Archive for 2003
I love the Abram stories of the Hebrew bible because they are so raw. This is God’s chosen people long before they have learned what it means to be chosen or who exactly has done the choosing. We get a chance to see all that learning in action as Abram and Sarai get up to all sorts of atrocious acts as they stumble about on their long journey—bigamy and ill-treatment are some of their lesser issues! One of Abram’s favourite tricks is passing of his wife as his sister and offering her favours to whatever local king might do him a good turn. Charming!
But slowly the chosen people do learn who their God is. What do they learn? I reckon the chief insight of Abrahamic faith is this: what you do matters. They don’t learn it quickly. They don’t learn it well. But by twists and turns they do discover that faith in God is an ethical issue. What you do matters.
In another vein Jesus makes the same point: it isn’t words that mark your participation in the kingdom but deeds; you can call God by your own choice of endearment but, unless you actually listen and respond to what God is saying, words are worthless.
Knowledge never saves us, the truth rarely sets us free: relationship with God is what we need. Relationship which we act upon.
For example, we all know that we are loved by God, liked even, beloved. But unless we follow that through in what we do, it might as well be a lie. It is what we do that matters.
Sometimes doing outranks believing altogether. Edna is always reminding me ‘sometimes you have to fake it to make it’. When the belief in God’s love is getting very shaky we can still get by by acting as if we believed it even when we don’t. And when our bodies are doing the right thing our hearts and minds get the chance to follow. What we do matters.
June 26th, 2003
I became a catholic when I was a young adult, barely out of my teens and I remember my very first year as a part of the Church very well. In particular, I remember really getting into Lent, giving it the works—fasting, praying, going to daily mass—and I remember too the joy of the Easter Vigil and the excitement of this feast, of Pentecost. By the end of that first year I thought I had got it all—a full dose of the Spirit, full to the brim. So much so that when my second year as a catholic came round I was completely floored to be facing Lent again—what was I supposed to do this time when I’d done it all last year? What was the purpose of Easter if I’d already experienced the resurrection and what was the point of Pentecost if I’d already been given the Spirit a year ago?
These days I love the fact that the Church has its seasons and that they come round with regularity, one after the other. There are two things going on in me to make the difference. First is that I get a chance to grow, to go deeper into something that I haven’t found the bottom of yet. I’ve learned I need to grow layer by layer, inch by inch, all my life. And the seasons help me. In Lent I discover again my own unwillingness to be loved by God. At Easter I realise it doesn’t matter since God is greater than my stubbornness. And here at Pentecost I’m reminded the Spirit has something for me to do no matter how badly I’ve done it in the past—to be a witness: a witness to truth, a witness to love, a witness to life.
The second reason I love Pentecost coming around each year is that it reminds me, underlines for me, that the Spirit of God isn’t a thing. I don’t know about you but, while Father and Son are easy to imagine, Spirit is elusive. It escapes me. We tend to think of doves, or tongues of flame, or rushing winds and if I try to think what spirit means beyond those metaphors I end up imagining a kind of thin, disembodied, soup with no qualities at all apart from being there.
I’m tempted to think of spirit as something I can have—as if the Holy Spirit were a fluid I could be filled with or have emptied out of me. Or perhaps I think it’s like petrol I can get topped up once or twice a year but then it gets used up and I run out of steam.
But you can’t have the spirit in the same way you can have a full tank. The spirit isn’t something you have but something you do. The spirit is life, is a way of being alive. It’s a way you or I can be alive. It’s a way our communities can be alive—or can be dead. St Paul has the list of the ways the spirit can die among us: jealousy, quarrels, disagreements, factions, and all kinds of falling out and falling apart. But he also has the list of all the ways the spirit can be alive in us. “What the spirit brings is very different: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and self-control”.
The way we are alive, the life in us, is what our witness is to God. We don’t have to be preaching from street corners or speaking in tongues to be alive in the spirit and giving witness to God. We give witness to God by letting the Holy Spirit bring us to life. There are always different spirits ready to make us miserable: maybe we feel we are unworthy of God, or unlovable, or maybe we feel heavy with a guilt we won’t have forgiven, or a resentment we won’t forgive. There are lots of inner voices telling us lies to get us to give up the ghost and let the spirit die in us. But God’s voice in us always wants life for us, real life. We are made for life for love, for joy, for peace. And, when we listen to God’s voice in us, the Holy Spirit comes alive in us, burns like a flame in us, fills us with a breath of fresh air, and makes us patient, kind, good, trustful, and gentle.
Every year I forget that, but every year Pentecost makes me remember and pray: “Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love”.
June 7th, 2003
Maybe it’s the heroic witness of those 22 Ugandans or maybe it’s Paul talking about his mission and the people he has served with care, but, when I read the gospel and hear Jesus talking to his Father about glory and trust and sacrifice and gift, I can’t help but hear him sound so proud of his disciples. He sounds brimful of pride in them. I can almost hear the tears in Jesus eyes.
Father, they have kept your word; they have believed in me; they have believed you sent me. Father, I pray for them, the ones you have given me, because they belong to you. I pray for them. All I have is yours and all you have is mine and in them I am glorified.
(more…)
June 3rd, 2003
…and here’s another one of the Easter fire…
Boring isn’t it? I guess you had to be there. … I feel the same about the first reading. If this is Monday then we must be in Philippi … or is it Troas? Without being there these snapshots from Acts lose their significance. Who cares where Lydia came from or how she cajoles Paul into coming home with her? I imagine it meant a lot to Luke who wanted to get the story straight but I couldn’t care less … I wasn’t there.
Being there and remembering are at the heart of the gospel today. The disciples will be witnesses because they have been with Jesus from the beginning. The enemies who persecute the disciples will do so because they have never been with Jesus, never known him. And when we have tasted all that Jesus had to taste we will have something to remember—we will have been there for ourselves.
There’s more to remembering than a few photos. We remember, we can give witness to, only what we have experienced. And every time we remember, the experience is alive in us once more. And when the experience of Jesus is alive in us we can’t help but be witnesses.
The key is in being there in the first place… in having the experience to remember … in knowing Jesus and being known by him. So, let’s pray for each other, then – on retreat or not – to grow in our experience of him. To have something to remember, someone to witness.
May 26th, 2003
Some of the big turning points in our lives happen without us even noticing. We quietly turn a corner and only looking back do we even see the bend in the road. Turning points: the moment where friendship slides over into love; the moment when what has been hard work is unexpectedly a passion; or the moment you wake up to discover you believe something that the previous night you would have said was impossible; or the moment you first catch yourself behaving like your parents only to realise you’ve been doing it for most your life. Momentous things can happen with us hardly being aware.
There’s a major corner turned in the first reading tonight. Paul and Barnabas are drummed out of the synagogue in Antioch so they turn to the pagans instead and preach to them. Doesn’t sound like much… but so much hangs on that small thing. We—you and I and all our faith—hang on that chance happening. Because for Paul it becomes a habit, and then a strategy, and then a theological point—taking the message to those outside the Jewish faith of Jesus—to the pagans, to the unbelievers, and right through history to you and to me. If there hadn’t been that fight in Antioch the Jesus movement might have remained a Jewish sect instead of becoming a world religion—our religion. Luke, telling the story with 20/20 hindsight, obviously relishes it, wants to underline it, wants to make sure we see.
What would you do if you could go back to one of your own corner-turning moments—what would you say to yourself, with the benefit of hindsight, as you stand there at the turning point with a whole new life ahead of you? What could you say? Would it be a warning? Would it be encouragement? Would it be a promise that, against the odds, what you are doing is going to turn out right?
One thing I’d wager is this—that as you stood there face-to-face with your former self, ready to speak the words you’ve been preparing—my bet is that God would be there too. With God’s own words. God nudging you in the right direction. God lifting up your spirits as you face something difficult. God giving you heart, showing you a future full of hope, full of promise.
I’ve got another bet to make too. If the past is like that, then so is the present. We never notice the corner until we look back and see it long turned behind us. Tonight could be a corner in your life. Not because it is a retreat—though that might help—but simply because you are alive and your eyes are open and your soul is ready. So what would some future-you, come back to marvel at this moment, have to say? And more importantly what is your ever-present, ever-loving God, waiting to say… to you, tonight?
My prayer for each one of you, is that in these days you find the grace to find out.
May 17th, 2003
It seems Christian apostolate is a team sport… and twelve-a-side at that! But thank God we don’t pick teams the same way the Eleven did when they were looking for one more to make up the number. I can feel myself standing there defiantly faking non-embarrassment as one after another gets picked and I get overlooked and left behind. Telling myself it doesn’t really matter, telling myself the shame isn’t meant and means nothing.
But Mathias is lucky I guess—chosen last is better than chosen not at all. Doesn’t your heart ache for Joseph Justus? Brought to the point of choice, acknowledged as having all it takes, and then rejected by on the toss of a coin and never getting to play.
Thank God we as a church don’t do it that way any more. Thank God we don’t train people of talent, recognize their gifts, and then pass them over without a word. Thank God ministry is no longer a lottery.
What really does it take to be an apostle? Communication skills, social analysis, a bustling brain filled with theology? The proper gender, the correct class, the right color?
How should we choose? You have to be a witness. A witness to Jesus. You have to have known him, seen him work, felt his touch, seen his smile, walked his way, witnessed the sweat on his brow, danced with him around the fire. You have to have stood by him through his failures, or wanted to… since we too fail. You have to have known him risen and shared the grasp of ruined hands mending your shattered life. You have to have ready the reason for your ridiculous hope—that he has chosen you and—strange to believe—chosen to be your friend.
May 14th, 2003
The Acts of Apostles hits a moment of peace and quiet today as Peter gets to show off the power of Christ as he heals Aeneas and raises Tabitha from the dead. But it is only a moment. We’ve been listening for days to the persecution the Jesus movement had to suffer at the hands of men like Saul. In the next instalments of the story we begin to hear of the internal problems they faced over circumcision and dietary laws.
That mixture seems about right for our own experience of Christian community. There is scorn from without. There is division within. And every now and again something wonderful happens and we know why we bother belonging anyway.
On the good days I love my church and would forgive it anything—stupidity, arrogance, hardness. But on the bad days I have to take courage that what I experience I share with Christians down the ages, right back to the first followers. It’s then that I’m most glad for Peter. Not so much when he is raising the dead but when he answers his master’s ‘what about you?’ with that perfect mixture of bravery and recognition: ‘Lord, who shall we go to? You have the message of eternal life’.
May 10th, 2003
Jesus, in Matthew’s gospel, is often at pains to uphold the Law and even to intensify it. He has not come to abolish the Law but to complete it. Not one jot or tittle of Law will pass away until its purpose has been fulfilled.
If you are feeling a little oppressed by this emphasis on rules and regulations, the snippet from Deuteronomy can come to our aid. It underlines just that purpose of the law—that we may have life. Law is in the service of life or it isn’t law. Law follows life and not the other way around. Law follows life.
March 26th, 2003
In a time of violence where do we look for solutions? What do we need more of? What more could we do to set things right? Maybe you’d go for more of the first reading? More law, more order, more UN resolutions? More strong leaders to enforce that law, more than willing to do the hard thing that needs doing in the service of peace—even using violence against violence?
Or maybe you would rather invoke the second reading: what we need is more peace at any price, more sacrifice, more imitation of Christ crucified, more of his way of holy inversion, divine folly, selfless sacrifice in the face of violence.
I don’t think the gospel will let us take either route. The zealous Jesus that John portrays seems to want less not more. Less law and less sacrifice and less of the demonic economy that unites them. What is law but an exchange of gifts? I’ll do as you say if you promise me safety, order, and a roof over my head. What is sacrifice but that same exchange made holy? I’ll do as you say if you promise me blessing, mercy, and eternal bliss. And in the Temple the two economies show their one body in coinage, currency, cash—each piece covered with holy slogans and heads of state.
Why are we at war with Saddam? Because we gave him money, arms, aid, made him strong. Because now he won’t fulfil his part of the bargain. And because there’s oil at stake.
Wherever there’s violence there’s money. Wherever there’s money there’s violence. Only, most of the time the violence is quietly exercised on those whose lives feed and fuel the sacred system—the poor within our borders and the poor we keep poor across the two-thirds world. That’s not to mention the violence against the planet our way of life demands. War simply unmasks the ever-present economy of death.
But Jesus will have none of it. This isn’t just a bad day for him. He isn’t just a little testy this morning. He sees, he understands, he stops to make a whip, and he carefully clears the Temple, cleanses it.
He clears it of money, of money changers, of money dealers. But he clears it also of what money can buy—sacrificial victims, surrogates for our sin, blood for our blood.
And when they stop him he does worse—with a word he destroys the Temple too, and puts in its place his own body and bones. Money, sacrifice and law, he rubs out and writes in their place his own self, his flesh and blood. The whole triple economy replaced.
But, ever pragmatic, we have to ask—did it work? What did he achieve by his little show? Did he put an end to violence once and for all? … Not at all. Once he unmasked it, it turned on him with all its force and anger so that within a year or two in John’s chronology the might of money and law and sacrifice were to pull apart the sanctuary of his body and leave it vacant.
So who wins … Jesus or the powers of the world? … Of course there is the resurrection—the promised three-day rebuilding—but what has it changed? Aren’t we still at war? And isn’t the economy of money, law and sacrifice still in command of our lives? Isn’t it still the silent, sacred bargain we make to put violence at someone else’s front door and not our own?
Not if we follow Jesus. He would not pay off violent men with his compliance. He threw himself into the hands of a God he knew makes no bargains for the human heart. He unmasked the violence we take for granted and showed himself to be free—beyond purchase, beyond law, beyond sacrifice. And if we follow him we are free. Not because we have bought our freedom but because nothing can take away the freedom God has given us. God’s love is the only coin we count, a love before and beyond prices paid and bargains struck. God loves us and nothing can change that.
March 23rd, 2003
I don’t know what you remember about Jonah’s story but what comes first to my mind is not this story of powerful preaching but all that stuff about the whale. Jonah in the belly of a whale.
In some way the whole book of Jonah is a kind of joke. The story begins with Jonah getting a message from God calling him to be a prophet, calling him to do just what today’s reading shows him doing—preaching repentance to the great city of Nineveh. That meant Jonah had to head east but what he in fact does is turn and run to the docks to find a boat to take him to Tarshish the proverbial farthest west anyone could go. He’s running away. But God won’t have it. Once the ship is at sea there are such storms that the sailors, always superstitious folk, begin to believe they are cursed and doomed to drown because of someone on board. Eventually Jonah owns up and tells his story and lets himself be thrown into the sea to save the ship. And here, what had already been a tall tale, turns fantastic. A massive fish comes along and swallows Jonah whole. And there Jonah stays for three days and three nights until the poor fish cures its indigestion by vomiting him out onto the shore where Jonah finds himself within a stone’s throw of Nineveh. You run in one direction and God delivers you somewhere else.
When you tell the story like that it sounds like a cautionary tale—when God calls you’d better listen because God will get his way in the end. But there’s a deeper story underneath, altogether darker and stranger.
Why does Jonah not want to go to Nineveh? Is he just lazy? Is he afraid of making a fool of himself? Is he scared of the lonely journey? Afraid of a foreign land? None of those excuses really capture what is going on.
The thing we need to understand is who God is asking Jonah to go to. God wants Jonah to go to his nation’s worst enemies; to preach to them—who are pagans in Jonah’s eyes—so that they may be saved from God’s punishment. God want to forgive the Babylonian people of Nineveh and Jonah doesn’t want them to be forgiven or saved. Jonah wants them dead, wants them to get the punishment they deserve for killing his people, enslaving the survivors, for taking their land, for forcing them to break their own laws and customs, for making it impossible for them to please God themselves. God is calling Jonah to get up and go into the very heart of the great nation of Babylon, to its centre of power, and tell people he hates that God’s good news is theirs for the asking.
It would be like asking a relative of someone lost in the Twin Towers tragedy to get up and fly to Osama Bin Laden and offer him amnesty, a clean slate, forgiveness. Or imagine a survivor of whatever war might be in Iraq, someone who has lost family and friends, hearth and home, and her whole future through the war machine of a vastly more powerful empire. Imagine her asked to travel to Washington DC and stand before the American President offering God’s blessing if he asks for it.
Tall orders.
And this is what Jonah refuses to do. He refuses to forgive his enemies, he refuses to be as forgiving as he knows God is forgiving. It is no small thing God is asking him to do. How would you feel in Jonah’s place? Could you bring yourself to enter the heart of your enemy and extend a hand of peace? Could you let the slate be wiped clean? Could you forgive and forget? Even if you knew God wanted it?
Jonah couldn’t. He tries to go as far West as Nineveh is East. So God gives him a second chance—storms, fish, and all. Maybe three days inside a fish softened him up but there in sight of Nineveh, the great city God, when God renews his call to preach repentance and forgiveness, this time Jonah says ‘yes’. At least a begrudging ‘yes’. At least he goes through the motions.
The way the book tells it Jonah walks across the city stopping every now and again to make a half-hearted attempt to preach. I imagine him hardly raising his voice, mumbling his message, trying not to be heard, let alone effective. But the story says that even that whisper was enough. The whole great city hears his message and all—each and everyone—repents—asks God—a God they only knew as the God of their own slaves—for forgiveness. They all start fasting. They take out the hair shirts. They get on their knees and pray for mercy. The storyteller says that even the farm animals and the pets repented. That’s the bit we heard today. But that snippet doesn’t tell us how Jonah felt about his unwarranted success? In fact, he is furious! He rages against God, so angry that his life’s enemies will get off scot-free that he goes off into the desert to let the heat of the sun kill him. But God makes a tree grow up to shelter and shade him. Even Jonah, full of curses, is under God’s forgiveness, God’s protection.
The message is so sharp it is almost painful. God is good. God wants no-one to suffer. God wants to save all people. Even our worst enemies. Even the most unpromising cases.
That’s the sign of Jonah. And it’s a sign worth taking to heart when we are readying our hearts for war. God loves Saddam Hussein as much as Tony Blair. God is waiting to forgive both of them. And you. And me.
Jesus claims that sign as his own in the gospel today. His is the sign of forgiveness, the sign of blessing, the sign of healing. In this gospel you can almost hear Jesus getting angry with his hearers who are wanting a sign but not seeing the sign under their nose. Jesus is forgiving. Jesus is blessing. Jesus is healing. But the only ones who see the sign are the ones on the outside—not the religious people with their certainties of salvation. Jesus is like Jonah. He preaches and those who are beyond the pale are forgiven and healed and welcomed home—while the comfortable and the confident can’t see what the fuss is all about.
It must have been like that too for the first Christian churches. The people that Luke wrote his gospel for where mainly Greeks of one kind or another. Jesus was a Jew, a devout Jew, preaching to his own people, offering them the fulfilment of their history but the people who came flocking in the years after his death were not Jews at all but people outside the law: slaves and women and foreigners. Imagine how that must have looked to the orthodox men of Jesus own people. Laughable! Disgusting! A sign of failure. A sure sign the early Christian communities were not God’s chosen people at all.
That’s the sign of Jonah. The angry prophet goes mumbling the message to the hated Godless enemy and they do in an instant what God’s own people had never done—they hear, they see, they see the sign. They turn to God and ask forgiveness and get it. They come home.
…
Jonah’s story has all sorts of echoes of St. Francis Xavier’s. It’s always my place of entry into Francis’ story to see him there on the docks about to leave for good for foreign parts. Leaving behind all he knew, his friends, his family, and setting off so ill-prepared, for a world he hardly understood. What gets him moving is the sign of Jonah. A zeal for souls, we once would have called it. A passion to preach the good news of God to the ones outside. A confidence and hope that even his mumbling the message in a foreign accent would bring them in their droves, like Jonah to Nineveh. In some ways he was a great success. He preached, he baptized, he moved on to do the same all over again. In other ways he failed. He made hardly a dent on Japan and none at all in China. And late in his short life he wondered whether he was going about it all the wrong way. But still he followed his zeal for souls.
It’s always easy at the end of a homily to ask ‘where does this leave us?’ Easy, but important.
Where does the sign of Jonah leave you and me? Well at one level it asks me who I don’t want to forgive, let alone have God forgive—it asks me what I am holding on to. Remember that bit of the Our Father, ‘forgive us as we forgive others’? If we want to be forgiven this Lent, put right with God, we have to let go of our resentment, let go of the hurt we hang onto.
At another level, the sign of Jonah must make us wonder about war—if the women and men on both sides are forgiven children of one God, killing each other has got to be the wrong way to settle differences.
And the last thing I have to say about the sign of Jonah is this: we worry about our shrinking churches, about closures and consolidations; we wonder where the world is going and what God is doing and why things can’t just stay the same; we worry about our children abandoning the church; we worry that God seems to be on the losing side in our world. But if the sign of Jonah really is claimed by Jesus as his own we shouldn’t be surprised if today the ones who are hearing and turning to God are not the ones like us inside the fold, inside the church but the ones on the edge, on the outside, outside the church, outside all churches; maybe people we fear, maybe the kind that makes us roll our eyes; maybe ones who embarrass us. If that’s the case we should not be surprised and we needn’t resent it—only look, only listen—and who knows what we might learn about the living, loving, forgiving God.
March 10th, 2003
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