revelations of Divine Love," chapter 59).

 

This resurgence of wisdom as the feminine principle has been championed by such as Matthew Fox and Thomas Merton and women theologians such as Joan Chittister, Mary Radford Reuther and more. Merton, an unlikely proponent as he was male and part of a male only order, Trappist monks. Yet he wrote a powerful prose poem entitled Haggai Sophia in honour of wisdom. Women played an enormous part in his dreams and were understood by him to be the prophetic wisdom of God. 

 

In his poem he writes the following (I wish I had time to read it all - it is wonderful):

 

'The feminine principle in the world is the inexhaustible source of creative realizations of the Father's glory. She is His manifestation in radiant splendor! But she remains unseen, glimpsed only by a few. Sometimes there are none who know her at all.’

 

He continues: 'Sophia in ourselves is the mercy of God in us. She is the tenderness with which the infinitely mysterious power of pardon turns the darkness of our sins into the light of grace. She is the inexhaustible fountain of kindness, and would almost seem to be, in herself, all mercy. So she does in us a greater work than that of Creation: the work of new being in grace, the work of pardon, the work of transformation from brightness to brightness. She is in us the yielding and tender counterpart of the power, justice and creative dynamism of the Father.’

 

Is there ever been a time when there was a greater need for ‘this tender counterpart of power, justice and creative dynamism’ to be reimagined and lived? The masculine sense of imposed power and right dominate resulting in unjust systems, cruelty and unending war. It is sad that this sense of feminine is often missing, not just in the males who are in power, but by females who take on the masculine traits that lead to momentary success.

 

Wisdom as the feminine principle is not gender specific. Women have no more of it than men for God evenly distributes it to all. It is to be found in all of creation and is experienced by those who, like Mary and Jesus, are in touch with God at their centre, poor and empty of the ego self, present to the poor and the marginalised and uninhibited by culture, tradition and entitlement.

 

Proverbs 1:20-23, which we read today starts: “²⁰Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. ²¹At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:” and no-one is listening. It is time we started. Amen

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