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.

Witchetty Grubs, Gumtrees and All The Saints

Luke 6:20-31

 

 

Today we are celebrating All Saints Day. The tradition of celebrating the saints and martyrs has been marked by Christians ever since the 4th century the Feast of All Holy Martyrs.

 

In 837AD Pope Gregory IV extended the festival to include saints, renaming the festival the Feast of All Saints, all who were martyred or who lived an exemplary life.

 

In recent times this has been widened to include everyone who is a Christian. We are all saints, in a biblical sense.

 

All Saints Day is a time to be thankful for all those Christians who have lived before us, whether they are officially saints or not. Some are the great teachers and prophets from history. Some are those who’ve taught and inspired us personally.

 

Some are our friends and family. We can thank God for their witness, and for the way they have transmitted the faith down the generations. We can learn from their lives. We can take time to be grateful for what we’ve received, and to recommit ourselves to follow in their footsteps.*

 

Interestingly, the reading from Luke’s Gospel takes us into a radical new place and challenges the narrow understanding of this day. In this passage Jesus moves from the narrow understanding of who was included in God’s economy and how that was to be defined.  He continues, as he has done repeatedly in Luke, to prefer the poor and to diminish those who would have seen themselves as belonging to the inner circle, the blessed, the rich, those with names and with power.

 

He instructs his followers to be inclusive even at the risk of personal recrimination and harm. He tells people to defy the accepted rules of engagement with others and to take it to and beyond the limits in place to make the intolerable tolerable. Soldiers, legally, could only make you carry their bags a certain distance so defy them and carry it twice as far and see what happens. Force the person to hit you with the back of the hand which was against law and practice. This is not about doing good, but about challenging the injustice inherent in the system.

 

Jesus takes it further and says we are to do unto others what we would want them to do unto us. This is an incredibly challenging statement. It is not a golden rule, it is a deep dark gold mine we are challenged to explore and to live. It is not about our relationships with those like us. It doesn’t even stop at simply celebrating saints who fit into our perception of life, faith and religion. It is not about our closed and isolated community but about the ever-expanding community of life on and beyond this planet.

 

Saints are not just humans, and especially not just humans who share our ethnicity, our values or our lifestyle. Saints are present in communities unlike ours, in peoples we fear and in the created world we continue to exploit.

 

Throughout history peoples of all backgrounds have sought to recognise God at work in their world. These cultures have discerned wisdom and insights both individual and universal, providing us with a web of spiritual and religious wisdom informing and expanding our own. To ignore such for an exclusive us only variety diminishes all of us. Thomas Merton, Henry Nouwen, Rowan Williams, Elizabeth Johnson, Sallie McFague, Pope Francis and many many others  have initiated and maintained communion with the saints of other faiths and practices in order to add to and affirm what they already know or suspect. So should we.

 

In the book of Job we read, “But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you;” Other versions use the word beasts, a deeply primal and free expression of God’s creativity, full of the capacity to teach, mentor and lead us. They too fit the definition of saints and deserve to be treated in the way we wish to be treated.

Wendell Berry speaks eloquently of this communion of saints when reflecting on the cycle of life in forests and plains, swamps and deserts, and everywhere in the natural world we inhabit; “They die into each other’s life, and live into each other’s death…and this exchange goes on and on, round and round, the Wheel of Life rising out of the soil, descending into it, through the bodies of creatures”.

 

In this century science and our expanding universe asks us to let go of the simple anthropomorphic (human centred) understanding of creation and Gods economy (kingdom) and to come into a relationship of respect, compassion and justice – the way of kindness - with all whom we share this world with. We are to recognise the wisdom inherent in others of all ethnicities, faiths and backgrounds and to sit in the desert and hear the wisdom of the beasts and all that maintains our planet and our lifestyle.

 

Failing to do so will continue the process of destruction of peoples through senseless wars, embargoes, bans and bombs. Saints are dying in places like Yemen, West Papua, Aleppo,  Philippines, the Sudan, Burma, remote communities of Australia and Manus Island. Saints are being banned from bringing their wisdom here for the crime of wanting a better life. Saints, such as these, must be welcomed in our country or we fail the test of doing unto others.

 

Failure will diminish the incredible success of the theory of evolution by natural selection in giving us the immense diversity of thousands of years of refining creation. Within that process there are many saints, past and present, responsible for giving us sustenance, oxygen, and sustainability – trees, birds, fish, oceans, mountains and rivers not to mention bugs, mosquitos, flies, microbes and more. We rarely include them in our list of saints or in our prayers on all saints day, but they are there by default, central to the on going creation of our world.

 

On this all Saints Day we are asked to expand our worldview to include difference and diversity, to find a place in our religion for all who have been created in the image of God; meaning those with the capacity to create and continue to create the unbelievable, and for many of us, the unfathomable complexity of our habitat.

 

By doing so we will be challenged about our relationships with others including the creatures we share this world with. We will begin to see such as deserving to be treated, in the words of Jesus, as we wish to be treated. “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” We are to write this across all our transactions, relationships and interactions with those we share this world with, and this world itself.

 

It is recognising the sainthood of all things, not just selected humans of specific gifts and talents. It is recognising that we entertain angels, saints, in each and every transaction we participate in. Detainees, victims of war, dislocated refugees and first nations peoples around the world, practitioners of other faiths, old growth forests, witchetty grubs and more carry the wisdom we need to maintain and care for ourselves, others and this world.

 

On this All Saints Day let us take just a few moments to quietly remember all saints of all kinds now. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Do We Need Saints Today?

Sunday was All Saints Day, the day we remember those who are no longer with us and whom we remember for that which they shared with us. In the Christian mind we particularly think of those who have been designated saints, examples of the life of faith lived out here on earth. Some are remembered for great deeds, others for dying a martyrs death and still others for strange and peculiar reasons we find difficult to understand. But they all lived an earthly life, not unlike ours, and all have something to share with us.

It has been noted by some that we no longer need saints and we particularly don't need to name our churches after saints. Apparently, St Oswald, you are no longer of value to those of us fighting our battles of faith on the battlefields of everyday living. Yet, we live in age where we need saints more than ever, no matter how obscure they may seem to be to a wired, consumer society.

The reason?

'Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.'

We need those who have faced the depths of despair and the heights of ecstasy in faith to dispel our fears and to give us hope for the future. Lazarus's circumstances reflects both the future circumstances of Jesus and the many who lived and died following in the steps of faith laid down by Jesus. Lazarus suffered illness and died. His family, particularly his sisters, suffered loss and grief in a particular way. Those who knew Lazarus also suffered. All harboured feelings against Jesus, specifically in relation to his tardy arrival and his failure to heal some one he loved and who loved him.

No amount of reassurance of a future resurrection or the suggestion that people who believe in him never die seemed to reassure them. These must have seemed like hollow words to all involved. One has to admire the faith of the sisters while noting the touch of anger in the comment relating to Lazarus being dead four days and that there would be a stench when they opened the tomb.

Like the sisters, we have a limited tolerance of those who give oft repeated assurances and seemingly inappropriate platitudes when we are facing tragedy, failure, loss - be it personal, financial or job, the failure of a relationship or more. Unthinking reassurance only seems to confirm that no-one else understands our pain, even worse, that this has never happened this way to anyone else before.

 

Yet that is partly what this story about - the reassurance that life, even the life of Jesus, consists of trying to remain human in the midst of the challenges being human brings us. Positive psychology and the happiness project encourages us to think that all can be smooth sailing and that we can so manipulate life to ensure happiness as an entitlement. The truth is much different.

And we need saints to remind us of our resilience and capacity to remain fully engaged with life and our humanity even when bad things happen to good people, including ourselves. Alain de Botton, in his book 'Religion for Athiests' makes the case that religion understands the predicament of humanity much better than secular people, atheists, and provides a multitude of saints to light the way when the positivism of modern thinkers fail us miserably.

Rowan Williams comments that Jesus came among us to join us in the muddle of being human and muddled through based on his relationship with what he understood of the character of God via silence and stillness and through the experience of those he encountered in the Jewish scriptures. He suggests that we are to follow such an example to ensure we muddle through as well.

We have the example of the saints in today's story:

• Mary and Martha who, in the midst of their grief and their anger at Jesus, remain faithful and hopeful;
• The disciples whose minds were befuddled by the tardiness of Jesus and the Unfathomable suggestion that Lazarus is in this state only so Jesus can display God's power; 
• and those watching who simply had no idea and went away struggling with the whole scenario.

We have the examples of:

• The Old Testament saints, many of whom were so deeply involved in the muddle of violent and unforgiving cultures and traditions we struggle to understand their relevance to us today;
• The New Testament saints who lived and died violently for simply believing in the kingdom of God as lived out by Jesus;
• The many exemplary people who have recognised the spirit of God loose in the land and dared to live, speak and challenge the church and society simply based on their faith in Jesus.

Each of us will have a saint or saints who speak directly to us in ways which give meaning and purpose to our lives. For me these include Francis of Assisi, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Vincent Lingari and the unrecognised workers for reconciliation and justice in our country. These are all people who have laid down a framework of hope and possibility which has allowed me to muddle through.

Some have saints who are close to home, people such as a loved one, family friends, teachers or work colleagues, someone whose example provided a light for our feet in times when darkness was all around.

Now we must remember saints are not perfect people, even Jesus was late arriving on the scene for Mary and Martha! Saints are often saints because they persevered despite moments, and sometimes more than just moments, of terrible decision making, errors of judgement and passion. King David, Peter, Merton, Day all had disasters, some we would feel it would be impossible to comeback from. But they did. Perfection is a modern day requirement which has no place in the life of a human being muddling through with Christ.

Why do we need saints to day more than ever? Because today we need to recognise that life is more than just a little difficult for the majority of the time; that happiness is a fleeting interlude between skirmishes; that the only true optimist or positive psychologist was Murphy when he wrote his famous rule, 'Anything that can go wrong, will', and muddling through as a human is more important than being perfect (whatever that is).

Our children need to understand this regardless of their age as do our teachers, coaches politicians, and most of all ourselves.

A quick look at the saints in our lives will affirm just how much we need them. Amen