It Is Written

Matthew 4:1-11

 

As we begin the Lenten journey we will discover texts and stories we know well. We may have already decided what these texts tell us, what they are about and what they reveal about the Easter story we will soon hear. They fit a narrative we have breathed in over many years and a narrative that has informed our daily living and our worship/faith story. It is now so familiar we have forgotten it’s nuances and finer points, and may have difficulty in identifying how it influences our live.

 

Yet there are many, if not the majority of our present day society, to whom these familiar stories are foreign and unknown. A student at the school where I was chaplain said that if she hadn’t gone to the school she would not have known about Jesus let alone the Easter story. There was no family history of church, Sunday School or religion. Easter was just another embedded public holiday with no particular significance for her and her family. This was true of most of the students and when we began to read and unpack these stories it was a revelation for them.

 

While it was a revelation for them, the ideas within these stories were not immediately or readily understood. Living in a society where success, recognition and power were the valued goals and most were working for through good exam results, successful businesses or being discovered as a musical or sporting protégé, they found the ideas in todays story unimaginable.

 

Who, in their right mind, would say no to immediate gratification, adoration by the masses or the power to do just as you pleased? Who in their right mind would put themselves in a place to have to even confront such ideas? Who would decide for a way of life that put you at odds with all that you were being taught by an education system committed to a consumerist world?

 

The danger for those who hear or read this story is that we place it firmly in the Jesus tradition and see it as a story relevant only to his experience and the fact he was God incarnate and therefore responded to the challenges by conforming to type. It was inevitable he would reject these seemingly external temptations by a personalised evil.

 

The idea this was a battle between ultimate good and ultimate evil lets us off the hook. We may presume we do not have to face such questions for we are but ordinary human beings without the power or the options of Jesus. If we read Jesus with a high Christology, in other words as one whose divinity reigns above his humanity, then we find little in which to relate to in this story.

 

If we read Jesus with a lower Christology, where his humanity is as important as his divinity, we begin to understand this story as not only relevant to us, but as our own personal story. The decisions and developing self-awareness Jesus experiences are akin to the decisions and developing self awareness we experience as we move through the various seasons of our own human life.

 

Jesus goes into the desert to make sense of the events of his baptism – John, the call to repentance and the voice from above. This deep spiritual experience unnerves him and he needs time and space, a lot of time and space as indicated by the words 40 days and nights (a long time), to make sense of it all.  He has to wrestle with his human needs and desires and find a way to reconcile his awareness of God’s call on his life.

 

The temptations mentioned are a summation of the many different and difficult questions he faced, some minute in impact, others of great consequence. They are not just boxes to tick in Matthew’s attempt to define Jesus as the one expected, but are representative of the battles human beings face if they are serious about living lives committed to wholeness in relationships and experience.

 

At some point in our lives we have to make decisions about the importance of objects such as money and possessions, of objects such as success in work and life, of objects such as power and control over others; the failure to address these issues results in these questions returning unresolved in violence, anger, frustration and more.

 

Domestic violence, child abuse, racial vilification, persecution and more are examples of a failure to answer these questions effectively or not to answer them at all. Ignorance does not excuse us for our behaviour. At some point these are questions that come up in wedding vows, adulthood, communal living and more and if we fail to confront them they will not just go away. Our subsequent life will be in some punctuated by their breaking in on our lives.

 

Jesus understood this and confronted these questions with the experience of the saints and the scriptures. He resorted to tradition, both lived by others and experienced in the natural world – “it is written” – not just words on a page but words in lives and the created environment. Tradition in this context is the lived experience of those who translated their experience to oral and ultimately written record. He was not standing against these inner urges based on his own limited life experience, but reaching back to the community of saints who had found proven ways to deal with human nature. 

In this way the desert confrontation is one of human experience versus the base desires within each human being. This is the universal challenge commenced at the beginning of creation and continuing today. It is the evolutionary urge for wholeness and the conflict of random chance, order and adaptation.

 

Imagine for a moment how different the Jesus story, our meta-narrative would be, if Jesus had responded differently to the questions being human asks? Image for a moment how different our lives would be if Jesus had agreed to follow his basic interests and left each person to find their own way?  Now some will say this could never have happened for Jesus was God’s Son, God incarnate; but may well have happened because Jesus was also human, every bit as human as you and I.

 

“It is written”, the tradition of the communion of saints sits at the core of Jesus response to being human, it also sits at the centre of our own. Reading the Biblical stories or spiritual biographies and reflections, retaining the values and parameters of faith and experience, and spending time in reflection with a spiritual guide or mentor all help us to make our responses to the temptations of being human. We cannot do it alone and neither did Jesus. He was surrounded by nature, the image of God in creation, by angels and by the Holy Spirit, he was surrounded by the saints. “It is written” everywhere for us and our guidance. The temptation is to rely on our own experience and feelings and to ignore those who have made this journey before and with us – people, places and creatures.

 

Jesus embodies spiritual practices necessary for our wise handling of life. Let’s begin this Lenten period to read what is written all around us and to find what is necessary to live a Christlike response to being human.

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 

Living The Way To The Cross

Luke 14:25-33 

I have always wondered what it would be like to be a celebrity and be pursued 24/7, to have an entourage of devoted followers at your heels waiting to catch a drop of wisdom, a look or even a touch. I guess when fame and fortune first hits one may think, “Wow, how wonderful it is to be so popular, to have so many people hanging on my every word, watching my every move and checking out my figure for signs of over indulgence!” 

By about day three I think the novelty would wear off. Get these people out of here! Can’t I have one moment alone? 

Today’s Gospel opens with the recurring words ‘large crowds’ were travelling with him’. Large crowds are a stock feature of the synoptic Gospels, by the lake, at the synagogues, on the mountains and wherever Jesus seemed to be. Even when he is seeking silence and stillness for a little time out they turn up, 5,000 in the sermon on the mount and 4,000 at the sermon on the plain. 

So I am not surprised that this time he turns around and gives them a serve, not a get lost you lot serve but a reality check. Ok folks, the school excursion is over, now down to real business. If you keep following what I say this won’t end well, are you up for it? Families, villages, careers, relationships and ordinary everyday living will be disrupted and turned around if you go where what I say will take you. 

D Mark Davis comments "…… this call to discipleship is radical, implying that those who follow Jesus are not going to be making decisions based on 'what’s best for me,' or even 'what’s best for our marriage/family/children.'" There is no clear indication that there is such a decision for, if one looks at the examples Jesus gives, an outnumbered army or an over committed builder, the decision seems simple, no. In the case of the army, negotiate; the house builder, rent; the other option in both cases most likely won’t end well. 

Jesus then says "Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” This is not a reference to the cross of Calvary but is not the act of a later editor putting words into Jesus’s mouth it appears in Mark, Matthew and the Gospel of Thomas as well as here. 

Also Epictetus a Greek speaking scholar is quoted in the Discourses by his pupil Arrian as having said the following: 

If you want to be crucified, just wait.  

The cross will come. 

If it seems reasonable to comply, and the circumstances are right, 

then it's to be carried through, and your integrity maintained.  

The inference being a certain way of life will lead, inevitably to conflict and if such a life is to have integrity one is to follow that life to its predictable end. Epictetus and Jesus both are saying, if your live outside the accepted norms of society and value what is at odds with such a society you will, in a Roman occupied country and a modern democracy, arrive at the cross. 

Now that may not be what the ‘large crowds’ wanted to hear. They were looking for peace and freedom from the oppressors not more violence and angst, especially from those they know and love. A counter-cultural philosophy of love your enemy, give help to the despised and reprimand to those in power is not the way one goes about making friends and influencing people. Yet the teaching of Jesus stood at odds with society then and still does today. 

Emerson Powery writes, "Today's contemporary Church has to wrestle with the reality of following a radical, counter-cultural prophet." 

Now this is not only a social justice question, it is a spiritual and religious question: what religion do you follow? The religion of the ego self and narcissism where I do everything for myself and those within my immediate purvey? Or is it the religion of capitalism, which says to the rich there will always be more, to the rest the leftovers. Or is it the religion of consumerism where enough is not enough and more is insufficient? Or is it the religion of self preservation, save our own bacon, call the lawyers and hard luck to the rest (a position often taken by the churches in reference to child abuse claims). 

Powery poses the challenge in just the way Jesus did, it is not a foregone conclusion that the large crowd or the contemporary church will indeed take up the religion of Jesus and live a radical, counter-cultural, prophetic role in the modern world. There is too much to lose. Our place in the power structures, our hard fought for exemptions and options, our buildings and our money, not to mention the fancy dress and valuable silver ware. To live a life of sacrificial compassion for others, including the whole of creation of which we as human animals are but one of many will mean a radical rethink for the church and for each of us individually. 

• It will mean preferencing justice in all our actions and our words, not just saying what is right but doing what is right, despite the cost. It will involve speaking prophetically into the public space and challenging long  held views or those opinions we described last week as being like haircuts, everyone has one but not all are worth considering. Integrity in word and action takes great courage but is the task we face. 

• It will mean preferencing the poor and not just the poor in terms of other human beings but the poor meaning the birds of the air, the flowers of the fields, the animals of the forests and fish in the sea. These make up the world along with humanity that God so loved. This will challenge how we consume, how we find ourselves entwined in the economic devaluation of resources and how we hoard up riches for ourselves at the expense of others. It is indeed very challenging and may well be too much on either an individual or a societal level for all of us. 

• It will mean preferencing a life built on enough – our daily bread – our ordinary job – our enough house. Simplicity in being without the urge to always seek more. Science tells us that there is a default point for happiness. Despite the lure of more, once one arrives there and gets over the excitement, science tells us we fall back to our default level of happiness. As happy as your are now is probably how happy you will be regardless of more. 

• It will mean preferencing a different God than the one we learnt about in Sunday School and came popular in response to the Enlightenment.This is a God is beyond all definitions yet knowable, beyond all boundaries yet personal, outside our world yet fully engaged in the experiences of our world, a God with a preference for all of Creation and not just human beings. Here is Mystery sitting in our muddle, our pain and our despair bringing hope to brighten our darkness. 

Jesus is a radical countercultural prophet who calls us and the church to a life which place us outside the accepted social contract. We cannot do it alone. We do it together and we do it together empowered by God’s ever-present Spirit. It is the only way we can take the road to the cross. In the end it was the only way Jesus could too. 

These Stones Will Speak.

The Story of Creation (Stones):

⁴⁰He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

 

Palm Sunday ushers in Holy Week and Jesus steady journey to the Cross. It begins ok enough. A carefully orchestrated non-violent procession on the outskirts of town mimicking the military parade of might and power just a stones throw away.

 

Happy followers wave their branches beside a smiling Jesus on a young donkey. Some even lay down their cloaks, probably especially brought for the purpose, on the ground in front of the donkey.

 

It was not a benign procession. The imagery is provocative and powerful. In Zechariah 9:9 we read the promise to the people of Jerusalem of rescue from those oppressing them:

“Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
    Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you;
    triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
    on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

 

It is powerfully political and religious at the same time. It is aimed squarely at the Romans whose power rules, for now, and at those who appease and seek to keep the status quo. This is not new for Jesus. He has always been political and on the offensive in terms of corruption, violence and oppression. It is the program he set for himself when he announced his ministry in Luke 4 - He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: 

 

¹⁸“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, ¹⁹to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” ²⁰And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. ²¹Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

 

The church is not a benign institution responsible for platitudes, nice music, lovely people; the church is a revolutionary body responsible for bringing in the kingdom of God. It is political for its mandate is the very same mandate Jesus took for himself. We are for the poor, the marginalised and the forgotten. This is not an option but mandatory on all of us to live like this.

 

When the religious leaders suggest that he and his followers tone it down, go through the right channels, work with the powers to be, he replies, ‘“I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

 

What an extraordinary thing to say. How do you reply to such a statement? Surely Jesus mental health was questioned? The man’s nuts!

 

In the last week we have discovered that the 12 Apostles dotted along the coast beside the Great Ocean Road are not 8 as we thought (4 had fallen into the sea), but 13. 5 more have been found. These majestic sand stacks have risen and fallen and been discovered over centuries. What stories do they hold? What things could they tell us if only they could talk. But they do. Science will interrogate them and discover more and more about the birth of our planet and our country, the sea and those who live in it. The stones will speak.

 

Jesus is saying this is not about you and your rational, reasonable selves. This is about the transcendence of God, of me who is indistinguishable from God, one with the Godhead who brought all things into being.  Listen to the stones, listen to the sand-stacks, listen to the trees and you will hear them calling out the words of Zechariah. They praise and celebrate God and call for release from oppression. 

 

Jesus reminds us the Godhead is present in all created things and that to silence the voice of one will result in another speaking out, seeking freedom. That voice maybe heard in the sounds and images of climate change, habitat loss, lack of water and the damage to ecosystems so fragile they have taken years to develop.

 

Jesus’ incarnation is not just about human beings, questionably the most intelligent beings on earth, but for all. “For so greatly did God love the world that He gave His only Son, that every one who trusts in Him may not perish but may have the Life of Ages.” It is only human beings who have a choice. The stones will always cry out in praise and adoration seeking to return to God simply by being a stone. Humans fail to hear the sound other creatures make and fail to see the implication in Jesus statement, you are not the centre of the world. Yes, you were made for relationship with God, but it is not all about you.

 

Others are valued and valuable and you are to take steps to care for the least of these. You are to resist oppression of peoples and creatures, oppose the destruction of the planet for profit and greed, and to ensure all have the opportunity to celebrate the life God has given them.

 

Jesus reminds us of the unity of life – we all co-independent - and challenges the leaders and the rulers to cease the ‘this and that’ of duality. You are alive in this moment. The Good news is here for all, listen and hear it, even the stones on which we are walking are speaking.

 

Thomas Merton responded when someone asked about how he lived out his monastic life, first a little humorously:

 

This is not a hermitage, it is a house. (“Who was that hermitage I seen you with last night?”) What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe. Who said Zen? Wash out your mouth if you said Zen. If you see a meditation going by, shoot it. Who said “Love?” Love is in the movies.

 

He than sobers up: “The spiritual life is something that people worry about when they are so busy with something else they think they ought to be spiritual. Spiritual life is guilt. Up here in the woods is seen the New Testament: that is to say, the wind comes through the trees and you breathe it.” (Thomas Merton from his essay Day of a Stranger.)

 

Palm Sunday is Jesus return to Jerusalem. It is also the time when he knows his enemies will be coming after him and he only has a short while. He appeals to the ancient prophets and the natural world to give context and meaning to his actions and words. He steps neither backward nor aside from the consequences of speaking out on behalf of all beings who are oppressed by the powerful and the tyrants, secular or religious. He steps forward knowing what the consequences most likely will be.

 

As we stand waving our palm branches and singing our songs are we ready for the decimation of our dreams, our hopes and plans if we take Jesus seriously and follow him to the Cross? Or are we only Palm Sunday Christians? Amen