Er, this is really last week's...and the one I put in last week is this week's...
"If our love were but more simple,
We should take him at his word
And our lives would be all sunshine
In the brightness of our Lord."
A bit naive, you might think? On the childish side of childlike, perhaps?
Maybe. But that hymn, which I have quoted several times before, was written by an old fashioned Catholic priest and scholar who had no time for modernism, liberals or situation ethics, and would not have thought much of the laxer ideas of some of us here at St. John’s. It was written out of an overwhelming love of God, certainly, but the humble love of a creature for his creator. Father Faber knew what he was talking about and he didn’t say - much less write - anything lightly.
I’d like to try a thought-experiment. A while ago I saw a sign outside one of the city centre churches. I wonder what your first reaction is to what it said: “Suppose everything that Jesus taught was true: what difference would it make?”
I’ve asked quite a few people that. I was particularly interested to know what non-believers would say. Interestingly most of them have been unable or unwilling to answer the question I actually asked. Most of them - and I was surprised at the vehemence of their reactions - took the opportunity to insult Christianity in the strongest possible terms. The two non-Christians who did give me a civil answer were, first, a Buddhist, who said something that, although it was based on a misunderstanding, moved me immensely. He said: “I would be desperately sad, because that would mean that hell would exist. I would volunteer to go to hell to show my compassion for all sentient beings.” The other was my friendly household agnostic, who said that he found it so completely inconceivable that he couldn’t answer. Part of his problem, I suspect, was that he knows rather more than most agnostics about the Bible and wasn’t sure where to start imagining.
It is true that if one starts thinking about all the details of what Jesus said it is hard to start answering the question, and even more so if we start arguing about what is authentic and what isn’t.
So let’s just concentrate on the basics - the sort of thing that CS Lewis called “Mere Christianity”.
That, somehow - presumably due to some sort of fall, though Jesus never specified - we need to be saved from our condition of potentially eternal separation from God (that, put simply, is what hell is). That God who created us loved us so much that he - his son - was born as a human being for our sake and for some reason had not only to live and preach and perform signs and wonders but die in a horrific way to effect that salvation. That he did it willingly and lovingly; and that he rose bodily from the dead, also for our sake, as, although it was quite unnecessary for the ‘effectiveness’ of our redemption, he knew we’d never understand otherwise.
And that somehow we have to unite ourselves with his life and death or we will not make that salvation ours.
My own first reaction to the sign outside the church, then, is ‘In that case Jesus Christ would be central not just to my life but to the world and its history; his coming into the world would rightly mark the change of the eras; it would be the central event in the many millions of years his world has existed, and in my life too.’
That is so, and that is summed up in St Peter's comment in today's Gospel:"Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God."
But it is striking that I, who have spent the best part of my life as a ‘professional religious person’, still frame my answer in the conditional: “If it were the case, then such and such would follow”, and make a statement which my life does not always reflect.
Only one of the Christians of whom I asked my question responded “What do you mean, ‘if’? It is all true.” while even the civil non-believers were quite clear that it is not.
What is the matter with us?
At St. John’s we are inclined not to avoid the difficult questions. While my non-believer friends found it impossible to ask themselves the question “what if it were all true?” I am sure that most, if not all, of us have asked ourselves the opposite question: “what if it were all false?”, and perhaps over and over again.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we do a little too much of that. We must do some of it; of course we must. We must do it in order to understand non-believers, & we must do it quite simply out of our nature as thinking & compassionate creatures. But perhaps, just perhaps, we become mesmerised by the difficult questions. It is true that faith is not knowledge. Doubt is part of faith. But I wonder whether that side of faith has not been over-emphasised recently - say increasingly over the last fifty years? I would not advocate blind faith, or the sort of faith which is so afraid of doubt that it will not talk, will not think, & becomes fundamentalist. We are so much freer in so many ways than our parents & grandparents were & that is undoubtedly a good thing.
But perhaps it is time not so much to call a halt to this as to realise what we are doing. To realise that perhaps we are coming at all this from the wrong direction. Listen to St. Paul:
Christ is the image of the invisible God; in him all things were created; all things were created through him & for him. In him all things hold together. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, & through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. The Father has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light; he has delivered us from the dominion of darkness & transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
Supposing this were true? It is true. St. Paul does not - ever - deny the existence of darkness. The world is a terribly dark place. But Christ has died & Christ is risen & the darkness no longer has dominion over us.
And that is where we should be starting. We are not better than anyone else because we are Christians. We are not the only ones who will be saved from our sins. But we are the ones who have received & accepted God’s ultimate, though not his only, revelation & we should receive that as a blessing, not as a burden. To whom should we go? He has the words of eternal life.
We suffer as much as the non-believers do at the darkness of the world. But there must - there must - be one difference.
I have spoken before about the paradox of the good God & the darkness of the world. I will no doubt speak about it again & I will not solve it. There are some things which are too big for us, & perhaps we just have to acknowledge that & put our trust in God.
Because God is there & he is trustworthy. The world is dark, but God is light & in him there is no darkness at all.
So I am not suggesting that we stop asking ourselves the difficult questions; but I do suggest that sometimes we look at the other side of reality, which is just as real or more so. Could we try to be at least as confident in our side of reality as the non-believers are in theirs? Could we try to trust in God & rest in his light - just sometimes? In Julian’s words:
He said not: Thou wilt not be travailed, thou wilt not be tempested, thou wilt not be dis-eased;
But he said: Thou wilt not be overcome.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
The Beatitudes
Both in sermons and in commentaries, people so often seem to see the Beatitudes - & much of the Sermon on the Mount - as a puzzle to be solved. How is it to be understood as a practical guide to life, as a sort of New Testament Ten Commandments, when so much of it is so “difficult”?
I am not going to add to the gallons of ink and the millions of spoken words that have been expended in commenting in detail upon the Beatitudes and the Sermon. Instead I am going to accept them as they are: if you want to be polite, paradoxical. If you want to be honest, they are crazy, unreal, even incomprehensible.
Yet they are central to Jesus’ teaching, to who Jesus was and to who we are.
No, Jesus was not saying that it is jolly to be poor, hungry and sorrowful. He did not expect you to cut off your hand, literally, if you are tempted to sin with it. He is trying to make us stop, rebel, and think. The impossible, the absurd, the contradictory, the apparently untrue, were his delight. They were his stock in trade.
The best way to make people listen is to startle them (remember Haydn’s Surprise Symphony?). And the best way to make them think is to make them rebel. As Kierkegaard rightly said, it’s no good telling people things; they have to get there themselves; to make them get there themselves, not to tell them, is your job...my job...what Jesus was doing.
So often, he is not trying to tell you about money, or mustard-seeds. He is trying to get you to see something. “O foolish and slow of heart!” “How long must I be with you? How long must I suffer you?” “Have I been with you so long, Philip, and still you do not know me?” How is it that you can’t see?
The Beatitudes are not like the Ten Commandments, to be learned by heart and carried out in detail. They are there, like so much of Jesus’ teaching - & his life - to be shocked by, nonplussed by; at the most, directed by. The Sermon on the Mount does not set out a law. It shows you an ideal you cannot achieve and possibly can’t even understand. “Be ye perfect(repeat, incredulously), as your Heavenly Father is perfect”? (repeat, incredulously)
It is, I think, quite likely that Luke’s version of the Beatitudes - which also includes the parallel Woes - is what Jesus actually said. It is certainly the more shocking. Matthew’s version seems to have been smoothed over, made, if you like, more ‘religious’. I suspect that what Jesus said was “Blessed are the poor, blessed are those who hunger and thirst...” It is an answer to the problem of pain, but not an immediately comprehensible one. It is not nice to be poor, to mourn, to hunger and thirst, to be persecuted. It is generally not a good idea, in this world, to be meek. And it is not unknown for peacemakers to struggle through life and meet a violent end.
My favourite childhood book was called “The Phantom Tollbooth”. It tells an Alice-like story of Milo, a small boy who entered a strange world by travelling, in his toy car, through a toy tollbooth. After many adventures he succeeds in reconciling two brothers who have been at war for as long as anyone could remember. At the start he was told there was a secret about his mission which he could only be told at its successful conclusion. What was it? he asks at the end. The reply is: “It was impossible.”
Well, it clearly was not impossible, because it was done: and yet it was impossible, and that was the magic of it. It was because it was impossible, rather than just difficult, that the story exists at all. Remember all those fairy tales and folk songs where the impossible is demanded: “Tell her to find me an acre of land (Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme) Between the salt water and the sea strand; Then she'll be a true love of mine. ...”
There is magic in the impossible.
Didn’t Tertullian suggest something of the kind when he said:
The Son of God was crucified: it does not make me ashamed, precisely because it is shameful.
The Son of God died: it is credible, precisely because it is absurd.
He was buried, and rose again: there is no doubt about it, precisely because it is impossible.
That is usually condensed as “Credo quia impossibile” - “I believe it because it is impossible”.
Or, as Jesus said, “With humans it is impossible. But with God all things are possible.” Of course they are. But they have to be impossible - and acknowledged as impossible - with humans first.
When things are clear, but very difficult, (some of the Ten Commandments or St. Paul’s lists of do’s and don’t’s) the result is discouragement. When they are impossible or absurd, there is space for magic - or for divine power.
Over and over in the Christmas liturgy, from the oldest Roman texts to the newest carols, you find this effort to express the shockingness, the absurdity, the sheer impossibility of the Christmas story - of Christianity, then, as it gets more impossible as the story progresses. Have you read the Athanasian Creed? Try it sometime. Three Persons in one God is absurd. True God born as true man while still remaining true God is absurd. The death of the Son of God is absurd. God cannot die. Come to that, creation from nothing is absurd. It cannot be. And there, where we come to a stop, is the space for the divine.
People talk about “fruitful tension”. To me the effect of these absurdities, these apparent untruths, these contradictory statements, is not so much a fruitful tension as an explosion in my brain. In the familiar phrase, it blows your mind. It must blow your mind. God - is - mind-blowing.
It is when we realise that we can’t do it, that we haven’t even begun, that divine power is let loose. That is what Jesus is trying to do.
So often we object to his parable in which the master orders his servants about & then does not thank them, & Jesus adds: “So you also, when you have done all these things that are commanded you, say: “We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which we ought to do.”
Why do we object? Do we think we are already perfect, when even St. Paul knew otherwise?
Kierkegaard remarks that it is always the stupid pupil who puts his hand up after ten minutes and says he has completed the assignment. He thinks he has completed it because he has not even understood what was required.
The point is that you have never finished. There is never a moment at which you have done it all. Like young Milo’s mission to reconcile King Azaz the Unabridged & his brother the Mathemagician, it is impossible.
But, you know, that is the Good News. It is absurd - but it is true. It is impossible - but it happened. We need no longer fear the incomprehensible, the vastness of the universe in comparison to our insignificance. We no longer need to fear anything at all. For God has overcome the world. He has led captivity, and our limitations, captive. In those frightening things, the absurd, the impossible, the apparently untrue, all we need see is his magic, his divine power; his resurrection - and ours.
I am not going to add to the gallons of ink and the millions of spoken words that have been expended in commenting in detail upon the Beatitudes and the Sermon. Instead I am going to accept them as they are: if you want to be polite, paradoxical. If you want to be honest, they are crazy, unreal, even incomprehensible.
Yet they are central to Jesus’ teaching, to who Jesus was and to who we are.
No, Jesus was not saying that it is jolly to be poor, hungry and sorrowful. He did not expect you to cut off your hand, literally, if you are tempted to sin with it. He is trying to make us stop, rebel, and think. The impossible, the absurd, the contradictory, the apparently untrue, were his delight. They were his stock in trade.
The best way to make people listen is to startle them (remember Haydn’s Surprise Symphony?). And the best way to make them think is to make them rebel. As Kierkegaard rightly said, it’s no good telling people things; they have to get there themselves; to make them get there themselves, not to tell them, is your job...my job...what Jesus was doing.
So often, he is not trying to tell you about money, or mustard-seeds. He is trying to get you to see something. “O foolish and slow of heart!” “How long must I be with you? How long must I suffer you?” “Have I been with you so long, Philip, and still you do not know me?” How is it that you can’t see?
The Beatitudes are not like the Ten Commandments, to be learned by heart and carried out in detail. They are there, like so much of Jesus’ teaching - & his life - to be shocked by, nonplussed by; at the most, directed by. The Sermon on the Mount does not set out a law. It shows you an ideal you cannot achieve and possibly can’t even understand. “Be ye perfect(repeat, incredulously), as your Heavenly Father is perfect”? (repeat, incredulously)
It is, I think, quite likely that Luke’s version of the Beatitudes - which also includes the parallel Woes - is what Jesus actually said. It is certainly the more shocking. Matthew’s version seems to have been smoothed over, made, if you like, more ‘religious’. I suspect that what Jesus said was “Blessed are the poor, blessed are those who hunger and thirst...” It is an answer to the problem of pain, but not an immediately comprehensible one. It is not nice to be poor, to mourn, to hunger and thirst, to be persecuted. It is generally not a good idea, in this world, to be meek. And it is not unknown for peacemakers to struggle through life and meet a violent end.
My favourite childhood book was called “The Phantom Tollbooth”. It tells an Alice-like story of Milo, a small boy who entered a strange world by travelling, in his toy car, through a toy tollbooth. After many adventures he succeeds in reconciling two brothers who have been at war for as long as anyone could remember. At the start he was told there was a secret about his mission which he could only be told at its successful conclusion. What was it? he asks at the end. The reply is: “It was impossible.”
Well, it clearly was not impossible, because it was done: and yet it was impossible, and that was the magic of it. It was because it was impossible, rather than just difficult, that the story exists at all. Remember all those fairy tales and folk songs where the impossible is demanded: “Tell her to find me an acre of land (Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme) Between the salt water and the sea strand; Then she'll be a true love of mine. ...”
There is magic in the impossible.
Didn’t Tertullian suggest something of the kind when he said:
The Son of God was crucified: it does not make me ashamed, precisely because it is shameful.
The Son of God died: it is credible, precisely because it is absurd.
He was buried, and rose again: there is no doubt about it, precisely because it is impossible.
That is usually condensed as “Credo quia impossibile” - “I believe it because it is impossible”.
Or, as Jesus said, “With humans it is impossible. But with God all things are possible.” Of course they are. But they have to be impossible - and acknowledged as impossible - with humans first.
When things are clear, but very difficult, (some of the Ten Commandments or St. Paul’s lists of do’s and don’t’s) the result is discouragement. When they are impossible or absurd, there is space for magic - or for divine power.
Over and over in the Christmas liturgy, from the oldest Roman texts to the newest carols, you find this effort to express the shockingness, the absurdity, the sheer impossibility of the Christmas story - of Christianity, then, as it gets more impossible as the story progresses. Have you read the Athanasian Creed? Try it sometime. Three Persons in one God is absurd. True God born as true man while still remaining true God is absurd. The death of the Son of God is absurd. God cannot die. Come to that, creation from nothing is absurd. It cannot be. And there, where we come to a stop, is the space for the divine.
People talk about “fruitful tension”. To me the effect of these absurdities, these apparent untruths, these contradictory statements, is not so much a fruitful tension as an explosion in my brain. In the familiar phrase, it blows your mind. It must blow your mind. God - is - mind-blowing.
It is when we realise that we can’t do it, that we haven’t even begun, that divine power is let loose. That is what Jesus is trying to do.
So often we object to his parable in which the master orders his servants about & then does not thank them, & Jesus adds: “So you also, when you have done all these things that are commanded you, say: “We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which we ought to do.”
Why do we object? Do we think we are already perfect, when even St. Paul knew otherwise?
Kierkegaard remarks that it is always the stupid pupil who puts his hand up after ten minutes and says he has completed the assignment. He thinks he has completed it because he has not even understood what was required.
The point is that you have never finished. There is never a moment at which you have done it all. Like young Milo’s mission to reconcile King Azaz the Unabridged & his brother the Mathemagician, it is impossible.
But, you know, that is the Good News. It is absurd - but it is true. It is impossible - but it happened. We need no longer fear the incomprehensible, the vastness of the universe in comparison to our insignificance. We no longer need to fear anything at all. For God has overcome the world. He has led captivity, and our limitations, captive. In those frightening things, the absurd, the impossible, the apparently untrue, all we need see is his magic, his divine power; his resurrection - and ours.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Iustus quidem tu es - late again
When faced with a passage like “if you walk in my ways and obey my statutes and commands as David your father did, I will give you a long life”, and similar passages, I am afraid the only thing I can do is struggle; I can’t produce tidy answers, only pointers and suggestions. All I can do is take you with me on my struggle and hope that somehow, something will make sense to you...and to me. If you have no problems with it, please do feel free to stop listening now.
That sentence put me in mind of Psalm 1, with its unequivocal statement of “just deserts in this life”: Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked: he is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season; and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so but are like chaff which the wind drives away.
It’s great poetry, and very stirring; and in certain frames of mind it is very consoling; there are times when we all need to hear this. We are trying so hard, and everything is going wrong – but Things Will Change.
However, there is other, equally great poetry, which says things that are, in general, closer to our experience; Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it this way:
TThou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause.
Equally great, and in part equally inspired, since the first two lines are lifted bodily from the twelfth chapter of Jeremiah.
So what are we to do with sections of the Bible, such as that psalm, and this reading in which God tells Solomon that if he is righteous and godly he will receive earthly blessings? When our own experience tells us that things just aren’t like that?
There are two easy answers. One is to look at such passages, and others, in the Bible, say “This is all rubbish” and discard the whole thing, and probably Christianity, and all religion, into the bargain. To shut your eyes to the word of God in the Bible.
The other is to say “Well, it’s the Bible so it must be true; if you are suffering you must in fact be a sinner”. To shut your eyes to the word of God in real life.
Neither option is acceptable; indeed, these two options are the same option, the unacceptable option of refusing to look with both eyes, refusing to see the word of God wherever it is; refusing to think and search and take risks.
We do have to remember that the Bible is not a book but a collection of books; and that while undoubtedly, as Paul said, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness”, it has to be used correctly.
At times, when we are learning something, it is useful to go back to an earlier stage. But at a certain point we have to decide that the previous lessons are learned, and move on. And that is the case with the lesson that God is here teaching us through Solomon. It’s a twofold lesson: that God cares about us; and that he wants us to act rightly and according to his spirit.
The way to teach a child to “be good” is to reward good behaviour and punish bad behaviour and to reinforce that with threats and promises. I’d be concerned if an adult needed that treatment; but if it is never given, then there’s a fair chance that the person may never acquire the concept of good and bad.
Perhaps that straightforward correspondence between righteousness and prosperity is how things really were when God first starting bringing up his children. We don’t know. But quite clearly it is not so now and there is no profit in expecting it to be so, or claiming it is.
I think one problem is that for most of us over a certain age (and most of us here just now ARE over that certain age!) Christianity is the background to our lives; we received a basic formation in Christianity, in Bible stories, and in the “general respectable behaviour” expected of good Christian folk.
The result is that to some extent we take it as read that we know about God, about Christianity, And we don’t realise that in that, as in everything else, we need to grow up. We need to stop wondering why, or complaining that, God doesn’t treat us like children any more. You wouldn’t try to teach a three-year-old fuzzy logic; and God didn’t try to teach the newly-monotheistic Israel the concept of doing good for the love of God and his kingdom. The Christianity appropriate to a child is not sufficient to build an adult life or understanding of God on; just as the first rigid rules about grammar and spelling are not sufficient to understand poetry. Both are necessary; both have to be grasped and then superseded. We must continue to move on and to grow, even if it is frightening. Paul put it this way: “when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” His understanding of God and how to serve him did not gain him earthly prosperity, nor did he expect it to. It led him to persecution, imprisonment and a violent death.
And his comment on that was “what has happened to me has really served to advance the Gospel…I hoe that now as always Christ will be honoured in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain”. He does not understand how, or need to feel safe. He has the courage to float without constantly feeling for the sea-bed below him. It seems to me that that is a grown-up response, from a grown-up man.
We are growing, as Paul says elsewhere, into the stature of Christ, but we are not quite grown. And while there’s no doubt that some things are obviously good for us and some obviously bad, we do not always know the difference – but God does. If we ask for bread to eat, we won’t get a stone; but if, because we are still half-grown, we do ask for a stone, we may find that we are given bread all the same, and may not realise until much later why we did not get what we asked for. When St James says that if we don’t get what we ask for it is because we don’t pray as we should, he does not mean that we haven’t been subservient enough, not used the correct formulas, or missed out a semi-colon in the Collect. He means that we haven’t grasped that God is bigger than the things we have asked for.
Ultimately, it all boils down to trust – and doesn’t it always? Trust that God’s gift, and the joy it brings, is always greater than we can imagine or ask for. The psalmist got it right when he said “Thou hast put more joy into my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound”. What God promised Solomon is no longer enough; what he gives us now is himself.
And that is not always immediately satisfying, or even immediately obvious. Some of us may wait a lifetime.
I’ll let Hopkins have the last word, as he had the first; as he turns away from his own troubles and complaints, and towards the beauty of God’s creation, and realises that the only answer – always – is to turn back to God, and pray, and wait, for his gift of his Spirit. I think this is a prayer that many of us could make our own.
See, banks and brakes
Now leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build -- but not I build; no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
May He send to all of us the rain that will make us grow in Christ. Amen.
That sentence put me in mind of Psalm 1, with its unequivocal statement of “just deserts in this life”: Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked: he is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season; and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so but are like chaff which the wind drives away.
It’s great poetry, and very stirring; and in certain frames of mind it is very consoling; there are times when we all need to hear this. We are trying so hard, and everything is going wrong – but Things Will Change.
However, there is other, equally great poetry, which says things that are, in general, closer to our experience; Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it this way:
TThou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause.
Equally great, and in part equally inspired, since the first two lines are lifted bodily from the twelfth chapter of Jeremiah.
So what are we to do with sections of the Bible, such as that psalm, and this reading in which God tells Solomon that if he is righteous and godly he will receive earthly blessings? When our own experience tells us that things just aren’t like that?
There are two easy answers. One is to look at such passages, and others, in the Bible, say “This is all rubbish” and discard the whole thing, and probably Christianity, and all religion, into the bargain. To shut your eyes to the word of God in the Bible.
The other is to say “Well, it’s the Bible so it must be true; if you are suffering you must in fact be a sinner”. To shut your eyes to the word of God in real life.
Neither option is acceptable; indeed, these two options are the same option, the unacceptable option of refusing to look with both eyes, refusing to see the word of God wherever it is; refusing to think and search and take risks.
We do have to remember that the Bible is not a book but a collection of books; and that while undoubtedly, as Paul said, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness”, it has to be used correctly.
At times, when we are learning something, it is useful to go back to an earlier stage. But at a certain point we have to decide that the previous lessons are learned, and move on. And that is the case with the lesson that God is here teaching us through Solomon. It’s a twofold lesson: that God cares about us; and that he wants us to act rightly and according to his spirit.
The way to teach a child to “be good” is to reward good behaviour and punish bad behaviour and to reinforce that with threats and promises. I’d be concerned if an adult needed that treatment; but if it is never given, then there’s a fair chance that the person may never acquire the concept of good and bad.
Perhaps that straightforward correspondence between righteousness and prosperity is how things really were when God first starting bringing up his children. We don’t know. But quite clearly it is not so now and there is no profit in expecting it to be so, or claiming it is.
I think one problem is that for most of us over a certain age (and most of us here just now ARE over that certain age!) Christianity is the background to our lives; we received a basic formation in Christianity, in Bible stories, and in the “general respectable behaviour” expected of good Christian folk.
The result is that to some extent we take it as read that we know about God, about Christianity, And we don’t realise that in that, as in everything else, we need to grow up. We need to stop wondering why, or complaining that, God doesn’t treat us like children any more. You wouldn’t try to teach a three-year-old fuzzy logic; and God didn’t try to teach the newly-monotheistic Israel the concept of doing good for the love of God and his kingdom. The Christianity appropriate to a child is not sufficient to build an adult life or understanding of God on; just as the first rigid rules about grammar and spelling are not sufficient to understand poetry. Both are necessary; both have to be grasped and then superseded. We must continue to move on and to grow, even if it is frightening. Paul put it this way: “when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” His understanding of God and how to serve him did not gain him earthly prosperity, nor did he expect it to. It led him to persecution, imprisonment and a violent death.
And his comment on that was “what has happened to me has really served to advance the Gospel…I hoe that now as always Christ will be honoured in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain”. He does not understand how, or need to feel safe. He has the courage to float without constantly feeling for the sea-bed below him. It seems to me that that is a grown-up response, from a grown-up man.
We are growing, as Paul says elsewhere, into the stature of Christ, but we are not quite grown. And while there’s no doubt that some things are obviously good for us and some obviously bad, we do not always know the difference – but God does. If we ask for bread to eat, we won’t get a stone; but if, because we are still half-grown, we do ask for a stone, we may find that we are given bread all the same, and may not realise until much later why we did not get what we asked for. When St James says that if we don’t get what we ask for it is because we don’t pray as we should, he does not mean that we haven’t been subservient enough, not used the correct formulas, or missed out a semi-colon in the Collect. He means that we haven’t grasped that God is bigger than the things we have asked for.
Ultimately, it all boils down to trust – and doesn’t it always? Trust that God’s gift, and the joy it brings, is always greater than we can imagine or ask for. The psalmist got it right when he said “Thou hast put more joy into my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound”. What God promised Solomon is no longer enough; what he gives us now is himself.
And that is not always immediately satisfying, or even immediately obvious. Some of us may wait a lifetime.
I’ll let Hopkins have the last word, as he had the first; as he turns away from his own troubles and complaints, and towards the beauty of God’s creation, and realises that the only answer – always – is to turn back to God, and pray, and wait, for his gift of his Spirit. I think this is a prayer that many of us could make our own.
See, banks and brakes
Now leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build -- but not I build; no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
May He send to all of us the rain that will make us grow in Christ. Amen.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
The Three-Legged Stool
On the principle of "Better Late Than Never", here is last week's sermon!
"and they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, "Know the Lord" for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them" saith the Lord."
Or, as Isaiah put it, "And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord; and great shall be the peace of thy children."
Our personal, immediate communication with God is constantly stressed in the Scriptures. We are, certainly, to be guided by church leaders and official pronouncements (or Moses if we happen to be children of Israel) but ultimately we are in life, as in death,alone with God; it is a a question not of acting according to the church’s rules, not of having the correct belief about the exact nature of the Trinity, but of knowing God, the personal God, whoever, however or whatever you understand him or her to be; it is clear that our God is a God who does communicate with each of us.
Jesus, picking up the words of Isaiah, responded thus to the people who were wanting doctrinal definitions from him about the Bread from heaven: “No man can come to me, except the Father, which hath sent me draw him; and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh to me.”
And this learning does not even need to involve a conscious relationship with the church. Paul, who knew what he was talking about when it came to direct communication with God, put it very strongly: “For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves”.
So what am I doing standing up here, then? You may well come to a conclusion about that during the next ten minutes or so.
Almost from the beginning of Christianity there has been some disagreement about the source of our knowledge about God and how he wishes us to live our lives. To oversimplify the position as it is now and has been since the Reformation: Protestants claim that Scripture alone is the source, Roman Catholics would add Tradition - that is, the teaching of the Magisterium of the church (let’s say “the Vatican”) - and Anglicans, which includes us Episcopalians, would add Reason. Scripture, Tradition and Reason, are the "three-legged stool" upon which faith rests.
This so-called "three-legged stool" probably originates with the work by Richard Hooker, an Anglican divine of the reign of Elizabeth I in his work "The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity". He never used the phrase, but the concept is clearly there.
However, it must not be misunderstood. One of the beauties of the Anglican part of the church - in theory at least - is its inclusiveness, its refusal to over-define, its openness to people as they actually are. Yes, certainly. But if we accept Hooker's understanding of the source of our faith, we should do him the courtesy of listening to what he actually said. Which was this: "What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that first place both of credit and obedience is due; That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think and define to be true or good, must in congruity of reason overrule all other inferior judgements whatsoever"
"What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that first place both of credit and obedience is due". Sometimes - I would even say usually - it is perfectly clear what Scripture is saying. But sometimes is it is not, and then we have the choice between taking another’s word for it, or struggling to understand for ourselves. The Roman church, and possibly most Anglicans, would assume that using our own judgement comes last; but that is not the original Anglican tradition, and it is not the belief of Hooker: “the next is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth.”
Can we really decide for ourselves what a particular passage of scripture means? Yes, I think we can (and must?).
The Roman church, when pronouncing on an area of doctrine, may give three broad judgements: This is what you should hold; this is something you should not hold; or: This is the safe position to hold. I really like the thinking behind this third possibility. In this case, you are told you are free to think differently if your reason and your understanding of the scriptures leads you so to do, but if you wish to be safe, then you know what the "safe" belief is.
In fact, I think my appreciation of this Roman Catholic concept has helped me to understand, and appreciate, what some see as "Anglican woolliness". We have the choice, I believe, to accept the "safe" way. Some people may choose that all the time; probably all of us choose it some of the time, or on some subjects; it would be arrogant to think that one person has such acuity and is so close to God that they could, in Kierkegaard's phrase, "float above five hundred fathoms" unaided at all times. And we must not look down on those who do choose the safe way, the way of seeking out and accepting without question whatever the church teaches.
But we also have the choice, where it cannot be said that "Scripture doth plainly deliver" - and only there! - to try to make out "what we can necessarily conclude by force of reason". We shouldn’t forget that the Psalm calls God “Deus scientiarum Dominus”, a phrase taken up as a motto by Cambridge university.
But God is more than the God of intellectual knowledge. Some have spoken of a “four-legged stool” which adds experience to Scripture, Tradition and Reason. As someone said, "I would rather feel contrition than be able to define it". Now this does not mean ”feeling” as in “if I feel it is so, it is.” It is best expressed by Melanchthon's equally famous phrase "this it is to know Christ - to receive his benefits - not to contemplate his natures, or the modes of his incarnation".
Of course, we need to do both; and the Scriptures are there for us to interpret, and god is there for us to know.
So what AM I doing standing up here, if God speaks to all of us through Scripture, reason and experience? Why have I got a special right to instruct any of you? I don’t think it is a question of right to instruct. I think I am here to do a bit of encouraging. To say “Do not be afraid”.
Our God is not a God who lies in wait for us to put a foot wrong. He is not even a God who stands and cheers us on from the sidelines. he is a God who is with us ever inch of the way: the safe way and the risky way; the joyful way, the sorrowful way, and ultimately the glorious way, for he has walked them before us. A God who said “I am with you in tribulation” and “Do not be afraid, for I am with you; I have called you by your name; you are mine.”
So let us pray: “O you who are the source of our faith, Christ our God, you have fulfilled th law and the Prophets in their entirety. Fill our heart with love and our minds with understanding each time we take your holy Scripture in our hands; you who live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God now and for ever. Amen.”
"and they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, "Know the Lord" for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them" saith the Lord."
Or, as Isaiah put it, "And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord; and great shall be the peace of thy children."
Our personal, immediate communication with God is constantly stressed in the Scriptures. We are, certainly, to be guided by church leaders and official pronouncements (or Moses if we happen to be children of Israel) but ultimately we are in life, as in death,alone with God; it is a a question not of acting according to the church’s rules, not of having the correct belief about the exact nature of the Trinity, but of knowing God, the personal God, whoever, however or whatever you understand him or her to be; it is clear that our God is a God who does communicate with each of us.
Jesus, picking up the words of Isaiah, responded thus to the people who were wanting doctrinal definitions from him about the Bread from heaven: “No man can come to me, except the Father, which hath sent me draw him; and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh to me.”
And this learning does not even need to involve a conscious relationship with the church. Paul, who knew what he was talking about when it came to direct communication with God, put it very strongly: “For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves”.
So what am I doing standing up here, then? You may well come to a conclusion about that during the next ten minutes or so.
Almost from the beginning of Christianity there has been some disagreement about the source of our knowledge about God and how he wishes us to live our lives. To oversimplify the position as it is now and has been since the Reformation: Protestants claim that Scripture alone is the source, Roman Catholics would add Tradition - that is, the teaching of the Magisterium of the church (let’s say “the Vatican”) - and Anglicans, which includes us Episcopalians, would add Reason. Scripture, Tradition and Reason, are the "three-legged stool" upon which faith rests.
This so-called "three-legged stool" probably originates with the work by Richard Hooker, an Anglican divine of the reign of Elizabeth I in his work "The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity". He never used the phrase, but the concept is clearly there.
However, it must not be misunderstood. One of the beauties of the Anglican part of the church - in theory at least - is its inclusiveness, its refusal to over-define, its openness to people as they actually are. Yes, certainly. But if we accept Hooker's understanding of the source of our faith, we should do him the courtesy of listening to what he actually said. Which was this: "What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that first place both of credit and obedience is due; That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think and define to be true or good, must in congruity of reason overrule all other inferior judgements whatsoever"
"What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that first place both of credit and obedience is due". Sometimes - I would even say usually - it is perfectly clear what Scripture is saying. But sometimes is it is not, and then we have the choice between taking another’s word for it, or struggling to understand for ourselves. The Roman church, and possibly most Anglicans, would assume that using our own judgement comes last; but that is not the original Anglican tradition, and it is not the belief of Hooker: “the next is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth.”
Can we really decide for ourselves what a particular passage of scripture means? Yes, I think we can (and must?).
The Roman church, when pronouncing on an area of doctrine, may give three broad judgements: This is what you should hold; this is something you should not hold; or: This is the safe position to hold. I really like the thinking behind this third possibility. In this case, you are told you are free to think differently if your reason and your understanding of the scriptures leads you so to do, but if you wish to be safe, then you know what the "safe" belief is.
In fact, I think my appreciation of this Roman Catholic concept has helped me to understand, and appreciate, what some see as "Anglican woolliness". We have the choice, I believe, to accept the "safe" way. Some people may choose that all the time; probably all of us choose it some of the time, or on some subjects; it would be arrogant to think that one person has such acuity and is so close to God that they could, in Kierkegaard's phrase, "float above five hundred fathoms" unaided at all times. And we must not look down on those who do choose the safe way, the way of seeking out and accepting without question whatever the church teaches.
But we also have the choice, where it cannot be said that "Scripture doth plainly deliver" - and only there! - to try to make out "what we can necessarily conclude by force of reason". We shouldn’t forget that the Psalm calls God “Deus scientiarum Dominus”, a phrase taken up as a motto by Cambridge university.
But God is more than the God of intellectual knowledge. Some have spoken of a “four-legged stool” which adds experience to Scripture, Tradition and Reason. As someone said, "I would rather feel contrition than be able to define it". Now this does not mean ”feeling” as in “if I feel it is so, it is.” It is best expressed by Melanchthon's equally famous phrase "this it is to know Christ - to receive his benefits - not to contemplate his natures, or the modes of his incarnation".
Of course, we need to do both; and the Scriptures are there for us to interpret, and god is there for us to know.
So what AM I doing standing up here, if God speaks to all of us through Scripture, reason and experience? Why have I got a special right to instruct any of you? I don’t think it is a question of right to instruct. I think I am here to do a bit of encouraging. To say “Do not be afraid”.
Our God is not a God who lies in wait for us to put a foot wrong. He is not even a God who stands and cheers us on from the sidelines. he is a God who is with us ever inch of the way: the safe way and the risky way; the joyful way, the sorrowful way, and ultimately the glorious way, for he has walked them before us. A God who said “I am with you in tribulation” and “Do not be afraid, for I am with you; I have called you by your name; you are mine.”
So let us pray: “O you who are the source of our faith, Christ our God, you have fulfilled th law and the Prophets in their entirety. Fill our heart with love and our minds with understanding each time we take your holy Scripture in our hands; you who live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God now and for ever. Amen.”
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Per ducatum Evangelii pergamus itinera Christi
2 August 2009
2 Samuel 11:26-12:13; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35
Kierkegaard said: “Far be it from us to endeavour to win human admiration by fathoming what is not to be fathomed; we do not believe that he came to this earth to propose for us themes for a learned investigation. But He came to this earth to prescribe the task, to leave behind Him a footprint, so that we might learn from Him.” Elsewhere he remarked that, rather than agonising over the parts of the Bible we do not understand, or even abandoning our faith because of them, we would do better to take in the parts we do understand, and live by them. If we really try to do that, he suggested, we probably wouldn’t have time to worry about the rest.
Christianity, living according to the will and law of God, is dead simple. Sometimes, in my more unconventional moments, I suspect it may even be dead easy, once you really get stuck in. Momentum doesn’t only work for the devil; it’s perfectly true that one sin leads to another (just look at David) and that once we get on to the slippery slope of vice it is difficult to turn and climb back up, and so forth. but, as someone said, the best way to pray is to pray. Praying is not easy, not for anyone, unless they are really experienced, and perhaps not even then, unless they have been given the grace of discovering “their” way of prayer. But once you actually start doing it, it does become easier. You are carried by the momentum. The same applies to virtuous actions; and the simpler both the prayer and the action is, the better.
We have an awful tendency to mock the Jewish Law, especially as it became in the Pharisaic and Rabbinic periods. Hedges round the Torah, hedges round the hedges. But we would do well to glance at our own faith. Now, I do not deny the necessity of law. Jesus gave us a law, and a very clear one: and if we do not keep that law we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. The simpler the law, the more binding – if not in theory, certainly in practice. Paul himself said that neither his generation nor their fathers had been able to keep the Jewish Law, and we have gone a long way towards making the Christian law equally impossible (and might I say undesirable) to keep. The church over the millennia, through, I believe, the same laudable desire to be certain about God’s will as the Jews had, has built up a vast structure of details, commandments big and small, sub-clauses of sub-clauses, full of ifs and buts and at the very same time extreme precision – I think that if everything seems to be collapsing around our ears, if our own part of the church appears to be tearing itself apart, it is because we have sowed the wind and we are now reaping the whirlwind.
Paradoxically, it is a minimalist attitude that leads to this mind-breaking (and soul-destroying) maximalism. It is the minimalist attitude that needs to know who my neighbour is (or rather, who he isn’t) and how little I need to do for him and still squeeze into heaven; and that same attitude, therefore, which leads to the details, the hedges, the ifs and buts. And still more paradoxically it is the minimalist attitude which leads to the need for domination and laying down of rigid rules. if I can’t get away with this, neither shall you; I want to do this but I am not allowed to, so neither shall you; if I have to do this, then you shall do it too. At which point I quote, yet again, Father Faber’s “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea”. Jesus, who is God, was as un-minimalist, un-hedged-about and as free from both ifs and buts and sweeping rigidity as we are the opposite. “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”
We are full of the wrong kind of fear: a fear of the consequences, a fear of inconvenience, a fear of discomfort; a fear that “God might be cross with us” as if he were an unreasonable and unpredictable parent; an insecurity; a human respect. Like Kierkegaard, I am preaching primarily to myself. We are too afraid to dare to be wrong, and too insecure to bear seeing another exercising the freedom which both attracts and frightens us. We have been held back by minimalism, by suspicion and by insecurity for too long; we are trying to break out of a painful situation, but we are going about it in the wrong way. It is as if we said “These rules as to who is my neighbour and what I must do for him are absurd and constraining. Therefore I will cast aside the very concept of “neighbour” and “charity” and be free from such shackles.” They are indeed absurd and constraining. indeed we should not be shackled; but we will only unshackle ourselves as God wishes it by going in precisely the opposite direction. Yes, this is the Edinburgh-Perth road. But to get to Perth, you don’t only have to be travelling on this road, you have to be travelling in the right direction. When theory becomes crushing and maze-like, when law turns into a great heap of tangled details and all sense of proportion and hierarchy of values is lost, the answer is not to chuck all theory and all law. The answer is to go back, to discover the foundations of the theory and the law, the point at which they are as clear and unmistakable as a signpost to Perth.
It is true that not everything is in the Gospel, or not explicitly so. When dealing with situations which are not explicitly there, one may respond in one of two ways. The first is the one which the church has adopted up to now and when I say the church I am starting with Moses, if not Abraham. It is to start to build up, or build up again, a huge structure of laws, each logically or not so logically deduced from previous ones. It does feel safer, I admit, and it is probably easier. But the other, which has not been tried except in very circumscribed areas – yes, even by the Anglican communion – could be simply to say “We don’t know” and leave it to private judgement. This is really scary to the average Christian (even to the congregation of St John’s) but it seems to me to be far more in tune with the Gospel itself. There are passages in the Gospel which are beyond us; but we have got to deal with that. It is not a disaster. There are situations for which the Gospel does not even give us guidelines. I think we have got to deal with that too. There is so much in the Gospel that we can understand, so much that we can carry out. The word is very near to us, in our mouth and in our heart that we may keep it. We do not need to cross the sea or climb mountains to find it. We do not even have to climb up to heaven to fetch it down: it has already come down to us. AN Whitehead complained that “the brief Galilean vision of humility flickered through the ages uncertainly…but the deep idolatry of fashioning God in the image of Egyptian, Persian and Roman rulers was retained. The church gave unto God attributes that belonged exclusively unto Caesar”. God is not a dominating God. God is a God whose truth gives freedom. When St Mechtild asked God what was most pleasing about St Gertrude, God replied “Her freedom of heart”. That sounds like a bad joke in the context of the church as institution, but it is true. It is only human beings who need to dominate and to hedge things about.
Could we perhaps try to walk in the direction of the sometimes wild-sounding indications Jesus has given us or, better still, follow in his footsteps? And maybe worry a little less when we can’t see them and the path is not quite clear? It may well be that in the area where we are walking just now there is no one correct path. If we are following his general direction we will come out automatically in the right place and find the footprints again.
Of course, this can be carried too far. The following suggestion by Dermot A Lane could be dangerous if taken maliciously. But perhaps some of us could try to use it benignly and see what happens:
“The need to move beyond a modern mechanical perception of the world towards some form of post-modern, inclusive, progressive paradigm is receiving growing acceptance among scientists and theologians alike. The issue facing humanity is to move from theory to praxis, from an instrumental rationality to a liberating wisdom, from an ethic of domination to a new ethic of social and ecological solidarity.”
Well, I mightn’t have put it quite like that. But when I unpack it it seems to say exactly what I mean. God, and so the things of God, is too big to be contained in one way of looking at things, and too simple to be codified. The essentials do not change, and changing world-views do not make them change. All truth speaks truly of God, since it comes from God. We could do with being a lot less afraid, and we would be a lot less vulnerable to the devil and his angels and a lot more supple in the hands of God. Per ducatum Evangelii pergamus itinera Christi!
2 Samuel 11:26-12:13; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35
Kierkegaard said: “Far be it from us to endeavour to win human admiration by fathoming what is not to be fathomed; we do not believe that he came to this earth to propose for us themes for a learned investigation. But He came to this earth to prescribe the task, to leave behind Him a footprint, so that we might learn from Him.” Elsewhere he remarked that, rather than agonising over the parts of the Bible we do not understand, or even abandoning our faith because of them, we would do better to take in the parts we do understand, and live by them. If we really try to do that, he suggested, we probably wouldn’t have time to worry about the rest.
Christianity, living according to the will and law of God, is dead simple. Sometimes, in my more unconventional moments, I suspect it may even be dead easy, once you really get stuck in. Momentum doesn’t only work for the devil; it’s perfectly true that one sin leads to another (just look at David) and that once we get on to the slippery slope of vice it is difficult to turn and climb back up, and so forth. but, as someone said, the best way to pray is to pray. Praying is not easy, not for anyone, unless they are really experienced, and perhaps not even then, unless they have been given the grace of discovering “their” way of prayer. But once you actually start doing it, it does become easier. You are carried by the momentum. The same applies to virtuous actions; and the simpler both the prayer and the action is, the better.
We have an awful tendency to mock the Jewish Law, especially as it became in the Pharisaic and Rabbinic periods. Hedges round the Torah, hedges round the hedges. But we would do well to glance at our own faith. Now, I do not deny the necessity of law. Jesus gave us a law, and a very clear one: and if we do not keep that law we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. The simpler the law, the more binding – if not in theory, certainly in practice. Paul himself said that neither his generation nor their fathers had been able to keep the Jewish Law, and we have gone a long way towards making the Christian law equally impossible (and might I say undesirable) to keep. The church over the millennia, through, I believe, the same laudable desire to be certain about God’s will as the Jews had, has built up a vast structure of details, commandments big and small, sub-clauses of sub-clauses, full of ifs and buts and at the very same time extreme precision – I think that if everything seems to be collapsing around our ears, if our own part of the church appears to be tearing itself apart, it is because we have sowed the wind and we are now reaping the whirlwind.
Paradoxically, it is a minimalist attitude that leads to this mind-breaking (and soul-destroying) maximalism. It is the minimalist attitude that needs to know who my neighbour is (or rather, who he isn’t) and how little I need to do for him and still squeeze into heaven; and that same attitude, therefore, which leads to the details, the hedges, the ifs and buts. And still more paradoxically it is the minimalist attitude which leads to the need for domination and laying down of rigid rules. if I can’t get away with this, neither shall you; I want to do this but I am not allowed to, so neither shall you; if I have to do this, then you shall do it too. At which point I quote, yet again, Father Faber’s “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea”. Jesus, who is God, was as un-minimalist, un-hedged-about and as free from both ifs and buts and sweeping rigidity as we are the opposite. “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”
We are full of the wrong kind of fear: a fear of the consequences, a fear of inconvenience, a fear of discomfort; a fear that “God might be cross with us” as if he were an unreasonable and unpredictable parent; an insecurity; a human respect. Like Kierkegaard, I am preaching primarily to myself. We are too afraid to dare to be wrong, and too insecure to bear seeing another exercising the freedom which both attracts and frightens us. We have been held back by minimalism, by suspicion and by insecurity for too long; we are trying to break out of a painful situation, but we are going about it in the wrong way. It is as if we said “These rules as to who is my neighbour and what I must do for him are absurd and constraining. Therefore I will cast aside the very concept of “neighbour” and “charity” and be free from such shackles.” They are indeed absurd and constraining. indeed we should not be shackled; but we will only unshackle ourselves as God wishes it by going in precisely the opposite direction. Yes, this is the Edinburgh-Perth road. But to get to Perth, you don’t only have to be travelling on this road, you have to be travelling in the right direction. When theory becomes crushing and maze-like, when law turns into a great heap of tangled details and all sense of proportion and hierarchy of values is lost, the answer is not to chuck all theory and all law. The answer is to go back, to discover the foundations of the theory and the law, the point at which they are as clear and unmistakable as a signpost to Perth.
It is true that not everything is in the Gospel, or not explicitly so. When dealing with situations which are not explicitly there, one may respond in one of two ways. The first is the one which the church has adopted up to now and when I say the church I am starting with Moses, if not Abraham. It is to start to build up, or build up again, a huge structure of laws, each logically or not so logically deduced from previous ones. It does feel safer, I admit, and it is probably easier. But the other, which has not been tried except in very circumscribed areas – yes, even by the Anglican communion – could be simply to say “We don’t know” and leave it to private judgement. This is really scary to the average Christian (even to the congregation of St John’s) but it seems to me to be far more in tune with the Gospel itself. There are passages in the Gospel which are beyond us; but we have got to deal with that. It is not a disaster. There are situations for which the Gospel does not even give us guidelines. I think we have got to deal with that too. There is so much in the Gospel that we can understand, so much that we can carry out. The word is very near to us, in our mouth and in our heart that we may keep it. We do not need to cross the sea or climb mountains to find it. We do not even have to climb up to heaven to fetch it down: it has already come down to us. AN Whitehead complained that “the brief Galilean vision of humility flickered through the ages uncertainly…but the deep idolatry of fashioning God in the image of Egyptian, Persian and Roman rulers was retained. The church gave unto God attributes that belonged exclusively unto Caesar”. God is not a dominating God. God is a God whose truth gives freedom. When St Mechtild asked God what was most pleasing about St Gertrude, God replied “Her freedom of heart”. That sounds like a bad joke in the context of the church as institution, but it is true. It is only human beings who need to dominate and to hedge things about.
Could we perhaps try to walk in the direction of the sometimes wild-sounding indications Jesus has given us or, better still, follow in his footsteps? And maybe worry a little less when we can’t see them and the path is not quite clear? It may well be that in the area where we are walking just now there is no one correct path. If we are following his general direction we will come out automatically in the right place and find the footprints again.
Of course, this can be carried too far. The following suggestion by Dermot A Lane could be dangerous if taken maliciously. But perhaps some of us could try to use it benignly and see what happens:
“The need to move beyond a modern mechanical perception of the world towards some form of post-modern, inclusive, progressive paradigm is receiving growing acceptance among scientists and theologians alike. The issue facing humanity is to move from theory to praxis, from an instrumental rationality to a liberating wisdom, from an ethic of domination to a new ethic of social and ecological solidarity.”
Well, I mightn’t have put it quite like that. But when I unpack it it seems to say exactly what I mean. God, and so the things of God, is too big to be contained in one way of looking at things, and too simple to be codified. The essentials do not change, and changing world-views do not make them change. All truth speaks truly of God, since it comes from God. We could do with being a lot less afraid, and we would be a lot less vulnerable to the devil and his angels and a lot more supple in the hands of God. Per ducatum Evangelii pergamus itinera Christi!
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